Against entropy

LISTEN. Enlightening class last night. I think maybe the most instructive conversation centered on that cliche that "everything happens for a reason" etc. My perspective, close to Pinker's, is that of course everything happens from causes, known, elusive, or merely speculated; but that just as obviously, not everything real is rational, not everything happens for the best or by design or with our collective good in view. 

The immediate and irresistible example that came to mind was that horrific condo collapse in Miami. The causes are physical and structural and human, insofar as engineers' warnings of impending instability were unheeded. 

Will good come of that collapse? Will lives be saved because engineers will now be heeded? Sure. Will that eventuality redeem, justify, rationalize, or vindicate the horror of the seminal event? Of course not.

But I have to concede, many people of faith don't concede my "of course," many struggle with it. They want to be Enlightenend, and they want to retain a rational faith and belief in a Universal Master Plan beyond our most enlightened ken. I want to understand their struggle.

And yet I still share William James's impatience with the "superficiality incarnate" on naked display from the likes of Leibniz, when they blithely reassure us that catastrophic pain, suffering, and unearned death in our little corner of creation is perhaps compensated by happier days in other corners of the cosmic vastness. I don't expect much light to fall on that form of thinking, if you want to call it that, no matter how long I listen.

Pinker's right, I think. "Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink," condos collapse. Our constant challenge is to stave off shipwreck and carve out commodious spaces in which our lives may be lived more fruitfully and flourishingly despite the inexorable cosmic care-less-ness all around us, so very evident all the time.

And here's my happy entropy-resistant news: my two-week post-op visit yesterday afternoon revealed the new spinal hardware I've been under orders not to damage through premature over-exertion, juxtaposed against the old broken system the indifferent universe had saddled me with. It's working like a charm, and I now have the green light to go out walking for as long as I please.  I feel like I've been gifted a new superpower, the power of unrestricted ambulation. Just call me Titanium Man. So we're off to Warner Park right now, to test reasonable limits. Entropy be damned. 

 

== 

Postscript. 2.1 miles, 46 "active minutes" in Percy Warner Park. A new beginning!

Post-postscript, Jy 1: 2.4 miles, 44 minutes...

Enlightenment Now

LISTEN. We're off to see my surgeons and physical therapists shortly, two weeks after dual surgery. I'm eager for their confirmation that my convalescence has been swift and that at least the more oppressive restrictions on my activity can now be loosened. 

The great advances of medical science in our time is one of Steven Pinker's large themes, as tonight we open his Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress -- the book that inspired our course. A hundred or so scientists are responsible for saving more than five billion lives! - so far. Pinker's right to indict the pervasive ingratitude/ignorance of too many of us about that. "[T]he neglect of the discoveries that transformed life for the better is an indictment of our appreciation of the modern human condition."

I think he's right, too, to say that we can measure and thus mark our progress with respect to countless indices. "...life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery..." 

These are humanistic values, and coupled with a firm commitment to applied learning they have transformed our world for the better. I wouldn't have opted for the surgeries I'm rebounding from, already so much better than before, in the pre-anaesthetic age that ended just the day before yesterday. And aren't we all lucky not to have been swept up in pandemic a century ago? Can you imagine the toll COVID would have taken in 1918?

Another of Pinker's large themes is entropy. Yes, in a closed system energy runs down inexorably. Dissolution is the ultimate fate of the universe as we understand it. But we don't live our human lives on a cosmological scale, we are tasked always to carve out the meanings and purposes of our lives in a suitably local context."Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny." So Pinker lines up with William James, as against the dark entropy-driven depressive ruminations of Henry Adams.

The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question... Letters of Wm James, June 17, 1910

 

 

I took some time yesterday to enjoy Pinker's conversation with Stephen Fry. 

It's a delight. And I think Steve #1 is right to call out the late Stephen Jay Gould for not getting the whole Enlightenment idea. NOMA, Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" proposal, goes badly off the rails when it denies the relevance of empirically-gathered knowledge in informing not only our knowledge but our values. That's odd, given his statement that what we've learned of evolution  is constitutive of the meaning of our lives insofar as science can speak to that. And with the advent of ubiquitous social media, we're further off the rails. It's making us dumber.

"The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing" is not only not trite or old-fashioned, it has not even yet really been tried or even noticed by a teeming sea of so-called modern men and women. We desperately need to try it. Now.

Stephen Dunn's prayer evolves

LISTEN. Yesterday was my first post-operative walk in the park. Finally got out of the driveway and over to the Richland Creek Greenway. 40 minutes, new spring in the step with not a hint of the old stenosis-related discomfort. Feels truly like a return to life, to the peripatetic life (which as I told my solicitous neighbor across the street the other morning, each of us at the end of our respective drives, is for me Life Itself).  Will check in with the medical team tomorrow and see if they don't agree I'm ready to walk my path again, an hour a day at dawn at least. Thank goodness.

It was in a spirit of renewal that I received yesterday's David Budbill poem Seventy-Two is Not Thirty- Five, which concludes

...The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.

And so we go, around the drive, the block, the park, the trail, the star. Pretty banal on the surface, repetitive, "full of misery, loneliness, and suffering" and "over much too soon."

But those who learn to look past themselves know the circle is unbroken -- not in the sky by and by, but right here on this terrestrial merry-go-round. 

That too may seem to some superficially banal, at first glance, but the poet/philosopher looks deeper and finds something profoundly meaningful in our participation in the daily round. The privilege of getting up and going, again and again, feels restorative -- even after a short disruption. I kept walking right up until surgery in mid-June, but each outing was a labored struggle. I was having to collapse onto my collapsible stool every ten minutes. Not yesterday. 

It was in that same spirit of renewal in small victories and "ordinary" life that I read Stephen Dunn's obituary yesterday. "Mr. Dunn specialized in poems about surviving, coping with and looking for meaning in the ordinary passages of life." He was frequently featured on Writers Almanac, just five days ago with "Achilles in Love" and the next with "An Evolution of Prayer"--

...As a child, some of his prayers were answered
because he prayed out loud for a kite or bike,
which his mother would overhear, and pass on
to her husband, his father, the Lord.

Later, he understood that when he prayed
he was mostly talking to himself—albeit a better,
more moral part of himself—which accounted
for why he heard nothing back from the void...

But on this side of the void, Stephen's left us a lot to think and talk about. And so he's not left at all. 

No place for old men

LISTEN. Like the children in his novel The Brothers K, David James Duncan "was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist faith. 'I knew I was going to take on the fundamentalist upbringing. It feels natural to me to waffle between extreme reverence and extreme irreverence -- and nothing makes me feel less reverent than a church.'" nyt

But what of the Church of Baseball?

Like the late commissioner and Renaissance scholar A. Bartlett Giamatti, nothing makes me feel more reverent than a green field of the mind. 

The Adventist heaven is described in literal, naturalistic terms as a "new earth, in which righteousness dwells, God will provide an eternal home for the redeemed and a perfect environment for everlasting life, love, joy, and learning in His presence. For here God Himself will dwell with His people, and suffering and death will have passed away."

That does sound like a dreamy place. A Good Place. A fictional place. Like Ray Kinsella's Iowa. A utopia, a no-place where everyone's young and ready to play two like Mr. Cub.  

(Looks like the Vandy Boys will play only two against the covid-riddled Wolfpack, btw, today's scheduled re-rematch has been declared No Contest.)

The moral, unintended by the Adventists but implied by their vision of a tangible afterlife: revere what's here and now, live your dreams when you can. As the Epicureans held, while we are here, death is not. While we are vital and active, and if we are lucky, suffering and senescence are not. Or at least they're not all-consuming. Life should be a garden party, not a solemn march to perdition.

Professor Giamatti understood the power of utopian dreams, landing on the tender side of William James's tough-and-tender distinction.

"There are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

"Success"

The speed of my recovery so far is apparently above-average, although I did have to pop a power-pill this morning at 4. 

I'm reminded that there will be good days and not-so-good, on the way back to full ambulatory freedom. And apparently it'll be longer still 'til I can resume pedaling. Articles like this one in the Times ("Not All Cyclists Wear Lycra") make me itch, literally, to get my Raleigh back on the open road. Patience has never been my prime virtue. One more thing to work on.

The impending July Baseball in Literature and Culture conference is my biggest external motivator right now. I've been given tentative permission to fly to Ottawa (KS) for that, if my convalescence continues apace. I'm eager to go and talk about Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and (David James) Duncan's Brothers K, about pain and suffering and deliverance therefrom. 

And to that end, I've hunted up the Times's original review from twenty-nine years ago. 

THE 19th-century Russian novel has been born again in "The Brothers K," David James Duncan's wildly excessive, flamboyantly sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-slapping homage to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy -- and the game of baseball... 
David James Duncan had been working on his second novel for two years when he happened to reread "The Brothers Karamazov." "I found there were a lot of parallels... A 'K' is a strikeout, which is a personal failure. I love the fact that a man who is considered a success in baseball has a 30 percent success rate -- in other words, a 70 percent failure rate."

I love that too, about the game of baseball and the game of life. Human success is almost never total, never remotely so -- especially not for those who give it a "squalid cash interpretation" and reduce it to a "bitch-goddess." Our triumphs should always leave us modestly humble, but still confident and cognizant that "our errors are not such awfully solemn things."

But hey Vandy Boys, let's try to have fewer of them tonight in Omaha!

Day by day

LISTEN. Convalescence finds me on YouTube a bit more than usual, for better or worse. Yesterday I stumbled across a year-old School of Life piece that speaks pretty directly to my situation...

 

"Taking It One Day at a Time" for me, a week and a day after a second consecutive surgery to restore nerve function in the lower spine, means taking it slow and patiently. Baby steps. Up and down the drive, with a wooden third leg that used to give me a leg up the hill but now just helps keep me balanced and steady on the flat pavement. The last two days Younger Daughter's ferried me up the modest hill to the big church parking lot a stone's throw away, but which I'm ordered not to tackle. Another role-reversal: I used to drive her up there to practice riding bikes and skateboards and eventually the Corolla. Yesterday's triumph: four slow laps around the empty lot, almost twenty-five minutes. Paired with a couple of ten-minute stints at home, I wake today exhausted and sore but pleased with my modest achievement, and ready to face another healing day.

...Taking it day by day means reducing the degree of control we expect to be able to bring to bear on the uncertain future. It means recognising that we have no serious capacity to exercise our will on a span of years and should not therefore disdain a chance to secure one or two minor wins in the hours ahead of us. We should – from a new perspective – count ourselves immensely grateful if, by nightfall, there have been no further arguments and no more seizures, if the rain has let off and we have found one or two interesting pages to read.

As life as a whole grows more complicated, we can remember to unclench and smile a little along the way, rather than jealously husbanding our reserves of joy for a finale somewhere in the nebulous distance. Given the scale of what we are up against, knowing that perfection may never occur, and that far worse may be coming our way, we can stoop to accept with fresh gratitude a few of the minor gifts that are already within our grasp.

We might look with fresh energy at a cloud, a duck, a butterfly or a flower. At twenty-two, we might scoff at the suggestion – for there seem so many larger, grander things to hope for than these evanescent manifestations of nature...

And that's the point in the narration when Younger Daughter said "I feel attacked"--it was the second time yesterday some judgment had been cast in the direction of her cohort. But at every age we're prone to focus excessively on larger and grander things, and must constantly be reminded to stop and smell the flowers. "It’s normal enough to hold out for all that we want. Why would we celebrate hobbling, when we wish to run?" Or just walk a little more briskly.

But if we reach the end of the day and no one has died, no further limbs have broken, a few lines have been written and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said, then that is already an achievement worthy of a place at the altar of sanity. How natural and tempting to put one’s faith in the bountifulness of the years, but how much wiser it might be be to bring all one’s faculties of appreciation and love to bear on that most modest and most easily-dismissed of increments: the day already in hand. SoL

The days are gods. Not the god, as Bill Murray's Phil Connors says, but they're still capable of supporting exceptional growth, renewal, and recovery. If I can string together enough good modest days like yesterday, pretty soon I'll again be back in stride and echoing Henry (4.20.40): “An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” 

So many reasons!

“Why should I live?” The student’s ingenuous tone made it clear that she was neither suicidal nor sarcastic but genuinely curious about how to find meaning and purpose if traditional religious beliefs about an immortal soul are undermined by our best science. My policy is that there is no such thing as a stupid question, and to the surprise of the student, the audience, and most of all myself, I mustered a reasonably creditable answer. What I recall saying—embellished, to be sure, by the distortions of memory and l’esprit de l’escalier, the wit of the staircase—went something like this: In the very act of asking that question, you are seeking reasons for your convictions, and so you are committed to reason as the means to discover and justify what is important to you. And there are so many reasons to live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress." --"Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" by Steven Pinker

And if that's not enough...

“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.” Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Ages and stages

 LISTEN. As we close Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? in Enlightenment tonight I'm most drawn to her late discussion of *Shakespeare and the respective ages and stages of human life. All the world's a stage for sure, but like Neiman I prefer to think of us players as improv artists rather than scripted drones. Resistance to an age of immaturity and imbecility is not futile. Thinking and acting courageously on the basis of our own reasoned understanding is the thing. The play's conclusion is not yet writ.

I'm pretty clearly at level six, a week out of surgery, living in a world suddenly less wide and walking three-minute laps around the driveway ten minutes at a time. Did that several times yesterday, ditching the old-man walker for the younger man's walking stick I've long treasured for its assistance in scaling the elevated trails of Warner Parks and Radnor Lake. Now it's helping restore the confident balance and stride I'll need to get out of the driveway and back in the wider world. As Rebecca Solnit (I think) said, your homeworld is defined by the length and breadth of your daily perambulations. 

So the next stage will take me around the perimeter of the Brook Hollow Baptist Church for at least fifteen minutes. Then twenty. Then to the Richland Creek Greenway for half an hour. And then it'll be time for the Physical Therapists to marvel at my progress and give me a green light to resume older longer routes and routines. Salvation for me will not be a sudden conversion, it will come incrementally in baby steps. The last will be a leap not of faith but of tenacity.

So far, this past week, I've experienced plenty of the predicted post-operative pain (thank goodness for Percocet) but none of the tingling, burning, numbing and deadening sensations that have been narrowing my world for longer than I've wanted to admit. I do think OLIF has given me the new lease I've desperately needed, and will extend my Sixth Age by years and maybe decades. 

I must thank my wife first for pushing me to consider surgery, and now for changing my dressings (etc.), the doctors for performing it with evident adeptness, Younger Daughter (my primary caregiver) for making this past week almost festive (we watched Guess Who's Coming to Dinner yesterday, the film that woke ten-year old me to a world of racist injustice), the nurses at St. Thomas who were so competent and kind, the friends and family who lent moral support... well, basically I (like Daniel Dennett) just want to thank goodness wherever we find it in the wide world. We forget how much of it there is. (Steven Pinker will help us remember, in our next read starting next week: Enlightenment Now.)

As for the Seventh Age, the age of "mere oblivion...sans everything"? It can wait.

*The Seven Ages of Man

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes 

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

--William Shakespeare (from As You Like It)

Clarity

The imposed post-operative downtime that has me confined largely to quarters (no long dogwalks, bikerides, swims etc.) has led to a few moments of clarity, insight, and resolve. 

To name one: I'm clear now that I can improve the quality of my days, hence my life, if I skip several of my habitual internet pit-stops and stop "following" certain social media attention hogs I've wasted time and mental energy on. I followed because they are philosophers, nominally and in the modern academic sense anyway, who sometimes say things that amuse or bemuse or provoke in ways that seem constructive at the time but dissolve in retrospect. Scrolling from one such provocation to the next can seem rewarding or gratifying, but the time thus spent leaves barely a residue of valuable information. Never mind wisdom.

Finally said Bye to one of them yesterday, a young philosopher from the east coast teaching in New Orleans and tweeting incessantly about beer, his quest for a girlfriend, and sometimes his work (not to be confused with an actual life-philosophy, but rather just a particular narrow take on the job of teaching philosophy to people even less grown-up than himself.)  I've hung with him because he's clever, he likes dogs and baseball and John Prine, he poses interesting questions and sometimes suggests things worth reading and pondering. 

But a recent tweet flirted (not for the first time) with nihilism, another implied his own complacent self-satisfaction in a way that grated even more than usual, wondering if he'd not already accomplished everything important in life and whether there was anything else he needed to do in order to flourish. I was reminded of Horace Mann's exhortation: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." But of course, ours is a shameless age. Our humanity (as distinct from our human-all too human-ness) is in short supply.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was a series of tweets on Fathers Day mocking fatherhood. "Should I have a child just so I can be a #dilf," i.e. an object of female lust? That did it. "Bye" was my last reply. I'd cut him more slack, I suppose, if we actually knew one another in the non-virtual world. I'd buy him a beer and try to explain my objections to nihilism, to smugness,to taking parenthood so lightly, etc. But since we don't, and since life is short, I've better things to do with mine. 

One down, so many to go. It's now clear I've spent far too much time following the random superficial excrescences of shallow (though credentialed) minds, symptomatic of our self-presenting, self-polishing, socially saturated insecure immature age. We all just need to grow up. Sapere aude.

Fathers Day 2021

In the Dad department I've lucked out, at both ends. I'm very grateful.

Thinking of J.C. Oliver (1928-2008), whose stoic/heroic struggle with back pain I begin at last to grasp. His example, in that and much else, still guides me. #FathersDay2021 pic.twitter.com/TyvgBTYxIl

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 20, 2021

How it started...

pic.twitter.com/KDmz3qENKs

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 20, 2021

 

My wonderful primary post-operative caregiver... pic.twitter.com/cyHwLW2YgU

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 20, 2021

 

 

 

Convalescing

Back’s sore as hell but surgery #2 went well enough for daughter to tell pup ”dad might be coming home tomorrow”… #photogenic #anthropocentric pic.twitter.com/VTYNmHdvdf

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 17, 2021

UPDATE, Friday morning. Home since Thursday afternoon, once the physical therapist signed off. Had wonderful care at St. Thomas midtown, many thanks to the personable and patient nursing staff there. And thanks of course to family and friends for your expressions of moral support and encouragement. Still hurts like hell, but Younger Daughter's a terrific nurse/chef so I'm mending as fast as humanly possible. I'm finding the nature videos on YouTube a comfort...

Sparkle

LISTEN. Enlightenment class meets a day early this week because tomorrow and Wednesday I have a date with destiny-aka Oblique Lumbar Interbody Fusion. OLIF sounds like a benign old Nordic friend. I hope it will be.

The second long Chapter (or short Part) of Why Grow Up is rich with topics of interest, beginning with Hannah Arendt's natality, a natural but under-appreciated complement to the philosophers' more commonplace preoccupation with mortality. Birth is the ultimate renewal of life, and it happens every second. With every new human the world gets an infusion of hope and, who knows, maybe redemption. And there's only one rule: you've got to be kind. Well, except for all the other Kantian rules we give ourselves in order to set ourselves free. "Human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality..."-SEP (Having trouble with Kant? You're not the only one...)

And then the world gets hold of us. The grind of life can wear a person down. (Like Kevin Costner's dad in Field of Dreams.) If it grinds enough of us, it brings us all down. That's the theme of the section called "Dissatisfied Minds," the world-weary disenchantment that sets in when the wonders of childhood have attenuated and we've settled for far less than our dreams. Remember Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill, asking about his generation: Where did our hope go? ("Suicide, despair, where did our hope go...Lost hope. That's it, lost hope.")

Susan Neiman's less cynically-scheming version of the question is: How do we get our sparkle back? “Once all it took to produce awe and wonder was a bunch of keys; now you have to travel to Yosemite or the west coast of Ireland. Some claim that the right sort of mindfulness training can lead you to find it in a leaf or a cup of coffee. I never got the hang of it… You’ve accepted the dimming of sparkle…” WGU 108

Speaking for myself: I'm halfway into my morning mug, and my coffee's still sparkling for me.

Neiman's actually asking for a friend, or a bunch of friends she hasn't met, the human community as we know it in the early 21st century so far. For her part, she's with Immanuel Kant and his commitment to rejecting Thrasymachus's relativism, Humean skepticism, Rousseau's primitivism, and all the more recent varieties of postmodernist deconstructivism. She's not looking for childlike sparkle, exactly, she's just trying to reinvigorate our participation in the perennial perseverance of our better ancestors who were grown-up enough to know that things were not as they should be in our world but nonetheless plugged away at repairing it. That's our great task: to be, as Roman Krznaric says, good ancestors. (Hope they were listening at Google.)

Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy, as Neiman tells it, is about having the courage to reject complacency in the face of an unjust world and reclaiming the hope and wonder and awe that is our birthright. "The world depends on us, even though we do not create it." (IOT)  But we do have the opportunity, constantly renewed, of re-creating it.

It's also about not settling, for Boethius-style consolation or Stoic resignation or Leibnizian or Hegelian optimism or anything else that would freeze us in our tracks, turn us inward and away from the large project of making a sad song better.

How about this? Court the world, spark a revolution. Court and spark ("mistrusting but still acting kind"). Let hope spring eternal. Go the distance. If we build it, the kingdom of ends, there's a chance the world of our ideals will finally come. We have nothing to lose but our chains. 

And maybe our stenosis... (LISTEN)

Whiffs and gleams

LISTEN. What a fine Friday afternoon in June, in a pre-pandemic, quotidian-normal sort of way. If all the days are (or could be) gods, as Emerson said, yesterday was exceptional. Exalted. Crowning. 

It was highlighted first by the three-dimensional presence and unmediated, unmasked company of a good friend over lunch at M.L. Rose. We've zoomed often during the contagion, but conversing face-to-face for the first time since March 2020 was a gratifying reminder of why immediacy matters. 

Later, while he endured Nashville gridlock I had a pleasant swim and did not take it for granted. After Monday I'm prohibited by the protocols of surgery from immersing in H20.

And then we went out to a ballgame, wife and Younger Daughter and I. First live game with the crowd since Spring Training 2020 just before they cancelled it. William Carlos Williams was right, the crowd at the ballgame is moved by a spirit of uselessness which delights them ...

 

It did me, anyway.

And without benefit of ludicrously overpriced beer, which for me has always been practically synonymous with baseball. But I'm pre-op and allowing myself just one a day until Sunday, when I must go cold-turkey. I had my one at lunch, a very nice Bearded Iris Hazy IPA.

I'm sure I'll get back on the one-a-day malt wagon, once the painkilling drugs are gone. But I think my bump-and-beer habit may be history. And happily so. 

We spoke briefly at lunch of novelist Walker Percy, who understood something important about alcohol. It's the immediate experience of that first "bosky bite of Tennessee summertime" that triggers the good times some of us associate with those sorts of spirits. “The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H50H on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the nasopharynx…”

James understood something important, too, of those soaring moments that are all too often yoked to toxic degradation: "it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning."

Much better for me, I'm deciding, to gather my whiffs and gleams from Tennessee summertime and its natural accouterments-- good times with friends and in the crowd, and in the lingering light of old dead philosophers and novelists who've become a living and permanent presence in my life-- and not so much from C2H50H. That recurrent first instant of sunshine in the nasopharynx can be replicated from other materials, I'm sure. I hope... (LISTEN)

Future Rising

LISTEN. "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" Pragmatism III

If Sapere Aude is the motto of enlightenment, that's the question it's motivated by.

Enlightenment is a state of mind, a commitment to learning for the sake of doing, and doing for the purpose of ameliorating the human condition, alleviating suffering, pursuing happiness, offering some form of hope and expectation for the future of life. 

I once taught a course called The Future of Life. We began with that "really vital question," and continued with Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar, Stewart Brand's 10,00 Year Clock, and much else. I introduced it this way:

“Future” and “life” both sprawl in an almost untameable way, of course, so we’ll have plenty of parsing to do as we go along. That means even more basic, orienting questions: Is the future all about me, or about us, at all? Or is it all about successors to whom our relation is murky? Should we consider our main obligation to be to ourselves as individuals, to our (contingent) historical epoch, to our wider communities, our DNA, the species, the planet, the carboniferous form of life, or— as the late Carl Sagan said– to the very cosmos, “ancient and vast” and ongoing, itself?

So many questions. We’ll begin looking for answers with a nod to Dan Dennett, who pointed out that we are the beneficiaries of generations of people who cared about us while knowing they’d never meet us, and with a forward-looking glance backward from 19th century futurist Edward Bellamy (“Looking Backward“). How easy it is to get details wrong, but how exciting to dream of real progress in subduing the inherited scourges– including economic and political as well as biological plagues– of the past.

"Real progress": that's the goal of enlightenment. 

If I were to teach the course again (and it would be a natural sequel to Enlightenment Now), I'd have us read the little book I just finished by Andrew Maynard. Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow, in a sequence of short smart chapters that explore the future from every angle, says we're "uniquely capable of imagining and creating different futures"... and of feeling an obligation to our descendants to leave them an earth worth living in.

It's a cliche to remark on the fragility of our home planet. I like former astronaut Cady Coleman's Buckminster Fuller-ish perspective on that, in the foreword. "The Earth from space does not look fragile--the rock itself will survive long after we do. But there is a sense of our vulnerability... We are the crew of Spaceship Earth and it falls on us to find a way to continue to thrive on our precious and beautiful planet." 

The iconic Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 (1968) has inspired many "to think of the future as something that we can and should aspire to, and to imagine the possibility of a vibrant home we would gladly bequeath to generations to come... a future that we have a hand in designing and creating." Our great challenge now is to inspire many more. Quickly. That's the vital project of enlightenment now. 

 

Habit-forming

LISTEN. The pre-op consultation was quite involved, in two different locations (three actually, but the first was wrong), and multiple consultants issuing instructions, drawing blood, asking questions about my remote medical history etc. Looks like I'm good to go for Tuesday morning, and then stage two on Wednesday if all has gone according to plan. Oh boy. 

The procedure itself is called Oblique Lumbar Interbody Fusion (OLIF), a name I'm recalling only because I've formed mnemonic triggers involving the Beatles' (Ob-La-Di etc.) and the Pythons' Lumberjack Song. I'm trying hard not to think about it, "non-invasive" though they assure me it (comparatively) is, and instead to imagine how wonderful it will eventually be to walk the dogs for half an hour without having to expand and occupy my collapsible stool every few minutes.

Before that happy result can eventuate, though, I must endure six weeks in the heart of Tennessee summer not going for sweaty daily bikerides and then cooling down in our backyard redneck pool. That's been my delight for several years. My post-operative instructions are to strap on the restrictive back-brace (thankfully not the primitive girdle my father had to sport after his much more invasive back surgery in the '60s) and limit my mobility to a few minutes at a stretch. And pop a Percocet if I have to.

And: lay off the blood-thinning bourbon and beer now, and later when relying on pain meds. That's more of a challenge than it should be, so I'm turning once again to William James's most sage advice on breaking bad old habits and replacing them with good ones.

Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results. PP I, ch 4

Right. My habitual bump-and-a-beer has indeed been frequently repeated, and has thus become self-perpetuating and automatic. It's time to be a lot more conscious and deliberate in anticipation of the  desired happy results of OLIF. 

Yesterday went well in that regard, with some promising new habits now under construction: I'll be listening to more music (and newly appreciating those noise-canceling earbuds I received for Christmas), intermittently and more frequently pedaling the stationary bike and pumping free weights (appropriately lightened, post-op), popping more corn, downing more herbal liquids... and probably writing about it. Memos to self can also be a great form of positive reinforcement. "The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy..."

And so, I'll frequently review James's maxim: "put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge..."

I pledge allegiance. Thanks, Will.

Growing up enlightened, and walking on

LISTEN. Going for the pre-op consultation this morning, this surgery adventure is about to get real. If I must be carnally invaded (and I must, dogwalks have become excruciating), minimally is the adverb of choice. It seems the enlightened thing to do, under the circumstances. 

This evening in Enlightenment we'll open Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. Being enlightened, for her as for her hero Kant, means accepting the way things are while still striving to do what can be done to make them better. It's very close to what I (following William James) call *meliorism, and what my mentor Lachs calls Stoic Pragmatism. 

"Age clarifies," begins Lachs's eponymous book. Garrison Keillor said a similar thing in a recent essay. "I expected to be grumpy in old age and of course there’s still time, but instead I’m awestruck..." (But then he also said some appropriately grumpy things about the state of academia, and the way it can leach the life and interest out of its subject-matter...)

Lachs: "Stoic pragmatists are committed to making life better until their powers are overwhelmed... pragmatists are unlikely ever to give up, while stoics may give up too soon." (Is that why the classicist Mary Beard intemperately describes Stoicism as "nasty, fatalistic, bordering on fascist..."?) 

Enlightened stoic pragmatists explore their options.  

Susan Neiman strikes me as such an explorer. She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. That's Stones (not Stone) philosophy.

In "What is Enlightenment?" (1784) Kant answered his own question promptly and succinctly, for once. "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"

In a distracted age like ours, and a country like ours (like Brian's) where we're so lockstep-sure that we're all individuals, it takes a resolute and committed will to think for yourself. Even those who think they're thinking may just be re-arranging their prejudices, William James probably wasn't the first to say. Most people would die sooner than think, Bertrand Russell repeated. Real originality is hard. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Honest Abe.

But I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement from Susan Neiman: "All the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement... Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule." Surprising statement from a Kantian, though even he was probably not much moved by the Categorical Imperative. Point is, there's a big gap between the way things are (according to experience) and the way reason tells us they could and should be. "Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two, without giving up on either one."

If travel is essential for growing up, the pandemic's really set us back. Former Harvard President and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's disdain for language-learning would too. As we've noted in CoPhi, discussing Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks (and as Wittgenstein's "language games" imply), learning a language is inseparable from thinking new thoughts and expanding your mental world.

Is 18 to 28 the best time of life? Neiman thinks it's the hardest, made harder by the conceit that you should be loving it then and missing it the rest of your life. Better to look forward with the poet to a long and gratifying maturation. "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."

Well, I'm hoping "the best" doesn't include the worst debilitating effects of neuropathy and spinal stenosis. I'm looking forward, in the last of life --way before the last, actually-- to getting my groove back. And my reliably durable stride. 

==

* "...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, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become..." Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Pascal + Murrow in bricks

An exaggeration, surely. But I'll wager he was onto something.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Blaise Pascal pic.twitter.com/p5wMRRNffa

— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) June 7, 2021

Thanks to social media we can sit alone in a room and be heard around the world. Is that progress?

"Just because your voice now goes all across the world does not mean you are any wiser than when it only went to the end of the bar."
- Edward R. Murrow pic.twitter.com/v0ppOPRJa8

— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) June 7, 2021

Integrity

 Younger Daughter wanted to gamble, to celebrate her 22d birthday and her recent college graduation. So she and Mom traipsed off to southern Indiana, while I stayed home with the dogs and cat and taught my Enlightenment class. 

And, I found yet another compelling Cornel West sermon on YouTube. This one happened to be at Southern Indiana University, not far from the gambling den in Evansville.

I've been on a West kick lately. I've always appreciated his energy and intelligence and humanity. And passion for justice. In this address the keyword seems to be integrity. He's always name-dropping Dostoevsky, I must find a way to get him into my Brothers K talk at Ottawa.

Younger Daughter broke even, btw, and reports having seen many desperate addicts of many kinds. Maybe that trip cured her of the allure of winning big all at once. Our biggest wins take time and commitment, and dedication. Perseverence. Love. Integrity, in Dr. W's impassioned drawl. He says his daughter told him she appreciates his dedication to lost causes. But there's never a right time to fold, when justice is at stake.

Got some nice souvenirs out of my family's adventure. Love the socks' summons to integrity.

 

"...we must remember that the basis of democratic leadership is ordinary citizens’ desire to take their country back from the hands of corrupted plutocratic and imperial elites. This desire is predicated on an awakening among the populace from the seductive lies and comforting illusions that sedate them and a moral channeling of new political energy that constitutes a formidable threat to the status quo. This is what happened in the 1860s, 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s in American history. Just as it looked as if we were about to lose the American democratic experiment—in the face of civil war, imperial greed, economic depression, and racial upheaval—in each of these periods a democratic awakening and activistic energy emerged to keep our democratic project afloat. We must work and hope for such an awakening once again." Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism

Distraction

I spent too much time yesterday fiddling with the storage on my phone, trying to figure out how to "manage" my photos and other files. 

So, I can entirely relate to what Susan Neiman says about the time we spend dealing with distraction, and with upgrading the technological marvels that are supposed to better our lives, and such. Is this really progress? Would a truly smart and enlightened age not have long since pitched its smartphones into the pond?

If one added all the hours spent by all of us on what are cheerfully called upgrades – figuring out how to navigate the new software on the computer, set the new alarm clock, grill with the new oven, store messages on the new smartphone, save pictures on the new camera, unlock the new auto ignition – wouldn’t it be enough hours to, say, produce enough food to feed the world’s hungry children, or perhaps find a cure for cancer? --Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

But that's Luddism. Our challenge is to learn to live well with our upgrades. Don't pitch it, just put it down. 

Brothers

 According to the internet, it's not wise to get inked shortly before surgery. Okay then. Henry's morning star remains, for now, a guiding light in my imagination but not yet on my forearm. No point in gambling gratuitously with my health, still and always worth "all the 'truths' under the firmament." Not yet.

Same goes for easing back into regular and casual public intercourse with unmasked others. Wife and Younger Daughter are at a casino in Indiana, celebrating her birthday. I was happy to stay behind and teach my class last night. Not yet, thanks. 

But I do intend to "live my life," as my wife put it, and not be unduly cowed by the specter of contagion. A life of zest is also a life of measured risk. Mustn't be blind to that.

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant...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. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

I'm just not interested in taking reckless risks that offer insufficient reward in compensation. 

I'm not ready to rub shoulders at the multiplex (for instance) with potentially-viral strangers here in Tennessee--one of those rebellious and least-immune southern states where so many are so belligerently unwilling to acknowledge our shared obligation to balance the personal and the public. They are benighted, not enlightened. I'll just chill here on the couch with the dogs, for now. ("Namaste home,"  as announced by the mug my wife thought it clever to gift me.)

Thinking about all this is a welcome distraction from the ticking clock, counting quickly down to the surgeons' (there are two) scalpels in less than two weeks now. I'm trying not to think too much about the "procedure," projecting ahead instead to that time in mid-July when (if all goes well) I'll be good to go up to Ottawa for that long-postponed conference. 

My topic: The Brothers Karamazov and The Brothers K ("David James Duncan's wildly excessive, flamboyantly sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-slapping homage to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy -- and the game of baseball"), and what both have to say about undue suffering and the absence of justice in our world.

I wonder if Brother West is a baseball fan. I know he has things to say on this topic. On every topic. Did you hear him with Brother Robert yesterday? If Thrasymachus had his way, there'd be no justice for sure. We don't need an "argument" to refute the nihilist. We don't need to refute the nihilist. We just need an eagerness to live our lives in the zest and tingle and excitement of reality. 

Sometimes we don't need to argue.

Lifelong teaching

Exciting news today for our Enlightenment Now class: on July 13 my old friend (and Best Man 28 years ago this past Sunday) Professor Daryl Hale--just retired from a teaching career at Western Carolina University--has agreed to zoom with the class in my absence, pinch-hitting while I'm at my Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in Ottawa KS. 

He's a Kant scholar and has regularly taught a course on Enlightenment at WCU. He's the smartest and funniest Kantian I know.  And he's also a baseball fan, and an early bird, like me. His guest stint came about just a few moments ago, when I received a text from him commenting on the Mets' amazing Jacob deGrom. Then he mentioned his retirement, after "I finished my last class on Enlightenment this spring, one of my favorites." Well, why hadn't it already occurred to me to ask him to fill in? "How stupid of one, not to have thought of that..." (As Huxley said of Darwin's natural selection.)

So I issued the invite, with the caveat that I'd understand if he was truly done with teaching. "Never done with teaching, just with grading." I get that. Like my colleague who's also retiring this summer, and like my mentor John Lachs, we can contemplate and even relish retiring from academia --(Lachs once said the great thing about tenure is that you can show the Dean any finger you like)-- but never from teaching and learning and philosophizing. 

But I'm still here tonight, when we'll finish Robertson's Very Short Intro. The two topics he raises in the second half of the book that most capture my imagination are (1) the rise of public spaces like coffeehouses, in the 17th and 18th centuries, as sociable venues for the enactment of enlightenment values (truth-seeking, mutual indulgence/toleration  etc.) and the exchange of ideas... and the decline of that sort of coffeehouse culture in our time; and (2) the rise and fall of the type of Public Intellectual in our day. 

Matthew Green also deplores the absence of conviviality among strangers in Starbucks and other commercial-chain coffee emporia nowadays. "Would you go up to a stranger in a coffee shop and ask them for the latest news?" No, they'd either be mortified or they'd likely spew a fount of fake news. I'm with him, we need a coffee revolution.

I agree with Erica Stone, "our universities have a duty to engage with the public." And our philosophers have a duty to step out of the ivory tower, if not into literal coffeehouses like Chris Phillips ("Socrates Cafe") and into pop culture celebrity like Cornel West --the two of them together are quite a duo, West by himself is by turns exhausting and exhilarating and almost always constructively provocative-- then at least into the sphere of social media where they can reach and enrich a broader public. I'm pleased to hear West in conversation with Rob Talissse on the Why We Argue podcast. Brothers!

"There is something devastatingly hollow about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it," as my old lifelong teacher has said. And demonstrated. Thought without action is even more hollow than concepts without percepts.

A few other questions, and my preliminary responses to what we've said about them so far:

Was Descartes right that "the mind has no sex"? 91 Do most of our contemporaries agree?

"No one knows exactly what causes gender dysphoria. Some experts believe that hormones in the womb, genes, and cultural and environmental factors may be involved..." https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001527.htm

It's the "cultural and environmental factors" I find most intriguing, and perhaps that's what many of us also find most confusing about this phenomenon. Or perplexing, for those who prefer a black-and-white, male-or-female world. Those of us over a certain age may be especially challenged by this brave new world of gender complexity, but the enlightened view generally is to welcome complexity and celebrate it.

I agree, whatever gender differences may impact how we view the world, they must not be allowed to occlude our common humanity in the search for truth.

1. Do you believe that language is an innate or a divine gift? (68)
2. How can the Free Masons be an essential part of the public sphere if they impose secrecy? (89)

1. Since I don't personally believe in divines, I can't see it as a divine gift. And I can't see it as a gift in the literal sense, since the only candidate for such largesse must be a god. But in the looser sense in which anything we consider a boon and an asset is a gift, I do think language is a gift... even though I also share the Jamesian ambivalence I've mentioned, noting the limits of language and the ways in which we distort life by trying to render ineffable experience in words.

The question as to whether language is innate seems to me a related but somewhat different issue. Were we humans and our antecedents always born with a capacity for language, or at least an innate "grammar" or scaffolding for symbolic communication? Or if not always, then emergently? I guess that's the Noam Chomsky line in linguistics. My line is that I can well imagine the evolutionary path of our forebears NOT having turned to language... in which case I suspect we wouldn't be here. So again, my gratitude for the "gift"... I don't think much thinking or co-philosophizing would go on without it!

2. Interesting paradox. I think of my old dad, who was a freemason (of course he never really divulged any "secrets") in much the same way, it seemed to me, as he was a member of the school board and Rotary and Kiwanis (civic organizations designed to bring merchants and small business-people and professionals together for "sociability" and boosterism etc.). In other words, freemasonry for him seemed just one more club that brought him into regular contact with his peers. I sort of see that as a way of building the public sphere.

Ben Franklin said the masons' great secret was that they had no real secrets. Ritual and clubbiness, yes. But nothing for the rest of us to be suspicious of.

Is there something there to grasp or is enlightenment unobtainable?
Would it be wrong to fit enlightenment into a paradigm of understanding that has passed into history?
Should we continue to think of enlightenment as a society in search for moral virtue?
Could communism in its truest sense be the once or a future embodiment of enlightenment?
When we think of enlightenment do we have to think of a structure that includes politics or should it just be one's own understanding of the world?
I felt that the conclusion of this book left me to wonder where the influencers of the enlightenment end?

If by enlightenment we mean a commitment to human betterment, progress, social justice, and in general the amelioration of the human condition, then that's not "there" in any sense that implies necessary existence. These are contingent states of affairs the attainment of which depends upon human agency and resolve. I can think of no reason to declare them unattainable, a priori. The point of pursuing enlightenment, like the pursuit of happiness (which on recent interpretations may simply be different aspects of the same pursuit), is to fulfill one of the crucial conditions of their attainment: our will to attain them.

Yes, I think it would be wrong to consign enlightenment to the dustbin of history... or of mere historical scholarship. Our course (following Pinker) is called Enlightenment Now. History is still being made and written.

I prefer to think of enlightenment as individuals building a better society collaboratively, in search of every kind of virtue. Moral virtue is a subset of virtue in the wide old Greek sense of arete, meaning excellence across the board and in every facet of life involving human volition.

If true communism reconciles the public interest with private freedom, and if it is realistic, then perhaps something like it is the future of enlightenment. But it'll be very different from any nominal form of communism we've yet seen.

I think we should think of enlightenment as embracing both personal and public dimensions. No need to exclude either.

I hope the "influencers" don't end at all, since we're still quite far from achieving an enlightened society. 

1: Does the Enlightenment “matter” today? 2: Had the French Revolution not occurred, would the Enlightenment (as it is defined in this book) have continued past the 18th century?

It does indeed feel like we're regressing, de-lightening, devolving, marching backwards with the rise of uncritically-minded superstition, baseless and outlandish conspiracy-mongering, blatant dishonesty etc. And that's why I think the values of enlightenment, theirs and subsequently, matter now more than ever. Progress constructed on the dispassionate (but not unimpassioned) quest for truth, facts, and reality can be our salvation. Its continued neglect will likely be our reversion to a more primitive and less hopeful condition. And yes, if we're really thinking (really THINKING) for ourselves then each of us can fashion our own sense of what enlightenment means. Our text indicates that on one interpretation that's exactly what Kant was advising, not the more absolute and objective conception of enlightenment as a categorical construction of the universal mind. We should ask Prof. Hale about that.

I wonder if a less bloody French Revolution might have contributed to a more enduring and widely-embraced form of enlightenment. If France and other European powers had remained in the grip of autocracy and coercive monarchy, on the other hand, would that have hastened an eventual revolutionary explosion of democracy? Or would it have isolated the American experiment and expedited the decline of our democracy? These historical what-ifs are intriguing, if inconclusive. To me, this just signals the importance of owning the present as history-in-the-making, wondering less about what might have been and more about what might still be.

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

My brain wants to agree with this in general, but I can't get past the "good books" phrase.

Aren't "good books" like "good art" — relative? Who gets to decide what constitutes a good vs bad book? I feel like that's a very slippery slope.

And... What's the criteria for a good book? Who is the authority on this criteria and why are they the authority?

Even if you're reading "bad books," you still have the advantage over the other man because you have the ability to read.

Well that's right, as lots of educators say: better that the kids read Captain Underpants than nothing at all.

But I do still think there's such a thing as a Good Book-- and there are many of them, not just one. It's true that we always have to ask about the ulterior agenda of those who propose to canonize any books. But I will always argue that Twain is better than Danielle Steele, for instance. Walker Percy and Shelby Foote wrote better books than just about any on the current bestseller list. We can and should differ, and debate, about what books are good, and why we think so. But if we throw in the towel and say its all just relative and subjective, then we might as well give up any hope for an enlightenment project of any sort. "Betterment" and "progress" require the exercise of critical judgment, not its abandonment. Sapere Aude! But then also have the courage to expose your own critical judgment to the critical scrutiny of your peers. (What's the Latin for "Have the courage to co-philosophize"?)

Habent animos cooperari, says my Latin translator. Doesn't have quite the Kantian ring to it. Dare operam is better. But I think Sam Fleischacker is right, as reported by our text, that Kant's great question is indeed "an invitation to public discussion in which diversity of opinion will flourish" as to what enlightenment really is. Doesn't mean all those opinions are equally correct. Let's discuss.

Robertson raises the philosophers' dispute over metaphysical foundations. Do we need them, as Alasdair MacIntytre said? Or not, per Richard Rorty? I'm with Rorty in this one, but not quite in the way Robertson characterizes it. Minds can "establish" truths (not Truth) but not finally settle them, not in the way a mirror can settle the matter of one's appearance. Truth happens to ideas, they become true or false depending on the non-arbitrary (hence non-relative)varieties of context and history etc. etc. Or so we Jamesians would wish to establish. But that's Inside Baseball, as it were. And this particular ball is in the tall weeds beyond the fence, better leave it alone.

Finally, I think, Robertson sounds the right concluding note. Enlightenment is about our "willingness to engage with change in this world independent of the next, to think about what might constitute 'progress'." We need to think hard about that, but not (again) only think.