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)