Just say Yes

LISTEN. Today in Happiness, after our little exam, we'll discuss what it means to Stoics to live in accordance with nature. We'll also consider the shared Stoic-Buddhist aversion to "drug-induced bliss." That's my cue to bring Michael Pollan and William James into the conversation.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience James said 

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature;

That's a remarkable observation, which he quickly tempered with the crushing corollary that 

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.

So, much as we should wish to affirm the Yes function, we can't sanction the degradation and poisoning. 

Does the same caveat apply to all drugs? James had (pardon the pun) high hopes for nitrous oxide, saying it taught him that 

our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

And we mustn't dismiss the other forms. "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." (Also see "The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher")

Michael Pollan agrees. Nitrous was not his drug of choice, even under tightly-controlled conditions, but psilocybin and other hallucinogens did bring him to conclude that "I am not identical with my ego..." In How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence he writes:

The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

If dissolution of the ego results in greater heart, more altruism, a deeper spirituality and a clearer understanding of what matters in life, I say let's dissolve. But I'm still looking for ways to accomplish that in the more familiar and seemingly less risky forms of trip that don't require me to violate statutes or disorient my consciousness in ways that may feel violently disruptive. That time may come, if the predictable health trajectory of many of my cohort holds in my own case. If and when it does I hope our laws will by then have caught up to the science and the humanism of judiciously dispensed psycho-activity. I don't want to take a trip to jail. But neither do I want to suffer needlessly, or for anyone else to either.

What would Kant say?

17! LISTEN.

“Well, it starts with perseverance. I mean, it starts there,” said Adam Wainwright, whose poetic 17th win of the season in his 17th year with St. Louis led his club to its 17th consecutive victory. “We had to overcome probably the worst baseball I've ever seen a Cardinals team play. We just weren't doing anything right. … It was just understanding that we're a better team than what we were showing and we could go out there and compete with anybody when we play right.

And now I'll stop crowing about my team. For now. Kant probably wouldn't have much to say about them. 

But he had plenty to say about rationality, as has Steven Pinker...

LISTEN (10.20). “I am struggling for words — this is crazy. It is just utterly irresponsible,” says one medical ethicist about Drumpf's "don't be afraid of COVID" tweet. That's the one norm he's established and never flouts. When crazy becomes normal, how do we stay sane?

What would Kant say?

Kant's life was pretty dull, his routines rigid. See The Last Days of Immanuel Kant for cinematic documentation of this. "It follows the famously abstemious and abstruse philosopher as he’s anticipating his death, yet it’s a physical comedy filled with neo-slapstick intimacy." It's funny, and broadly affectionate. The depiction of his vaunted daily walks, at snail's pace, is hard for a peripatetic like me to watch. My pal the Kantian in Carolina was offended by it, but I find it an ingratiating portrait of an eccentric for whom the excitement of life was almost entirely about thinking. I wouldn't want to have lived that life myself, nor do I much like reading its results. But I'm glad someone did.


Kant really needed a dog, though. Schopenhauer at least had his poodles, one Atman after another.

His philosophy, though, shook things up and enticed admiring competitors and successors to challenge his biggest caution: don't try to describe reality-in-itself. Don't forget: everything we know comes with a built-in point of view, a perspective rooted in the knowers' categories of mind.


I shouldn't have gone looking for that film on YouTube just now, the rabbit hole is hard to resist. Did you know that Joacquin Phoenix taught Kant? Like Chidi in the Good Place? "The wave returns to the ocean... Whenever you're ready, just walk through."

Ready or not...

Was Kant's metaphysic of mind-as-projector of categories (quantity, quality, relation, modality... plurality, reality, cause & effect, possibility...) and of space and time the Copernican revolutionary breakthrough he and his acolytes thought? For Hegel and Schopenhauer it didn't break on through to the other side, the noumenal view from nowhere. That was a deficiency, they thought. But was it ever even a possibility? My biggest concern about Kant's metaphysics is that if he's right we might never get to make first contact with ET (whose categories and resulting "conceptual scheme" might be too alien to know)...

We'll also consider Kant's ethics, and Bentham's. Of course we should help people when we feel sorry for them. There's nothing wrong with that, and much right. But Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon?

How about the Experience Machine? We've already got one, haven't we? And when the holo-deck comes along we'll find out how the experiment really turns out.

If wisdom and understanding come only at a "later stage" of history, Hegel, in twilight, is philosophy worth doing now? At dawn? It's the very best time to do it, in my experience, rght before our daily morning dog walk. That's when Geist is most real for me. But my geist is probably not yours, or "ours"... Anyway, the great rational optimist and cynical pessimist are ultimately (like us all) in the same boat. "Shipwreck is a permanent possibility," said William James...

Schopenhauer on Hegel: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

Schopenhauer's Will still seems wildly speculative and idiosyncratic, to me, truly a projection of the philosopher's personal temperament. But it shows that pessimists are people too. I don't think it shows the value of asceticism, though, as "the ideal way to cope with existence." But as always, to each their own.

In Fantasyland we're invted to wonder if the film industry narrowed the perceived distance between fantasy and reality and acts like a drug. I'll ask Older Daughter about that. And about online videogaming.

Also, advertising. It's manipulative and misleading, it engenders false desires and a confusion about what will make us happy. Or, you can do what I've been doing for decades, ever since I went to Radio Shack and purchased a little device that screwed into the back of the tee-vee. That was before hand-held remote controls, kids. But muting the noise, I've found, enhances the day-to-day quality of my life like almost nothing else.

And: Wells's War of the Worlds, our infatuation with celebrity, and celebrities. Suburban nostalgia and racism. LA and South Florida as fantasylands. Confucius Institutes. Should there be a Western Philosophy Institute in China? The difference between harmony and conformity, compliance, sameness, and uniformity. Would we have a more eastern attitude about harmony and cosmic order in the west if Heraclitus (and Hegel) had "won out" over Plato? 225 Kant's Enlightenment "maturity"... Parents who try "to maintain their authority over their children after those children have grown up"? 231 People who are "beyond care" and have "given up"? 235 "Yin/yang"/// "picking yin"? 239 (Keep it clean please.)
Is the Confucian principle of quan anti-Kantian? 243 How about the African concept of ubuntu? 246

10.6.2020

Into the woods

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider Buddhist and Stoic prescriptions for  the "existential illness" that finds us deluded, grasping, and erroneously attaching to the impermanent world's chintzy shiny baubles. Both traditions propose therapies.

Our campus counseling center sent out a flyer yesterday, advertising its services "free of charge" to the campus community. Freer still for many of us, and more effective, might simply be a walk in the woods or down the street. Or on a sandwalk.

Positive emotions come into play on a good walk. For the Stoics emotions were "problematic because they are inseparable from faulty beliefs," but that surely is a faulty overstatement. Some emotions lead us down the wrong path, others make us feel at home in the woods and the universe and our own skin. Jennifer Michael Hecht puts it well in Doubt: A History, in her discussion of "graceful-life philosophies" which offers a lovely forest metaphor for happiness:

The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest… we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some *blueberries, sit beneath a  tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest… Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time.

Maybe that's the sort of therapy Cicero had in mind when he said we can be our own physicians (not meta-) when treating "diseases of the soul." No license required. Just hang a sign.

RAIN is a nice counseling acronym (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identification), the gist of which is that you are not your pain. Let it go.

Buddhist awakening involves an end of rebirth, when karma stops "accumulating." Doesn't that just mean an end, full-stop? Is that cure possibly not worse than the disease? Or is that very question emblematic of western delusion?

Jhanas are states of "deep concentration" or "absorptions" meant to facilitate "detachment from worldly delights." I've written about that, I'm still trying to understand why I'd ever want to plug my springs of delight. For the attainment of nirvana, presumably. But that sounds mystical. Doesn't have to, according to our author. "A 'little nirvana' could consist in a state of more contentment and less reactivity." Nothing wrong with that. We're all suffering from less contentment and more reactivity than is healthy, mentally or physically. A little forest bath couldn't hurt.

Playing right

 LISTEN. 16.

One more clinches the wildcard, but more importantly the streak has already clinched Grantland Rice's point about living: winning (as Nuke LaLoosh learned) is more fun than losing, but winning and losing matters less than playing the right way. Playing with confidence and style and mutual support and a spirit of fair play will look great on the last scorecard, whether you get to fly the W or not.

But my team does, today. Again. Hey Chicago, what do you say? I say I want to play life the way Harrision Bader plays centerfield.

 

This was a good weekend all around for me, with the sun shining brightly I finally got back on the bicycle for some lovely extended rides, not just short class-to-class campus commutes. 

And I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Powers's new novel Bewilderment, which takes its title straight from Plato's cave: "the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light." That's just what we were talking about at the end of Happiness
class last time, as we ambled back to the Naked Eye observatory. The crack of light between two eternities of darkness, the bird that flies into the lighted chamber. We're lucky to have found the light, however briefly. We should open our eyes.

Next in CoPhi we turn to Berkeley, Voltaire & Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau. To be is not merely to be perceived, but the absence of acute perception afflicting so many is definitely a deficient state of being. I still think Voltaire and James were right about Leibniz's (and Pope's) thundering incarnation of superficiality in metaphysics. Everything's not right with the world, yet. Not even when you're winning. 

Leibniz's best biographer (or most entertaining, at least) is Matthew Stewart. I don't suppose he's related to Jon (not the comic but the philosopher who's about to publish a fresh look at Hegel). I look forward to seeing if he can render the philosopher who inspired James to inhale nitrous oxide in search of Hegelian clarity (was there ever a squarer circle?) any less superficial. (Some Subjective Effects...)

I'm enjoying Julian Baggini's new book on Hume, which takes us "to the places that inspired Hume the most, from his family estate near the Scottish border to Paris, where, as an older man, he was warmly embraced by French society" and "includes 145 Humean maxims for living well, on topics ranging from the meaning of success and the value of travel to friendship, facing death, identity, and the importance of leisure." g'r... g'b

The importance of leisure, indeed. Go Cards go. Go on reminding us how important it is to play well with others, and to care. Leave the great scorer out of it, if you like. What still matters is how you play the game.

==

 My Own Life (Oliver Sacks)... Unweaving the Rainbow (Richard Dawkins)... The Courtier and the Heretic (M.Stewart)... "superficiality incarnate" (WJ on Leibniz)...

More than happiness

LISTEN. Who could ask for anything more? Cards have now won eleven in a row. I want twelve. 

Stoics and Buddhists, according to our new author in Happiness today, want more. But more what? More life? More time? More equanimity? More acceptance? Just more, says Thor. "I just think that’s what being a New Yorker is all about, being hungry for more," says the star hurler with the high school education who is also "a  multidimensional human being with feelings and problems and goals outside of sports."

 More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age is Antonina Macaro's contribution to the growing body of literature commending "mindfulness" and (in the blurbed words of secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor) "the pragmatic and therapeutic dimensions of philosophy." 

Owen Flanagan is another secularist who finds natural wisdom in Buddhism. Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True) too. “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” Wright and Stoic resurrector Massimo Pigliucci agree that Buddhists and Stoics like Marcus Aurelius come to similar conclusions "from a different metaphysical starting point."

“Think, remind yourself every time do you have a problem, every time you have an issue with other people, remind yourself of the big picture. You think about the extent of time, think about the extent of space, and the part that you are within it, and you will see that, (a) your particular concerns are actually not that important, but also, (b) that you are connected to everything else and that therefore the rational thing to do for you as a human being is to try to do your best to improve society at large."

“The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death.” ― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

Macaro declares herself neither Buddhist nor Stoic, favoring Aristotle and noting that Epicurus has yet to enjoy a resurgence of interest and attention akin to that lately visited on the Stoics. She notes as well the Stoic connection to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Therapy is of coure the keyword, and the binding thread of most ancient philosophies. Relieving distress and improving the experienced quality of lives was pretty much the entire point. But that's not to say that happiness is the entire point. "Happiness is not everything." But it may be the thing most indicative of whether our therapeutics are working. 

Stoics are not Skeptics, but if there's a significant connection between Stoics and Buddhists it's natural to wonder about the connection between Buddhists and Skeptics too. Was Pyrrho influenced by Buddhists? Committing to firm beliefs about the nature of reality, for instance, seems to have been anathema to both traditions. Not to commit to beliefs, even provisionally and experimentally, is to travel without a map (or gps). It doesn't seem smart. It doesn't seem likely to work, if one of the points of a journey is to arrive at a destination. Or at least approach it. So: is happiness a destination, or a journey?

Well it's both, isn't it? So shouldn't we want more reliable maps, more accurate satellite positioning, more stable infrastructure of all kinds, smooth roads and clear skies and plenty of pleasant diversions along the way? And more charging stations for our more efficient and eco-friendly vehicular conveyances?

Lots of metaphors to unpack, then, on the road to less suffering and more happiness.  Will metaphysics help or hinder? Will god-talk? James said his religious act was to defend experience against "philosophy," and that in general the religious impulse for most of us is driven not by a yearning for that sort of transcendence. What do Buddhists and Stoics think about that?

And what do they think about Nabokov's "common sense" view of our predicament, our "cradle above the abyss," our "brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"?  What do we?

I think Humbert-squared's creator was on to something uncommonly acknowledged, with those stark images. As was the Venerable Bede, which is why this was our wedding scroll:

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark...It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle." --Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

Contrary to the popular notion of cold dispassionate Stoics and monkish meditating Buddhists, then, we'll treasure human connection above all, if we truly seek a life of more happiness. We'll value community, we'll work on relationships, we'll want to leave a legacy. We'll care about what life is going to be like here, after we're gone.

And in the words of the late psycho-novelist Irvin Yalom, we'll learn to "temper the anguish of our finitude" in the face of life's brevity, fragility, and beauty. We'll realize the rainbow wisdom that "we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones..."

We'll ride our winning streaks. Life brings suffering, of course, lots of it. But it also brings pleasure and joy. Happy people get this. And they want more.

Catching up

LISTEN. Ten in a row for the Cards. And they've not had a losing season in fourteen years. The manager credits players, teams, and organizational leaders over the years for being "very intentional about passing on to the next group.” There's a life-lesson for us all there. Even Cubs fans.

As Crash Davis said in Bull Durham, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And sometimes it rains. Maybe the secret of happiness is to enjoy the wins, look beyond the losses, and carry an umbrella.

Seriously. You can't win 'em all, but win or lose tomorrow's always another day. Lose or win, we'll never be precisely here again. So take it easy. Give 110%. And practice your cliches. 

Lots to catch up on in CoPhi today, on the heels of Constitution Day and Library Day, from Hobbes to Descartes to Spinoza to Locke...

But it was time well spent over in Walker Library with Writing Center staff and librarian Rachel Kirk, preparing to succeed with midterm presentations and school and life.

“The most successful students are those who know that they can do better than grasp at the closest source of information. Reference librarians, who spend their days learning what is available in a broad range of fields and how to search for it, provide a great service for students and other library patrons... Democracies can work only if all citizens have access to information and culture that can help them make good choices, whether at the voting booth or in other aspects of public life.” --John Palfrey, BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google g'r

"Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization...If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide... You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." --Ray Bradbury

Facts, Fake News, & Critical Literacy

Books about Books

 

And one more thing: A delightful trip to New Hampshire and a hike up Mt. Chocorua, across from William James's summer place, with Kyle Finn Dempsey...

LISTEN (9.'20). Today in CoPhi we'll turn to three French philosophers, Descartes the pretend-skeptic, Montaigne the real one, and Pascal the gambler who wanted desperately to suppress his doubts in deference to the promises of faith.

Rene Descartes "meditated" himself into a conjured and contrived form of doubt, but never really doubted for an instant that the world revealed by the senses--beginning with the senses themselves, and our perception of ourselves as sensate creatures capable of encountering a world--is real enough. What he doubted was not his and our existence as embodied knowers, but the status of that knowledge. For him, if we're not indubitably certain then we know nothing.

C.S. Peirce the fallibilist, as noted in How the World Thinks, said it's an error to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in real life. That's one of Descartes's errors. His mind-body "ghost in the machine" dualism is another. The worry that life is but a dream is fun to discuss and make movies about (Matrix, Inception etc.) but whether we're dreams or dreamers may, as the Chinese sage said, be a distinction without a practical difference.

Blaise Pascal is best known for his famous Wager and its "What have you got to lose?" premise, but I'm more struck by his statement that the immensity and silence of the night sky terrified him. Fear in general seems to have motivated his approach to theology, specifically fear of eternal damnation. As we said in one of our Zoom sessions yesterday, fear-based thinking and living is ill-advised in politics. Probably in religion too.

Michel du Montaigne's rhetorical/skeptical question was Que sais-je? What do I know? The answer depends on what we want from knowledge. If not Cartesian certainty, but practical guidance tempered by humility and a willingness to revise our beliefs and practices in the light of what we learn, then I think he knew quite a lot. He learned to get back on the horse that throws you, and knew that life should not be lived in fear of dying or anything else.

In Fantasyland today Kurt Andersen says Christian religiosity is "the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all" (89), and that Enlightenment skepticism received a religious make-over in America that predisposed the national mind to become an incubator of conspiracy-mindedness. The QAnon nonsense is just the latest incarnation of an old tendency, going back to the Freemasons whose big secret mission, said Ben Franklin, was that they had none.

Wouldn't it be nice if nations and traditions just stopped insisting on exclusive divine sanction for their beliefs?

In How the World Thinks today we wonder about Islamic notions of "perfect divine transcendental unity" and their dis-unifying consequences.

Is ordinary experience, day to day, "nothing more than a powerful illusion"? 149 Does anyone ever really act as if they believed that? Is it possible to function effectively and happily with such an attitude? Or in predestination and one's pre-"recorded destiny"? 154 Or in natural disasters that kill innocent people according to "God's will" for which the victims are nonetheless "culpable"? 155

More too on Harry Frankfiurt's "bullshit" (162) and Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" and Stephen Hawking's greatly exaggerated reports of the demise of philosophy (167). And a question about reductionism that reminds me of a mantra we met in the Atheism course several years ago: "physics fixes the facts." But not all of them, Baggini says, not if fixing means reducing. There are no car batteries in fundamental physics...

==

Spinoza didn't make it easy on himself by affirming pantheism, but perhaps he found the solace of solidarity with nature and the universe sufficiently off-setting and worth the cost in personal terms. He thought he'd touched all the bases: God, nature, freedom, emotion, everything. QED (Not quite easily done.)

He "claimed to demonstrate both the necessary existence and the unitary nature of the unique, single substance that comprises all of reality. Spinoza preferred the designation "Deus sive Natura" ("god or nature") as the most fitting name for this being, and he argued that its infinite attributes account for every feature of the universe."

An infinite God leaves no remainder, but also leaves individuals without a personal savior. He didn't think he needed one, with his rationalist's intellectual love of God. Free will may be an illusion, but a Spinozism of freedom is supposed to free us from reactionary passions like anger and self-pity. He would have been pleased by Einstein's endorsement. “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."

But, freedom? "It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason." Much easier said than done. But again, Spinoza wasn't about easy.

Anthony Gottlieb's Spinoza brought "a breeze of the future," a foretaste of our present, with determinism and secularism in the ascendant in the most enlightenend quarters. Was he really "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers," as Bertrand Russell averred? "Those who were acquainted with him," said Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, called him "social, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality." But they didn't confirm his mythic identity as a humble lens grinder scrabbling to sustain himself for his philosophic labors. "[H]is lens-making was primarily a scientific pursuit rather than a commercial one."

If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, we'd come to his conclusion that "all things [are] just as necessary" as a true mathematical proposition. "Unfortunately, people did not come to see this at all." Fortunately, I say, lest we stop trying to be the change we want to see in the world. He'd say not to sweat that, if we want change then we necessarily will do what we think we must to achieve it... but we can't bank on making a difference that confounds the "whole order." And I say, again, I'm banking on it.

This God-intoxicated man has many secular and atheistic intellectual descendants, who are tarred by "no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States." Still, "he believed that he believed in God." Maybe Einstein did too, Gottlieb's judgment that he was "probably just being diplomatic" notwithstanding.

John Locke's empiricism overstated the blankness of our slates, and relied too heavily on memory as a guarantor of personal identity. Thomas Reid was not in his league, but may still have had a better idea with his overlapping memories thesis. Until we become cyborg, total recall will not be an option.

"Locke's grand work," said C.S. Peirce, "was substantially this: Men must think for themselves."

Thomas Jefferson may have overstated the case for Locke's influence on the founding generation of the American republic, but if he influenced the sage of Monticello it would seem to follow that in fact his shadow has loomed large. A direct line can be drawn from his social contract to John Rawls's, and from there to the current generation of progressive politics in America... to say nothing of his namesake on Lost. The authority of a rulers derives from the freely-contracted consent of the governed, or from nowhere. It doesn't come down from heaven nor out of the barrel of a gun.

Locke "greatly admired the achievements that his friends in the Royal Society had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature. The goal of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience."

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sounded the Enlightenment keynotes: think for yourself, question conventional and inherited wisdom, stop quibbling and splitting hairs about angels on pinheads... 

4.17

Garden wisdom

LISTEN. John Dewey got a mention in the Times. In an opinion piece, by an academic, but still it's a rare and welcome echo of a time in this country when philosophers' views were valued and sought after and considered by the broad educated public. Dewey's (and Molly Worthen's) rejection of academic irrelevance is as timely as ever.

I'm also happy this morning that one of my favorite novelists has a new book out. Richard Powers has just published Bewilderment. Hope for a Grieving Kid and Planet May Lurk in the Human Brain, headlines the Times review.  That sounds right. Where else are we going to find it? The brain is wider than the sky.

Also, the Cards won again. Nine straight. Roger Angell was surely right, “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team," but forming and honing the habit of caring is anything but foolish. It teaches me to care in class and in life about bigger things. It's an affiliation that pays its way. 

We conclude our very short intro to Epicureanism today. I wanted us to read it early in the semester because it's a view I find both enticing and challenging, and thus a good benchmark against which to measure subsequent Happiness philosophies.

I am enticed by the Epicurean appeal to friendship and small-scale community, the invitation to repudiate ungrounded fears of eternal perdition and a punitive afterlife, and the encouragement to reject the false promise of materialist consumerism. I am challenged by the suggestion that we can conscionably pursue our personal happiness in some remote garden, far removed from the push and pressure of politics. 

I hope our course generates enough smart deliberation to help me resolve the tension between enticement and challenge. Can I declare, with Mr. Jefferson, that I too am an Epicurean? 

If I cannot resolve the tension, I'll just have to continue to be a pragmatic pluralist with regard to Happiness. That is, I'll continue to deny that any single approach to our quarry is wholly and exclusively adequate. I'll continue to be enticed by Epicurean virtues and challenged by Epicurean disengagement. And I'll continue pursuing a good and happy life. One could do worse. As tensions go, it's not an unhappy one.

Next we'll consider their rivals the Stoics, in light of the stoic dimension of Buddhism. A central point of contrast is the notion that we ought to love our fate, and cultivate that attitude when it's not spontaneous. "It was necessary, the Stoics believed, to adopt a philosophical attitude towards the unfurling of events, understanding their inevitability... There is a beauty and nobility in the Stoic conception of amor fati..." Well, say the Epicureans, there's also beauty and nobility in resistance to fear and misery. They have "no such exalted notion of the ultimate wisdom of Providence and no... love of fate." 

I'm still with them, in that debate, but I look forward to our coming conversations. We'll see. We'll differ. We contain multitudes, it's very well that we'll contradict one another. That's one of the things friends are for.

==

LISTEN (9.'19). "For the Epicureans," writes Catherine Wilson, "politics implied a striving for power and admiration which was incompatible with virtue, pleasure, and peace of mind." So, they retreated to their garden outside the city and cultivated "true friendship." Tempting. I've definitely had a touch of the apolitical blues lately, the seductive cure for which seems to be disengagement from the civic arena and investment in relationships of trust and mutual support that don't depend on polarized party partisanship.

But somebody's got to hold the pols to account. It's a false dilemma that pits private against public life. Did the Stoics have a better understanding of this?

"The earliest humans, Lucretius proposed, were wild shaggy creatures living solitary lives in caves and forests... they raised themselves by degrees to a condition of civilization." Are we there yet? We're only as civilized as our institutions and practices and (as has been much remarked in the past three years) norms allow us to be. That's why even Epicureans sometimes have to summon the grit to exit the garden, enter the arena, and prosecute a case against those who threaten our tenuous hold on civilization in the name of truth and philosophy.  

"The normalization of Drumpf and Trumpism—allowing those things to be defined merely as a political problem needing a political cure—degrades democracy. Calculating political advantage, too, narrowly misses the point of taking part in politics, which is to defend values."

Or as old Neil, gadfly to southern men and Republican presidents from way back, said: let's impeach the president. Then, we can all "avoid contact with the person causing [us] pain." To do nothing in the face of his incessant insults and anti-democratic degradations would be to surrender to fatalism, and as Wilson concludes her little book:

Epicureanism is not a fatalistic philosophy. It lays great weight on human choices and preferences... It invites us to take pleasure in what is near at hand: in warmth, food, and drink, in moderation; in the company of those we happen, for whatever reason, to like; in the recurrence of spring after winter; and in the surround of foliage and flowers, and the appearance of new life.

There will be, as Chance the gardener (not rapper) knew, new growth in the garden in the spring. It's really very simple. And ordinary, and beautiful.

The library

LISTEN. Rained all weekend, so I didn't get to do the bikeride the doc finally greenlighted.

But I did have fun watching the Cards solidify the second wildcard, and the first installment of Ken Burns' latest trip down history lane. (And okay, I confess: the Titans' OT win in Seattle.) 

And reading.

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card, Arthur used to sing to our girls. 

(Older Daughter reminded me yesterday of another studious friend of our childhood, or rather her childhood and my lucky dadhood: Morris. Reminded me in turn of Wallace and Gromit and Frog and Toad...)

We're going to the Walker Library in CoPhi today and tomorrow, to prepare for October reports. After hearing from the librarians and reps of the writing center, I hope we'll have time to wander into the stacks. That was one of the more important components of my own undergraduate education at Mizzou, just roaming Ellis Library and pulling this or that volume from its random obscurity to see if it had anything to teach me. Kids these days don't do that or know why they'd want to. They don't know what they're missing.

Michel de Montaigne had a lovely personal library, up there in his tower. He knew that direct personal experience and vicarious experience via reading inform the best writing. He knew books, no less than life itself, had much to teach him. "Que sais-je?" ["What do I know?"] He knew quite a lot, actually, for a skeptic. PhilD

 

Maria Popova is a fan, of his, of books and libraries and reading generally, and of Sarah Bakewell's terrific introduction to Montaigne in How to Live.

What separated Montaigne from other memoirists of his day was that he didn’t write about his daily deeds and his achievements — rather, he contemplated the meaning of life from all possible angles, and in the process popularized the essay as a form. He began writing fairly late in life, when he was thirty-nine, and continued for twenty years, halted only by his death in 1592. The 107 essays he penned range across the entire spectrum of human concerns — from the grandly existential, like death and the art of living, to the universally human, like fear and friendship and sadness and love, to the seemingly trivial, like the customs of dress. Above all, however, he was interested in the simple yet infinitely profound question of how to live — which, Bakewell is careful to point out, is quite different from the ethical prescription of how we should live. She writes:

Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life — meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

Like Thoreau, he wrote of himself not so much from egocentrism but simply because first-person acquaintance is where we all must begin. "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

But readers get to know others much better, and are not restricted to the living. Or rather, readers live in the company of men and women of all ages. Writers live in the future too, or can at least imagine being read by future readers. 

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth... Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Carl Sagan

But as Mr. Twain pointed out, a person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't. And a citizenry that won't read, like those people on the bus in Mount Airy who insulted Ted Koppel yesterday on Sunday Morning, can't keep a democratic republic. 

See you at the library.

191 J23 Ol43

Material minds

LISTEN. Today in Happiness it's "Material Minds"--Epicureans believe in them--and "Religion and Superstition"--they don't. They don't, that is, believe in the supernatural sorts of religion that sponsor fear-mongering superstition. "The only incorporeal entity for the Epicureans was the void," in which nothing we'd call spiritual or soulful is apt to root... excepting, of course, our natural selves. "The mind grows up with the body," and departs with it. The entire interest and importance of life must find its place in the interim.

This may surprise or even shock the sensibilities of those who've been trained in the dualist mind-body tradition so favored for so long in the western philosophical tradition, but a corporeal notion of soul is actually "more appealing" than the strange specter of a "puppet-like" immaterial soul pulling our strings. The invasive alien-homunculus hypothesis is quite creepy, when you think about it.

[Before class, btw, there's another opportunity to participate in a public reading of the Constitution, in front of the Bragg Building. Yesterday's was kinda ruined by that fire-and-brimstone hellmonger who took up residence in front of Honors and forced us inside. But I did still get to read the 8th amendment and condemn cruel and unusual punishment. Time in the company of crazed fundy preachers counts as that, in my book.

Do any of us want to launch this season's Happiness Hour after class? Or is it still unwise to congregate in public places? If we do, it needs to be out on the patio.]

Epicureans are empiricists, insisting "that our beliefs about the physical world ought to be recognized as true or false by being tested against experience." Experience can of course be misleading, but it's only further experience that ever reveals its own past errors. The discernment of reality begins and ends with appearances. There is no ultimate touchstone of reality that is not itself another appearance. That's what Epicureans claim to know: a world of appearances. And they believe we need to keep on collecting appearances, if we value knowledge.

But they're not Berkeleyan empiricists. They're not metaphysical idealists in denial of material reality. They're atomists who believe in a spiritual but non-supernatural (and therefore mortal) dimension to life that we've got to grab and enjoy before the lights dim.

Hypothetical zombies aren't good at grabbing life and living in the light. Sure, "we can imagine brains like ours that are unconscious"--pretty sure I've encountered some--but they don't live the good life. They don't flourish. They don't achieve eudaimonia. That chance is solely ours.

And the Epicurean gods? They "neither create nor evaluate." They "do not care about us"... Who needs them? Well, maybe we need them as aspirational role models. They're "free of worry, fear, and vexation." Epicureans have high standards.

"Neuroscientists believe they have found areas of the brain that are particularly prone to religious ideation, as was suspected... by William James." But James still took religious experience seriously, and so (we may suppose) can modern-day Epicureans. What they won't take seriously is any suggestion that such ideation merits fear and superstition. But if your particular religious impulses quicken your heart and mind and give you some release from worry, fear, and vexation, well, pragmatic-pluralist Epicureans will take that seriously. We'll be suitably moved by such "ideals of piety and community" as can unite committed friends in the holy/secular communion of the Garden.

The expanded consciousness of a Democritean cosmopolite

LISTEN ('19). Today in Happiness we begin by noting the Epicureans' departure from both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in their thoroughly material approach to mind/soul. Our spirit is for them ineluctably embodied, anchored to our organism, dependent on our situation in the material world.

It's a feet-on-the-ground philosophy, a grounded worldview that potentially opens onto rich tapestries of experience. More ethereal souls would not understand, mediated as they would have to be in their recessive duality, cut off from the immediacy that may well be our surest source of happiness. “The notion that the soul is distributed and corporeal is in many ways more appealing than the notion that an incorporeal soul is lodged in the brain,” writes Catherine Wilson. As material spirits, our most ordinary encounters are capable of delighting us. Every fiber of our being may be alive and receptive to extraordinary perceptions.

May, not must. We have to attend to the inherent possibilities of delight, and constantly cultivate our perceptual acuity, lest we become dull and inured to the monotony of everydayness. If we don't, and if we've been saddled with a temperament given to misgiving and ruminative regret - very few of us, it seems, are entirely exempt from such feelings - we'll not flourish. "The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."

The music of life is available and on tap for those who've grasped their intrinsic consanguinity with the cosmos. You could call this insight Democritean cosmopolitanism. “To a wise man," wrote Democritus, "the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Elusive Structure of the Universe and the Journey to Quantum Gravity).

More simply: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." That's Carl Sagan, who was a big fan of Democritus.

The travel writer Pico Iyer just published an essay on this theme. In The Beauty of the Ordinary he writes of Fall and the cycles of the seasons,

the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last; from Vermont to Beijing, people relish autumn days precisely because they’re reminders of how much we cannot afford to take for granted, and how much there is to celebrate right now, this shining late September afternoon... I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.And every day in late September brings us a little bit closer to October baseball. (Cards' magic number to clinch the Central is down to 3.) 

[And in 2021 I don't remember how that all played out. Is there a Happiness moral to be drawn? Maybe. I do know, in '21, that the Cards' sweep of the Mets last night that has them clinging to the second wildcard is making me happy this morning. Next they go head-to-head with the Padres, who are now their closest playoff rival. 

What matters, as Roger Angell has said, is our capacity to care... not about a game, about life. “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team..." But... (see slide #8)]

Bart Giamatti, not long before his own time here was cut tragically short, said he knew nothing's forever but needed to think so. "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."

George Santayana also said a similar thing. "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."

And: "There's no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval." Life offers many happy returns, while we're here and paying attention in our animal bodies, with our animal minds.

But now, what if an artificially intelligent being emerges someday and somehow wires itself to attend to things and reflect on their beauty? Is that possible, conceivable, comprehensible by us? Would its "body" not then in some meaningful sense be the whole world?

But then, aren't ours - on the Democritean premise - that already? That which we perceive being inseparable from that with which we perceive, the composite of our material atomic substance, can't we already say we are the world? We don't need to de-corporalize and upload our consciousness, to have and enjoy this delightful insight. We just need to expand and open it.

Hobbes

LISTEN. In CoPhi today we take up Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. 

First, though, we participate in a public reading of the U.S. Constitution, a document that used to compel the reflexive assent of all our representatives in all three branches of the federal government. No more. So I think it's an entirely appropriate ritual demonstration of our commitment to the rule of law that we should line up behind the microphone in front of our building and take turns reading it out. Imagine what it will be like to live in this country when Constitutional law is no longer credible or enforced. Why, it might be something like living in a state of nature, in a war of all against all. It might be nasty, brutish, and short.

And we might find ourselves in that benighted condition sooner, not later, if we don't check the excesses of the Machiavellian "ends justify the means" politicians in our midst. There seem to be a lot more of them lately.

I confess, though, a grudging admiration for Hobbes, and not just because I'm so fond of his feline namesake. 

If I'd lived in (the original) Hobbes's time, in the Elizabethan age of English civil war, I too might also have thought that public civility, even simulated faux-civility, would only ever result from the top-down imposition of a regime of authoritarian intimidation. 

So here's a couple of old posts dedicated to the philosopher who warned us that our worst instincts are our strongest, and that we must "civilize" ourselves through fear not of one another but of a Leviathan state.

Hobbes “walked much and contemplated”

Machiavelli and Hobbes are on tap in CoPhi today. Students often come to them already intrigued with the former but unaware of the latter, though both their names have become adjectival terms of notoriety. Beware Machiavellian politicos and their ends-justify-the-means mentality, we all seem to have been forewarned, and beware Machiaveliian schemers generally. But while the last century spawned chilling examples of totalitarianism and its murderous toll, fewer of us have been alerted to the dangers of the Hobbesian superstate.

The explanation could have something to do with the evident sweetness of temper of “Tommy” Hobbes (as my old poli-sci prof at UMSL called him), who envisioned Leviathan but exemplified something more like the lamb in his personal conduct and bearing. Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead Philosophers offers an endearing glimpse of a true English eccentric. He “avoided excess ‘as to wine and women’ and stopped drinking at age sixty,” he “walked vigorously every day to work up a sweat… and expel any excessive moisture,” he sang “prick-songs” late at night to stimulate his lungs and lengthen his life.

My favorite thing about Hobbes remains, naturally, his peripatetic nature. He walked to work up a sweat but also to stimulate ideas, which he’d interrupt himself long enough to record by disengaging the quill from his walking stick. “He walked much and contemplated,” says Aubrey’s Life, “and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it.”

Another explanation of the failure of “Hobbesian” to convey the menace it might is, of course, a certain sweet-natured cartoonish tiger-cat who resisted his namesake’s “war of all against all.”

“Hobbes was fond of his dram,” sang the Pythons. But he was fonder of his stick. His walking stick. (See below.)

I was amused when my old friend said he’d just spent five weeks in Britain and came away with nothing more philosophical than a visit to a castle where Hobbes had tutored. My colleague answered rightly by noting that an ancient English castle’s more likely to stimulate the philosophical imagination than is a dusty library in Tennessee. But in any event, Hobbes is a fascinating and over-maligned figure whose steps I look forward to tracking. As I wrote for students awhile back,

Thomas Hobbes is one of my favorite “authoritarians”: a walker who kept an inkwell in his walking stick, he lived to 91 in the 17th century and believed humans could be saved from themselves with the right kind of contract. Contrary to a student essay I once graded, he did not say pre-social contract humans were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes did say that’s what it would be like to live in a “state of nature,” without civil authority or police or government to keep the peace and impose order. It would be a “war of all against all.” If you don’t agree, asks Nigel Warburton in his Little History, why do you lock your doors?

Not, surely, because you think everyone’s out to get you. But it only takes a few miscreants, doesn’t it, to create an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust?

I’d like to think Hobbes might reconsider the extremity of his position, were he transported to our time. On the other hand, we might reconsider the benignity of ours, were we transported to his. Those were tough times: civil war, a king executed, murderous politics, etc. How much freedom would you trade for peace and safety, if there were no other way to secure it? How much have you? How secure do you feel? Still relevant questions in our time, and Hobbes’s answers were extreme indeed. But he was no monster, he was a peace-seeker and a civilizer. Most walkers are.

But, would life in a state of nature really be as bad as Hobbes thought? Most of us find most people less than totally distrustful, hostile, aggressive, and vicious, most of the time. On the other hand, we’re most of us hardly “noble savages” either. Civilization and its discontent-engendering institutions account for a percentage of everyday bad behavior, but surely not all of it.

The Hobbesian threat of insecurity and fear of violent death, in our time, may be great enough for most people to override their desire for personal freedom. Is safety more important than liberty? “Better red (or whatever) than dead?” Better to have government snoops monitoring your calls, emails, etc., than… than what, exactly?

Even if you agree with Hobbes that humans left to themselves would revert to base, aggressive, instinctive behavior, you may still also hesitate to agree that the only corrective for this condition is an all-powerful and authoritative central state. You may prefer not to concede the mechanistic, material model of humans as incapable of changing, of choosing to become more kind and compassionate, less fearful and selfish. You may hold out for a species capable of rewriting its default programming.

Speculations about human nature as inherently good or bad have always slighted the individuality of persons, absorbing it in abstractions about universal nature. We should seek instead to grasp the particularity of our separate natures. Our separate plural natures.