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.)
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.
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.
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