Montaigne fini, pas fini

LISTEN. Time to close Sarah Bakewell's fine Montaigne bio. Our time with him for now is ended, but not finished. I think he's now in a dead heat with David Hume as one of my favorite skeptics. But I do have reservations.

For instance, if amor fati means "cheerful acceptance of whatever happens" I cannot join him in being firmly wedded to such a complacent-sounding stance. Loving one's fate, as I understand the concept, does not mean loving everything about everyone's fate and cheerfully renouncing the meliorist's mission to work for better futures all around. The tenor of Bakewell's discussion, in terms of Christian salvation, suggests a narrower focus--on one's personal fate--than pragmatic meliorists prefer. 

But if amor fati is more about renouncing impotent, debilitating, self-destructive regret for one's own past errors and fallibilities ("18. Reflect on everything; regret nothing") while still learning from them and cultivating conscientious, humane regard for others and a "willingness to leap between different people's points of view," that elicits my cheer.

The three great Hellenistic traditions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism are bound to Montaigne and bind him to so many of us, Bakewell observes, by their and our shared pursuit of eudaimonia and ataraxia. We're all just trying, just essaying, to flourish and get us some peace. 

Virginia Woolf pops up a couple of times, in Bakewell's later pages, to appreciate Montaigne's "beautiful vision of generations interlinked" and to endorse his vision of life as an aim and purpose "unto itself." It's not at all surprising that the author of A Room of One's Own should so admire the modest sage of the tower. The minds of several centuries now have been "threaded together" in an open-ended conversation with the humbly great Essayist, in a way that presages Richard Rorty's vision of philosophy as a perpetual conversation across time and place. 

And the affirmation of life as its own end echoes another Rorty theme, the repudiation of anything non-human as eligible or worthy to resolve our inescapably human problems and conflicts. There's never been a less "authoritarian" mind than Montaigne's. Hence my wish to enlist him as a pioneering humanist and primordial pragmatist.

There's one other reservation I cannot resist mentioning. 

Bakewell concludes with an image of Montaigne engaging with his cat. "They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes." And in that glance, we're to believe, he found the seed of "his whole philosophy."

In the glance of an aloof, indifferent feline. Really?

For most of us, I think, that's the wrong answer. 

But never mind. Que sais je?

n oor wot

Flattery

LISTEN. A student actually "came out" in class yesterday. As a Flat Earther. This is for him.

 

...we have video from space of the rotating spherical earth the earth is round... what's what's odd is there are people who think earth is flat but recognize that the moon is round, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the Sun are all spheres but earth is flat... Star Talk

...Eratosthenes asked himself how, at the same moment, a stick in Syene could cast no shadow and a stick in Alexandria, far to the north, could cast a pronounced shadow.... The only possible answer, he saw, was that the surface of the Earth is curved... Cosmos

Looking for Life on a Flat Earth

What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth.

...Believing in a flat Earth is hard work; there is so much to relearn. The price of open-mindedness is isolation. “It took me about four months before I could talk to someone outside the apartment about this,” Marble said during his presentation. “You’ve gotta be ready to be called crazy.” Several people described the relief of “coming out” as a flat-Earther. “You can tell people you’re gay, you can tell people you’re Christian, but you don’t get ridiculed like a flat-Earther,” I overheard one woman say. “It’s really that bad.” At the bar, I fell into conversation with a woman who was attending a real-estate conference in the hotel. She asked what my conference was about; when I told her, she doubled over with laughter. I cringed a little, protectively, and glanced around to see if anyone had heard her.

The reward is existential solace. This, I came to understand, was the real draw, the thing that could make, say, an unemployed clerical worker drive twelve hours, alone, from Michigan to Raleigh. To believe in a flat Earth is to belong not only to a human community but to sit, once again, at the center of the cosmos. The standard facts of astronomy are emotionally untenable—a planet spinning at a thousand miles per hour, a mote in a galaxy of unimaginable scale, itself a mote in the vast and expanding universe. “That, to me, is a huge problem,” Campanella said. “You are a created individual. This is a created place. It’s not an accident; it’s not an explosion in space; it’s not random molecules joining together.”

You, we, are special. “It’s like God is patting me on the shoulder, saying, ‘You deserve this!’ ” a man from New Orleans told me. He was a trucker, the son of a former newscaster, and an occasional musician. As we were talking, an older man in a wheelchair approached and, in a drawl, introduced himself and asked if we were Christians. He brought up the notion of infinite space and the lack of a creator. “How can people live with that?” he asked.

“Those people are fucking miserable,” the trucker said. “They’re so unhappy.”

(continues)

To the journey

LISTEN. In our Happiness reading today we find Montaigne audaciously telling the king that if he likes the book he must like the author. But is that so audacious? Of course books convey the core humanity of their creators. The good ones do, at any rate. Montaigne must have inspired Whitman's “This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man . . . ”

We noted of Kant, in CoPhi, that he'd never ranged further than forty miles from his native Konigsberg. But Susan Neiman reminds us what an ordeal it would have been, to traverse such "stony excuses for roads" in the 18th century. Travel must have been even more of an "extreme sport" in Montaigne's day, never knowing when you might happen upon plague or pirates.

Nonetheless, Montaigne loved "the feeling of going with the flow" and "avoided all plans." Abroad in the land he saw "everything afresh and with full attention." When's the last time most of us really did that?  I'm always astounded at fellow flyers who lower the window shades before the plane even ascends. How blase we've become about getting from A to B. 

And the daily commute is more harrowing than adventuresome. On my way to school yesterday I passed the burnt shell of a truck on I24, hoping the driver got out in time. The return trip, which I always postpone 'til 6 to avoid the worst traffic, was still intolerably dense with dangerously reckless lane-switching Richard Petty wannabes. 

I spoke with the metro bus driver outside my building the other day, hoping he'd tell me his trip had quickened since the last time I rode twenty years ago or so. It hasn't. But one of these days the stress of the drive is going to finally be too much, worth trading for a little extra transit time detouring to Smyrna and La Vergne while leaving the driving to a pro. 

First-world twenty-first century problems, right? If Montaigne could remount his horse, I can hop back in the Corolla. Today, anyway.

Montaigne aspired to a cosmopolitan identity, and accordingly sought (and gained) Roman citizenship. Nowadays you don't have to align with imperial national power, to claim such a status. You just have to renounce narrow nationalism, One of the great puzzles of this historical moment, surely, is why in recent years we've seen such a retrograde march backwards to the last refuge of scoundrels. Real patriots are at home everywhere. With enough of them we'll eventually defeat Make [____] Great Again nationalistic bluster and nonsense. 

Montaigne shared an odd attitude with Freud, when viewing antiquities and relics: first wowed, then underwhelmed. Reality always has a hard time competing with our dreams and fantasies. Analyze that, Herr Doktor Professor. Is our dreamscape too large? Or too small?

Lend ears to all and mind to none, was Montaigne's Pyrrhonian principle. Listen up, but keep an open mind. Seems a reasonable approach, but of course we want our leaders to sift the relevant evidence slowly and judiciously and then to issue a judgment and lead. Temperamental skeptics are possibly not generally well-suited for that form of pro-activity. A philosopher's better place is probably on the sidelines. Same for academics generlly. Trouble is, our "leaders" tend not to understand the value of academic detachment. Like Georgia's board of regents they're prepared to toss tenure and academic freedom.

Was Montaigne "an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher"? If you write about everything, you'll eventually philosophize. But the best philosophers, premeditated or not, understand that everything is their proper purview. The trick is figuring out which dots connect to which, and which are best left to stand alone. That's the essayists' mission. The English Montaignes, the William Hazlitts, aimed to. be "alert to everyday life as it really is." Shouldn't that be every philosopher's aim? Relevance is no accident.

In honor of the Hazlitts, here's their best line: "Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking!"

Or not.

The nectar is in the journey!

Growing up

What a fine summery weekend, with possibly the last short-sleeved dogwalks and bikerides for a while. The World Series begins Tuesday. The leaves are coming down more insistently, as the chill wind blows in. 

This is that time of year when I must repeatedly chant George Santayana's seasonal wisdom: "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." So true, as is the ensuing moral: it's a want of discipline and education that allow us to "insist petulantly on [our] random tastes instead of cultivating those which might find some satisfaction in the world." In other words, it's a lack of maturity. It's a failure to grow up and achieve enlightenment.  And that will bring us to Susan Neiman.  

She has become one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, with her gift for pith and pointed observation. To wit:

“As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.”

“One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.”

“If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.”

God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it.”

“The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it’s rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them.”

“The rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil g'r

Growing up means facing the darkness, fixing the roads, educating the children, working out our ethics on our own, not settling for deficient actuality when better possibilities loom. It also means living through growing pains, as Bruce and friends sing.

That was a nice piece about Bruce and his friend Barry on Sunday Morning. Their friendship is anchored in a shared dream of a more enlightened, inclusive, and reconciled America. It's possible. "While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.” (Matt Haig, Midnight Library)

==
LISTEN (recorded 10.20).

Today in CoPhi, if we make sufficient headway on report presentations, we'll open Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age.

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 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 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."

Today in Fantasyland we notice the precedent in POTUS 40 for 45's dangerous conflation of myth and reality, and wonder if there's any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet." Only one surefire way, apparently: log off.

And what do we think of the 80% of Americans who "say they never doubt the existence of God"? I think they need to think about it.

10.27,20

Convivial humanism

LISTEN. How to live? More suggestions today in Happiness...

9. Be convivial: live with others. 10. Wake from the sleep of habit. 11. Live temperately. 12. Guard your humanity.

Introducing children to the art of conversation, Montaigne thought, brings them out of their private worlds and engenders indispensable social graces. The graceless and rude incivility of so much of our recent public discourse would seem to vindicate that view. He was a humanist in the fashion of Kurt Vonnegut, "trying to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment" in a post-human paradise or hell. "We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it." 

Or as Kurt put it, addressing our newest humans: "There's only one rule... God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Only follow nature to be happy, Montaigne's fan Denis Diderot has a Tahitian instruct Europeans. Many of Diderot's readers would have construed that in libertine fashion, more as license than liberty . Others might hear echoes of the Stoics. I hear William James's "savages and children of nature" in his essay On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, "to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead..."

But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist.

Over-educated pessimists do abound, in the environment of my workaday world. They're lop-sided. They need to get out more.

Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows...

Guarding our humanity means that for Montaigne, as it did for James: it means staying in touch with the life and health of the body, and resisting the call of those forms of transcendence that would have us "rise above the human"... for Montaigne, recall, even on the loftiest throne we're still seated on our asses. Mustn't get beyond our raisin', as we say in the south. That's when the seductions of authoritarianism most threaten our humanity, as Richard Rorty said in his last, recently posthumously published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism.

So... convivial pragmatism is a humanism. Montaigne was that kind of humanist too.

 

Minding the gap

LISTEN. We close Warburton's Little History today and tomorrow in CoPhi, with Peter Singer's utilitarian urgency about expanding the circle of our moral concern beyond narrow speciesism and parochial self-interest.

In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, he says "one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage... one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?” g'r

One does want that, notwithstanding Paul Bloom's thesis that some "chosen suffering" enriches life. (The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning). A good life, a life of well-being, involves more than hedonistic self-indulgence. Of course. The effort to minimize the suffering of others must inevitably incur a measure of pain. Humanists like Vonnegut and Pullman ("there is a meaning, and it is to make things better & to work for greater good and greater wisdom") get that. Humanism is not a hedonism. Nor is it a variety of existentialism that treats meaning as a strictly personal object of manufacture. The greater wisdom does pursue the greater good. 

And as cousin Mary says, wisdom wastes no time in the pursuit but also understands that "things take the time they take. Don't worry." (Echo of Montaigne there.) All in good time, as my favorite Berkshires content-providers say. (Check out Trout and Coffee, if you want to go to New England in your mind.)

 We all ought to want to do all we can to reduce pain and suffering. We're more than a little distracted, though, and perturbed to have to confront the reality that most of us could do a great deal more, at minimal cost to ourselves, to improve and save the lives of countless others. This makes Singer unpopular in some quarters. But as Warburton says, Singer--like Socrates--doesn't mind being unpopular. Gadflies don't mind being considered pests. They do perform a vital public service, whether we like it or not. Fortunately for Singer, he won't be condemned to swallow hemlock. 

He's all over YouTube. Here's one of his old TED Talks, on effective altruism. Here's his Google talk on The Life You Can Save. Here's a recent New Yorker interview in which he acknowledges that he doesn't live up to his own high standards of altruism (choosing, for instance, to spend money on his elderly mother when "there could have been better things you could have done with that..."). And in this recent conversation he says we don't have to possess great personal wealth to begin leveraging our resources effectively and making a tangible difference for "the greatest number." 

He sets the ethical bar high, as did Socrates. Where else should it be?

==

 LISTEN (recorded Oct.'20)

Today (again) in CoPhi we close Warburton's Little History with Rawls's Veil, Searle's Chinese Room, Turing's Test (and Depp's Transcendence), and Singer's Effective Altruism, before opening Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. And we conclude midterm reports.

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 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 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."

Today in Fantasyland we notice the precedent in POTUS 40 for 45's dangerous conflation of myth and reality, and wonder if there's any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet." Only one surefire way, apparently: log off.

And what do we think of the 80% of Americans who "say they never doubt the existence of God"? I think they need to think about it.

Originally published 10.27.20

Behind the shop

LISTEN. In Happiness today we're on to the next batch of answers to Montaigne's ultimate question: How to live?

5. Survive love and loss. 6. Use little tricks. 7. Question everything. 8. Keep a private room behind the shop.

Montaigne's great lost love was that of his slightly older friend La Boetie at just age 32, "soon to be 33... God granted me this grace, that all my life up to now has been full of health and happiness." I'd not have been so gracious and grateful myself, at that age. 

But of course, life expectancy in 1563--even adjusted for the Plague--was not much more. Still, it's a remarkably equanimous parting judgment. Will I pronounce anything like it at 80 or 90? Hope so. My late father was full of gratitude for the life he'd enjoyed when he exited at not quite 80. I don't think genes exactly code for that, I'm going to have to continue to work on acquiring the requisite ataraxia. 

Among the tricks that enable such a shift of outlook is the epeckho, the willing suspension or "holding back" of belief. Skepticism, translated into Socratic humility, is one solid source of self-preservation. But don't confuse this with Pyrrho's willful refusal to commit, which led him constantly to refrain from action and intent. Montaigne's suspension is a way of treading lightly and being flexible, but it's not an arrested stasis. Montaigne preferred to move, in contrast as well to Descartes meditatively transfixed by the flames he said may or may not possess substantial existence. “Montaigne did his thinking in a richly populated environment…Descartes needed motionless withdrawal.”

And then there's Blaise Pascal, shrinking from the silent stars and annoyed by his peers “playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring” and generally just getting on with living human lives rather than agonizing over the ultimate fate of their souls. Montaigne the humanist approved of lute-playing (etc.), pondering and marveling at the fascinating varieties of ways to be human.

He preferred to do that while walking and riding. Much to his credit, he did climb back onto his horse, when not perambulating on shank's mare. But even the most frenetic peripatetic must eventually retreat to the safe enclosure of walls, so Montaigne ascended his tower and found “real liberty” in the unobstructed country of the mind. I go to my ramshackle Little House in search of the same mental expansiveness. One of the great things about minds is their capacity to convert literal shacks to figurative towers. 

I'll be retreating to mine shortly, apparently we're about to be visited by painters. 

A modest retreat, but my own.

Gifts & responsibilities

LISTEN. Report presentations continue in CoPhi today, and (among others) we'll consider Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt. But I'm still thinking about the Ezra Klein podcasts I binged this weekend while walking the dogs and biking in the gorgeous sunny crispness of early-Fall. Nick Offerman on Wendell Berry and the power of walking, which "foments so much creativity in me and so many of the people I admire, writers and creative heads"), Holden Karnofsky on effective altruism and future AI (etc.), Richard Powers on taking seriously the gifts and responsibilities of being alive, and more. Delightful conversations all. Happiness is suddenly having so much more to think and talk about than you'd previously imagined. 

==

Would Ludwig Wittgenstein agree? He was one odd duck. Or rabbit. Or duckrabbit. What do you see, and how do you see it? Why do you see it that way? He thought these were questions worth investigating, in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations. Proposition 7 in his pre-humous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, counseled withdrawal.  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Famous premature last words.

"Raised in a prominent Viennese family, Ludwig Wittgenstein studied engineering in Germany and England, but became interested in the foundations of mathematics and pursued philosophical studies with Moore at Cambridge before entering the Austrian army during World War I. The notebooks he kept as a soldier became the basis for his Tractatus, which later earned him a doctorate and exerted a lasting influence on the philosophers of the Vienna circle. After giving away his inherited fortune, working as a village schoolteacher in Austria, and designing his sister's Vienna home, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, where he developed a new conception of the philosophical task. His impassioned teaching during this period influenced a new generation of philosophers..."

The Tractatus said we can't speak meaningfully about our most important questions in ethics and religion (and maybe language), and so should hold our tongues. That may sound like Freddy Ayer's "nonsense," but Wittgenstein was not being dismissive, he was courting mysticism. He presumed that language fails to mirror reality because we cannot verify their correspondence, cannot faithfully and flawlessly replicate in words the facts and meanings that lie beyond them.

The Philosophical Investigations takes a linguistic turn. “The meaning of a word is its use in the language,” not its relation to something non-linguistic in the world. The uses of words are discovered and decreed in our "language games," which include but crucially are not limited to the games philosophers play about truth. Those games can get us stuck like a fly in a bottle, and he wanted to pop the cork. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

How do you avoid linguistic captivity in the first place? Not by inventing your own private language. Language is intrinsically public, and only other users of our language can call us out for the language errors we don't catch. A private language is too much like Leibniz' private monadic theaters of mind, too much like a game of solitaire played with improvised rules.

But rules presuppose other rule-followers, and language games presuppose other players. So the question is how do we break the spell of language, when it bewitches and confuses us? It's tempting to say "it's only a game," we can always play a different one. Can we? “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Won't language always hold us captive in this sense?

The Investigations thus seem to bring Wittgenstein full circle, back to the concluding counsel of the Tractatus. “So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.” I know what he means, I often feel that way when doing philosophy, and especially when watching others do philosophy. But now and then someone will say or write something that provokes an "ah-ha!" moment, and language seems less captor than liberator. Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature had that effect on many of my peers in grad school, with its proposal that the pictures holding us captive in philosophy are optional. We can just decide to give up the picture of words as mirrors? That's a game-changer.

“Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.” And vice versa. Peripatetics know this. You aren't necessarily lost, in language, you're exploring. Try another path. Start another conversation. Read another book. Write another sentence.

Hannah Arendt covered Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial for The New Yorker in 1963 ("Eichmann in Jerusalem"), finding him the very epitome of banality, "an ordinary man who chose not to think too hard about what he was doing." The banality of evil resides in the hearts and minds of heartless, thoughtless functionaries. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal." And they pay that "normality" forward, to catastrophic and tragic result. “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism has suddenly again become must-reading. "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.... The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists... one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

4.18

Montaigne

LISTEN. Today in Happiness we turn to Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

First inessential question: 

How to pronounce his name? I'm just going to go ahead and anglicize it. Mon-tane. Two syllables, no lilt or continental inflection. We're not French here in middle Tennessee, though we do sometimes add gratuitous syllables. Give him a "ye" at the end if you must. But what do I know?

That was his slogan. Or one of them. Another: ‘I am a man and think nothing human is foreign to me’... Rendered in Latin on one of the beams of his tower refuge:

 

He also said:

• Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
• Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
• No man is a hero to his own valet.
• The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. 
• On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
• I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
• When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
• If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
• There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
• Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
• The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
• Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
• Saying is one thing and doing is another. 

And so much more. 

Second question: 

What makes him a Happiness philosopher?

Short answer: 

Relatively early in life he figured out how not to worry about death, how to attend to the larger significance of small things, how to write out his frustrations, confusions, and general discontents, how to read without losing his own original voice, how to survive love and loss, how to be woke, generally how to take himself less seriously but more instructively...  He learned that we can be happy without knowing everything, or possibly anything. 

“The trick [writes Bakewell] is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.”

And he makes his readers feel like his intimate friends, thus giving essayists ever-after an indispensable insight into their craft. "The illusion of confiding in the reader alone is what essayists play on," essays master essayist Adam Gopnik. "You’re my best friend, Montaigne, like every subsequent essayist of his type, implies to his readers. By dramatizing an isolation that can be cured only by an unknown reader, the confidences come to belong to all." 

Above all, Gopnik concludes, Montaigne was the pioneer humanist without whom our modern liberal pursuit of happiness could not be imagined, let alone executed.

Here was a far-reaching skepticism about authority (either the ancients’ or the actual), a compassion toward suffering, a hatred of cruelty that we now imagine as human instinct, though all experience shows us that it must be inculcated. Montaigne, having no access to the abstract concepts that were later laid on this foundation, gives us deeper access to them, because he was the one who laid it. The liberalism that came after humanism may be what keeps his memory alive and draws us to him. The humanism that has to exist before liberalism can even begin is what Montaigne is there to show us still.

So maybe I need to add Montaigne to our A&P course next semester, as we explore all those 'isms?  

What I like most about Montaigne is that he wrote his mind, up there in that tower, and in the process found his bliss. And as we learn in chapter 4, he read a lot and "forgot most of what [he] read." I can relate.

Sic transit, wabi-sabi, and the far shore

LISTEN. Back from Fall Break and a long-overdue reunion with Older Daughter. She's in her element, has found her community, and knows where to find all the good food and fun. Plus, she lent me her high-energy pup for invigorating strolls along the LA River. It's not exactly Montaigne's strolling meditation "in the beautiful orchard" but she definitely pulled me "back to the walk"...

Back from LaLa Land, a real place with real people and real pooches. Bonded with this one, walking the LA River in Reseda. Miss you, Peach. Take care of your humans, I miss them a lot too. pic.twitter.com/5XhRQyhyeh

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 12, 2021

Today in CoPhi it's report presentations, analysts, positivists, and existentialists: Did Russell, Ayer, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus walk with dogs? Russell did. For most it's the answer (to the ultimate question, of course, about life, the universe, and everything).

Sartre, though, liked cats. 

==

LISTEN (10.'20). Our discussion of Falter and the end of the "human game" yesterday in Environmental Ethics turned to questions of meaning and its possible loss in a technologically transformed future. Todd May's Stone conversation with George Yancy does too.

...I believe, with some of the existentialists, that we're not here for any particular cosmic reason or purpose. We just show up, live our lives, and then die. This doesn't mean, of course, that I don't believe in things like morality; rather, I ground morality and values in another way... our death threatens to sap meaning from our lives. Why is this? We live oriented toward our future. Our most important engagements — career, relationships, hobbies, etc. — presuppose future development. Death would cut us off from those developments and thus some of the meaning of our engagements. And it is important to note that because we can die at any time that threat is a constant one. We live under the shadow of death.

...we must engage in forward-looking projects and engagements, because that's inevitable for almost all human beings. A life without ongoing engagements is, for most people, an impoverished one... we must try to live as best we can within the moments of those engagements. Instead of solely looking forward, we should enjoy the present of what we do in the knowledge that at any moment the future could disappear. It's a kind of stereoscopic vision that seeks to orient toward the future while immersing in the present.

I don't think that doing this is easy. For my own part, living more fully in the present is difficult for me. But I have gotten to the stage in my life where I can see its far shore much more clearly than the shore I set out from, and so I am trying to do that with greater urgency... (continues)

He's right, properly focusing a meaningful present with an altered onrushing future while retaining what's valuable from the past is a difficult balancing act. Young people who can't quite see their own far shore so vividly may feel less urgency, but this isn't just a question of personal meaning. It's existential for our species, and our life on Earth. 

On the personal front, though, May's approaching shore reminds me of Northern Exposure's radio deejay philosopher Chris Stevens. "Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon." And, you are here right now. Don't just "snuggle up to your fiber optics baby and bliss out." Connect. Chris quoted Einstein to that effect too, in a nice riposte to Ayn Randian hyper-individualist libertarianism.

“Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we’re here for the sake of others, above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends; and also for those countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by bonds of sympathy.”

We'll talk about that today in CoPhi, beginning with Bertrand Russell's youthful discovery of John Stuart Mill's father's answer to the Big Question about God and the First Cause, then consider Freddy Ayer's youthful positivistic impudence and the brush with mortality that his wife said made him so much nicer "after he died," then Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus on freedom, absurdity, and the perpetual reconstruction of what we call our human and personal natures. 

If Sisyphus was really happy, btw, he'd have had friends helping him with that rock. And he'd have taken more moral holidays, when not working from home during the pandemic. [More Sisyphus cartoons]

Among today's Fantasyland fantasies we consider the incipient early-60s counterculture of Students for a Democratic Society, the culture of gun fetishism and our epidemic of gun violence, The Force, The Pill, and our national obsession with perpetual youth. 

That last topic is a good teaser for our next read, Why Grow Up?, which we'll open after we close How the World Thinks. We're about to do that, after today's chapters on Transience and Impartiality and next time's concluding thoughts. 

The acute Japanese sensibility to the fleeting seasons is one angle on transience. Those revered cherry blossoms are magnificent, and no small part of their magnificence is due to their rapid entrances and exits. They are a natural production of performance art. And tea can teach too. "Teaism is the noble secret of laughing at yourself... the smile of philosophy." 

And take a little wabi-sabi with your tea, to enjoy "the bitter-sweet pathos of things" and find "beauty in imperfection and consolation in impermanence."

Now, maybe I'm ready to go stand in line and vote this morning. 

Precious impermanence

LISTEN. My team lost a nailbiter last night, as the Dodgers broke the tie in the 9th and took the wildcard. 

As predicted, this morning I find myself musing that it's only a game, after all, so why all the fuss? And my inner ten-year-old is having none of it. Good. I want to stay in touch with the ten-year-old. He's the one who believes, like the late Bart Giamatti in "Green Fields of the Mind," that something can be forever. The wisest of us grow out of that.

They grow out of sports. And 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.

My inner ten-year-old is tender-minded, not so tough. Good for him. His successor's got disillusion more than covered.  The kid can't wait for Spring Training. The older guy just looks forward to Friday night's Dodgers-Giants game. (And Friday morning's flight out to LA !) He knows "forever" is childhood's dream, so he's focused on the passing now. 

 

The older guy is more likely to ponder Buddhism and Stoicism, to detach from the games of life as they pass, and to enjoy the gift of the present. 

And so we close Antonina Macaro's More Than Happiness, which more than makes a case for gleaning the best of Buddhism and Stoicism (and every other wisdom tradition we can manage to partially assimilate) as we attempt to reconcile our fantasies of forever with the exigencies of the impermanent and rapidly-recedeing now. Can we accept our finitude, even embrace it and appreciate the way it elevates the game of life? Can we "cherish precious impermanent things"?

Well... as Thomas Carlyle said of Margaret Fuller 's statement that she accepted the universe: we'd better. There's really no alternative. But acceptance does not have to take the form of resignation, for a Stoic Pragmatist who eagerly anticipates the green fields of next Spring. We do survive every moment, as John Updike said, except the last one. Atomically speaking (with the Epicureans) we even survive that one too, as we might learn from Freddie the Leaf. "Freddie landed on the soft snow. He closed his eyes and went to sleep. In the tree and the ground, there were already plans for new leaves in spring." As Freddie's creator said, “Every moment spent in unhappiness is a moment of happiness lost.”

And as Macaro says, we should remember "how small the cup of human enjoyment is" and not forget to enjoy our tea. Remember with Epictetus and the Stoics too, though, when finally the cup is drained, that it's just a cup. It was never going to be forever, though its atoms persist to assume other forms.

And, as Macaro concludes, we should remember that all things -- "like cherry blossom or autumn leaves" -- must pass. Sic transit. Beautiful. 

 

Like Spring.

Talking cures (James, Peirce, Nietzsche, Freud)

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

And,

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

And,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.13.20

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

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

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

3.11.21 

Back to the garden

LISTEN. Hedonism was a report topic in CoPhi yesterday, when we spoke of the intra-Utilitarian dispute between followers of Bentham and Mill over qualities of pleasure.

It will be a report topic today too, in Happiness, when we discuss Buddhist and Stoic perspectives on our "animal and divine nature" and the meaning of human life. 

Clearly, we humans are confused and conflicted about the place of pleasure in a good life.

My own view (though not my lifestyle, I'm certainly not one to burn the candle at both ends no matter how "lovely a light" it might produce) aligns pretty closely with that of the late Christopher Hitchens:

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”--Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

We've often alluded in class to the "hedonic treadmill," and the idea that we must inevitably find ourselves inured and bored with every anticipated life-enhancing pleasure. But must we step off the treadmill and abandon life's simpler pleasures, to find real meaning?

No. Pleasure of every sort, proportionate to our capacity for varieties of experience, is appropriate for the human animal. Sensual, carnal, embodied pleasure has its place. Same for intellectual, cerebral pleasure too. And the pleasure of social solidarity. Buddhists and Stoics, in their haste to identify the sources of our suffering and impotence, can both seem puritanical and self-abnegating in their reluctance to acknowledge the range of pleasure and its rewards. 

And so, I find my Epicurean loyalties largely intact as we approach the conclusion of More Than Happiness. There's much wisdom in detachment, and on occasion even in resignation. But there's more, I think, in the commitment to simple pleasures, and to living with attentive presence in the company of friends who've also made a mission of repudiating fear and enjoying what Cousin Mary called our one wild and precious life.

Macfarlane, Mill, Darwin, Marx, Kierkegaard

It's October, a transitional month. I took my elegiac last dip in the pool before it filled again with falling leaves Friday. Time for MLB's postseason, lawn displays that frighten the dogs on our daily walks, and in just a few days Fall Break and a flight out to California to see Older Daughter. 

Jimmy Carter is 97 and still an inspiration, the anti-Machiavelli. I've learned that Charlie Brown depended on donuts. Mark Zuckerberg knows we're Fantasyland. Anthony Doerr's literary ambition is matched by his personal humility and love of libraries. The house across the street is scheduled for demolition. 

And it's time for midterm report presentations. 

==

LISTEN. Robert Macfarlane, who tweets obscure and fascinating words (for instance, one of his recent Words of the Day: “waymark” - a sign or mark placed to guide walkers along a route) and writes about the hidden dimensions of naturalistic spirituality, was on On Being yesterday. (tr/g'r)

His conversation with Krista Tippett was about a subject I don't think I've ever heard discussed before at such length and depth. It was mesmerizing. “Since before we were Homo sapiens,” he writes, “humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning.” Darkness as a medium of vision? Well, I suppose that's why I'm up and typing at 5 a.m.

Macfarlane is a peripatetic, on the surest path to naturalistic spirituality. “A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.” And, “Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.”

 

Macfarlane's The Old Ways: 

A Journey on Foot rev. by Jan Morris... Guardian

J.S. Mill was a peripatetic too. He's up first today in CoPhi.

From A.C. Grayling's new History of Philosophy -

Achieving happiness is to be done, J.S. Mill said, not by seeking happiness – 'Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so' – but by seeking the happiness of others, helping to improve mankind, or pursuing artistic or other goals ...

What I like most about Mill, apart from his pioneering feminism (“I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be..."), is his recovery from an indentured and abusive childhood and subsequent post-adolescent breakdown, at the instigation of his father James and his godfather Jeremy Bentham. They colluded in raising young John Stuart as a pressured prodigy, with an astonishing experiment in hothouse home schooling--Greek, Latin, & Euclid beginning at age three...

He read histories, many of the Greek and Roman classics, and Newton by eleven. He studied logic and math, moving to political economy and legal philosophy in his early teens, and then went on to metaphysics. His training facilitated active command of the material through the requirement that he teach his younger siblings and through evening walks with his father when the precocious pupil would have to tell his father what he had learned that day. IEP

The pedagogical/utilitarian experiment was arguably a success (if also an incursion on the personal liberty of the future author of On Liberty); but I'll bet he was going to be a world-class philosopher even if he'd been allowed a normal childhood.

He credited his recovery largely to the late discovery of music and poetry, specifically the poetry of Wordsworth.

What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence... I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis... The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. J.S. Mill, Autobiography

 

2016-11-07 | Democracy is flawed: Citizens lack knowledge and judgment. John Stuart Mill proposed giving extra votes to those with university degrees. An idea whose time has come more » 2018-02-17 | The comprehensive John Stuart Mill. He was out to combine Bentham with poetry, the Enlightenment with Romanticism, and to span the entire philosophy of his time more » More Mill @aldaily

Also today, Darwin...

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish, a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening." Carl Sagan

"If I were to give a prize for the best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter in motion on the one side, and the world of meaning, purpose, and design on the other. He understood that what he was proposing was a truly revolutionary idea." Daniel Dennett

"The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, what we're made of, it's what our life means insofar as science can answer that question." Stephen Jay Gould 

An old post:

I’ve had a lifelong obsession with an old zoologist at my alma mater, Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1966), who happens to have been my first real landlord: my parents rented rooms in his home soon after my birth, while my Dad was finishing his veterinary degree at Mizzou.

I remember him visiting our family in the years just prior to his death. He pulled dollars from my ear.

Later I’d learn of his historical importance, as one of the expert witnesses not allowed to testify at the infamous 1925 trial of John Scopes in Dayton TN.

Well, during our recent visit to Columbia, MO, Older Daughter and I rode by the place with my old roomie RD (still a Columbia resident).

And that’s what got me hunting for the little offprint of the memoir Dr. Curtis published in the Columbia Missourian in 1957, that belonged to my Dad. Found it yesterday. And, found it again this morning online: “A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie.” (The house is pictured on p.37.)

And check out the last page, where he talks about how the former university president “admitted publicly” that faculty positions were rotated among “the various Protestant denominations…” What a different world it was, not so long ago.
I’m just intrigued by the single degree of separation between myself and someone who was born in 1875, who began his university teaching career at my old school in 1901, who was in Tennessee literally alongside H.L. Mencken in 1925, and who used to entertain a little boy who would one day move to Tennessee to philosophize about things like the Scopes Trial.

Somewhere in a box I have my dad’s personal correspondence with Dr. C...

A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial
from "D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee" by Winterton C. Curtis (1956) - The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... W. C. Curtis at the Scopes Trial

2015-04-06 | Half of Americans reject evolution, the second-lowest acceptance rate of 34 developed countries. Just try defending Darwin in Kentucky more » More Darwin @aldaily

And Marx...

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today, by Louis Menand...

And Kierkegaard...

"Life must be understood backward, but it must be lived forward”

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” - why not both, not Either/Or but Both/And?

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it... Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too... This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” I think not.

But cut him some slack, he was a sometimes-cheerful peripatetic... and apparently a philosophical counselor too. How Kierkegaard Can Help Us Cope With Drumpf-Related Anxiety...

2019-05-04 | The afterlives of philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation fell almost immediately into disrepute; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, became an inspiration for “mindfulness.” Why? more » 2019-11-04 | Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer more » More Kierkegaard @aldaily

11.18.19