Cosmic philosophy as anti-authoritarianism

 We are it, the vast and awesome universe. We are small creatures with capacious imagination and growing intellect and, unfortunately, residual primitive fears and hostilities we have to overcome before we can truly claim our largest cosmopolitan heritage as citizens of a cosmos. The brain may be wider than the sky but the heart of too many of us remains a few sizes too small. 

So I should clarify the cosmic/humanist philosophy I was celebrating in that last post. We're not insignificantly minuscule by birth, but neither are we vested with importance by pedigree. We bear tremendous potential. That means we have it in us to do something on a cosmic scale. Or not. 

”We are the custodians of life's meaning," so far as we can tell. That's quite a responsibility. It's not yet an achievement. "If we crave some cosmic purpose then let us find ourselves a worthy goal,” was Carl's anti-authoritarian instruction at the end of "A Universe Not Made For Us."

Do something, humanity, don't just (as WJ always said) "lie back." Don't rest on some falsely-imagined lineage of inherent essential grandiosity conferred by divine descent. "This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication." (Pragmatism VIII) Respect. Don't emulate.

In A&P we're surveying 'isms tangential to atheism, some on my view salutary--humanism, naturalism, pragmatism--and others decidedly not--parochialism, racism, sexism, nationalism, geo-centrism, chauvinism. 

The docile passivity of waiting for meaning and purpose and importance to rain down from heaven or some more proximal potentate is beneath us. That reeks of authoritarianism. We can do better. Or so we'll see.

This is us

 The conversation in A&P took a pleasantly unexpected turn yesterday when I was asked what had led me to my view that humanity is not so insignificantly minuscule after all, in the ever-expanding vastness of space-time. "Look again at that dot. That's here.That's home. That's us..."

 

The question was pleasant to me because I never get asked it, though I've endlessly shared the observation every semester when speaking of "cosmic philosophy" and recalling my adolescent delight in first discovering Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection back in the day. 

We are a "transitional animal," I read, and that makes us part of something so much larger and potentially better than we've yet imagined. That's when I really began pondering the evolutionary epic that is everybody's story, and that led me eventually to philosophy.

"The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.” Right, I thought. We are it.

But that's not what I said in class yesterday. I surprised myself, pleasantly again, by citing a later moment of clarity when I first encountered the Belle of Amherst's poem.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

... Emily Dickinson

 

I might also have mentioned Eric Idle's Mrs. Brown, who I discovered at about the same time in the '70s and who also helped clarify my peculiarly hybridized brand of humanism. Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour... 

And hang on tight.

 

Believing-muscles

We're wrapping up Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction today in A&P. 

It emerged last class that I'm using the 2d edition, just out, while others have the 1st. Not a big deal, but since it dates all the way back to 2003 they're missing a few emendations. There's a fresh discussion of the New Atheists, for instance, who of course are not so novel anymore. 

And I'm missing the old autobiographical start to chapter 1, in which the author charitably described his own childhood exposure to Roman Catholicism in "a gentle, benign religious environment" by non-"Bible-thumper" parents and teachers who were not "anything other than kind." He says he later "moved over to Methodism" before eventually landing in atheism. He believes there is no God. But he bears no grudge against those who believe otherwise. It's a nice beginning. I wonder why they removed it.  

Maybe this line from Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll (who would be 190 today) is pertinent to that editorial decision. It's definitely pertinent to our impending CoPhi discussion of ancient skepticism. 

“If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things.”

But you've got to believe something, and even the most skeptical atheists do. They believe, affirmatively, that there are no gods. That's something, right Pyrrho? Well, he's not saying. He's like Douglas Adams's hyper-skeptic in the Hitchhiker's Guide (Restaurant at the End of the Universe), the Ruler of the Universe, whose cat he calls the Lord...

Lessons Learned

 In Bioethics we're reading, in Michael Lewis's The Premonition, of the pandemic planning task force hastily assembled in 2005 by Rajeev Venkayya, a young White House staffer tabbed by George W. Bush to head the "Biodefense Directorate" of the Department of Homeland Security. (What odd names for agencies of the U.S. government, they somehow sound more suited to the old U.S.S.R.)

Bush, it may surprise some of us to learn, had read a book. Or at least had read the portions of a book that staffers had highlighted for him, pointing out the country's state of utter unpreparedness should anything like the influenza pandemic of 1918 ever be repeated. If it happened on his watch his presidential legacy would suffer. On the heels of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, WMDs in Iraq (not), et al, that got Dubya's attention.

Venkayya's first hire was a Vandy grad named Richard Hatchett, who left a promising path towards a career in poetry for med school. "Writing is too hard." He gave us "social distance" as we've come to know it today, not knowing its anthropological significance as a kinship marker or its track record from 1918. "I just didn't know any better." Pandemic planning turns out to be hard, too.

Then came Dr. Carter Mecher, a Chicagoland native whose father encouraged his medical path: "If some other dumb fuck can do it, so can you." Thanks, Dad.

"Very few medical students shared his enthusiasm for human beings on the brink of death." He sounds like a soulmate for the Santa Barbara public health director Charity Dean, who we read in the previous chapter used to soothe herself in childhood reading and thinking about the Bubonic Plague.

Dr. Mecher is quite right, it's good to learn from our mistakes but "best to learn from other people's mistakes."

And what great lesson has he learned about how people do and do not learn hard lessons? "The gist of it was that people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek..."

Right! And since it's time for us to begin thinking about midterm report presentation topics I urge you all, classes, not to wait for me to impose on you. Take a glance at the syllabus for February and freely seek the subject you can't wait to share. If some other !@#$%! can do it, so can you.

The polls are open

 Today in CoPhi, inspired by all those philosophers (especially Agnes in Chicago) who love to ask their questions on Twitter, I'm running a poll. Hoping we'll discover interesting differences amongst ourselves, as regards our respective understandings of "Socratic," to discuss in class. 

If it goes well, we'll do it again. Maybe we'll do it in Atheism and Bioethics too. In fact, classes, I'm open to your suggestions: what relevant queries would you like to pose for your classmates in an informal and non-binding plebiscite? 

Who was more Socratic? #CoPhilosophy

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) January 24, 2022

Breathe and pay attention

“Don’t pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.” 

Henry was telling his friend Edith Wharton to write what she knew, to attend to and describe what she most directly encountered. Great advice, which I've also heard from another Henry and from the late great Buddhist sage Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Unlike his brother the radical empiricist,  Master of prolix fiction probably wouldn't concede that sometimes, oftentimes, words are superfluous. It's odd how often we must remind ourselves: just breathe, just behold. 

What a sky, just before dawn. So glad I’ve not lost my “subscription ticket to morning time in this world.” And glad for the reminder from HDT and TNH to be here for it. pic.twitter.com/psQS2OfRP7

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) January 24, 2022

The Premonition

We commence reading our Bioethics texts today with Campbell's Basics and Lewis's Premonition: A Pandemic Story. Michael Lewis says "Trump was a comorbidity" of the pandemic. That's one of the nicer words I can think of, for him. But Lewis is right, the previous occupant's mismanagement, dishonesty, and lunacy are only a part of the COVID story.  

The story begins with Laura Glass, a prescient middle schooler in Albuquerque whose scientist dad taught her that "science was this tool for finding cool new questions to ask, and answer" and who came to understand what so many of our nation's nominal leaders did not: that there's "no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network," the result in each case being a halt the the spread of infection.

The story continues with Charity Dean, the young chief public health officer for Santa Barbara County in California with a passion for communicable disease and crisis who persisted in doing her job despite stiff resistance from misogynists, sexists, male chauvinists, and other health obstructionists. In childhood, "when she was feeling low, she had cheered herself up by reading books on bubonic plague." When she learns that the fine print of her job description empowers her to take whatever measures she deems necessary to block the spread of disease, the drama begins

Our stage is set for a compelling story, made all the more so by the fact that it's true. I foresee another Lewis-inspired film.

Speaking and listening

 It felt good to get back in the classroom yesterday, though I was feeling talked out and a bit sore-throated by the end of the day. Obvious remedy: talk less, listen more. 

And so I responded affirmatively to the student who emailed later to ask if I was familiar with the work of Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, aka Richie Alpert, who said “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” True. And that was indeed a message I tried to convey on Opening Day, that the collaborative form of philosophy I hope to foster in our classes involves just that willingness to listen as well as speak. I need to practice what I preach.

Richie's obit describes him as a "peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities," but I don't think he was quite my style of peripatetic. Or Aristotle's. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try to hear what he might have to say. "Be here now" is a wonderfully pithy piece of wisdom. If we do that in class and really attend to one another's contributions, not leap to dismiss what sounds unfamiliar or uncongenial, we might learn something. 

Richie eventually learned something his pal Tim Leary, who turned on, tuned in, dropped out, orbited the planet for  a few years and then literally crashed and burned, apparently did not: "He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies..."

I hope we have some of those this semester too, in and out of class. Listening respectfully will help. But as William James knew, philosophers also must speak. They must fire their volleys of vocables from their conceptual shotguns, and the honest among them also know that only a few of those volleys will approach their targets. 

Truth and fact do well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. But words are our medium and currency, so another of my Opening Day messages was that we've got to speak up if we're going to be any decent kind of CoPhilosophers. And pay attention to our peers.

Words are also, said the poet, a powerful and amazing drug when judiciously dispensed. Getting the dosage right is a challenge, but a worthy one. Let's drop in, and let's converse.

Opening Day!

LISTEN. Another semester's Opening Day is upon us. Deja Vu all over again. It's cold out there, as they say day after day in Punxsutawney PA. After so many of them, I (like Phil Connors) should be able to get it right. 

Getting it right is pretty easy, on Opening Day in CoPhi, Atheism, and Bioethics. We just talk about who we are and why we're here, and we prepare to ask and address lots and lots of other questions. 

Questions like: What is philosophy? What is wisdom? What is the status and importance of truth (and facts, and reality) in our country and our world? How does the world think? Why do so many of us think it's okay to believe whatever we feel like believing? Why do so many have so cavalier a disregard for the health and well-being of our peers? Why do so many choose to live in Fantasyland?

And is it true, as an old prof of mine liked to quote Martin Heidegger, that "only a god can save us now?" 

Or was Carl Sagan right: there's no sign that help is coming from any external quarter to save us from ourselves?

I choose, as a humanist and meliorist, to look on the bright side. Let's co-philosophize and see if we can't improve our situation. Or at least do no harm.

I'll leave it there, for now. I don't want to presume that any of us has all the time in the world.

Don't panic

 Well here we go again, the start of another pandemic-shadowed semester in a state whose legislators insist on our absolute persona freedom from responsible and prudent action in service of the public health and general well-being. 

A story in the Times yesterday quoted the old Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee, now at the helm of the University of West Virginia.

“I think there is a rush to do something immediate, and that kind of is a panic push, which I don’t like,” he said. “We’ll never go back to where we were, those days are done. This is what life is about. We have the Omicron, we have the Delta, next year when you and I take a flu shot, we’re going to take it with a dose of Covid vaccine.” Some Colleges Loosen Rules for a Virus That Won’t Go Away

I'm triple-vaxed myself, but I've never had a flu shot. Does that have to change now? Whatever. Just don't panic. (And don't address students, as one arrogant, profane, and benighted history prof in Michigan did, as "vectors of disease"-!)

Our Provost sent around our marching orders, reminding us that in Tennessee we cannot require masks in our classrooms or send anyone out for exhibiting alarming symptoms. But, "run your classrooms as you see fit within the boundaries set by good sense and the rules of the University." Ha ha ha.

The Covid affliction is one health crisis we're still having to deal with, another--which it has doubtless had much to do with exacerbating--is the emotional strain and angst so many students say they're suffering these days. Eric Idle, the Python, offers this sound philosophical counsel to all who find themselves feeling blue (not to be confused with True Blue).

@bodonadam: i'm a sick guy (long term) and i've been feeling rather melancholy lately, ive just turned 30. any words of wisdom/advice, if you have time, @EricIdle? maybe a reading or music suggestion? I usually love making and listening to music.

Yes. You’re alive. You’re going to die. Don’t waste any time. That’s what George would say. Be alive! Live each day to the best of your ability. With love and kindness. I have a Reading Blog if you want reading advice. All music is better than none. Good luck.

 Couple this with what he once sang to Mrs. Brown, and you should be fine.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving... all evidence to the contrary. And good luck.

Militant meliorsts: to the barricades!

 Nice resumption, after a holiday hiatus, of my weekly Meliorist Movement Meetup on Zoom yesterday afternoon. We're a small but motivated advocacy group, and thanks to my comrade we have a logo, a line of apparel, combat gear, and a reserved domain name. Aux barricades ! 

  

Meliorists of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our fatalistic indifference to a world in steep decline. What do we want? Gradual but persistent improvement. When do we want it? ASAP. 

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight... Be not afraid of life," faithful fighters... William James, Is Life Worth Living?

In the mud with the earth of things

 One of the things Rorty's critics in the ranks of academic philosophy seem to find most galling about his stance is what they perceive as his disrespect for their discipline, the suggestion that philosophers are no more or less capable of addressing our big questions about god, freedom, mortality, truth etc. than (say) literary critics. His last appointment at Stanford, after all, was in comparative literature.

I have no problem with Rorty's literary affinity, and unlike some of my colleagues I find nothing deflating about the link to literature. A sympathetic peer yesterday referred approvingly to the Rortian notion that philosophy is "in the mud" with literary (and other) studies, reminding me of a recent exchange in which we agreed that fiction often exceeds formal philosophy in its relevance and probity. Richard Powers's Bewilderment is a good example. (Thanks for the Shakespeare & Co. link, AC, I'll listen as soon as I can tear myself away from Five Questions... Still trying to answer #5. What am I afraid of?) 

So I reminded my sympathetic peer:

As noted here recently, being "in the mud" with literature is not a bad place for a pragmatic philosopher to be. Better to describe it, though, as WJ did, as being in touch with "the earth of things" rather than enchanted by "the glories of the upper ether."

But to be clear, a Jamesian pragmatic pluralist has no quarrel with those who entertain enchanted ethereal dreams and fantasies. Each room on the pragmatic corridor has its own claim to occupancy. Those who refuse to maintain contact with the earth of things, though, are neglecting our most vital question* concerning the future of life. The increasingly near, increasingly imperiled future of this world.

*The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in 'the seat of authority' that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will pragmatism often seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. It will seem so much sheer trash, philosophically. But life wags on, all the same, and compasses its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think that philosophic protestantism will compass a not dissimilar prosperity. Pragmatism, Lec. III

Truth's authority

…Authoritarians don't just want to control the government, the economy and the military. They want to control the truth. Truth has its own authority, an authority a strongman must defeat, at least in the minds of his followers, persuading them to abandon fact, the standards of verification, critical thinking and all the rest. Such people become a standing army awaiting their next command. —Rebecca Solnit

A question for Rortians: does truth have its own authority? 

Jamesians think it has, but they too think you cannot divine it by appeal to something eternal. Truth's authority, for a Jamesian pragmatic pluralist, flows from its affinity to the facts and reality as discerned to apply in the case at hand. The truth about January 6, or climate change, or the pandemic, or whatever, requires honest attention to what happened, is happening, and is reasonably projected to be likely to happen. "Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events."

Do Rortians understand this in the same way Jamesians do? 

I used to be sure they did not. I'm not quite so sure, now.  I'm going to see if I can get clear on that between now and Chicago in February...

Stand and shout

LISTEN. Celebrated those birthdays (a collective 245) with sushi and cake last night. And now the holiday season is really over, for a few weeks. And for a few weeks I again get to be the numerically-younger spouse. She really doesn't want to hear that, but as Senator Baker used to say: truth will out.

It was a nice commemoration of WJ on twitter yesterday, at Jeffrey Howard's instigation. 

I appreciate his retweet of what I finally decided is my favorite WJ quote, wherein he derides his own "childish idiocy" for dreading to die before "settling the universe's hash" in one more book. This may be the most binding thread between James's pragmatism and Rorty's successor neo-version: a resolute refusal to take the philosophical enterprise any more or less seriously than any finite and fallible human project deserves. It is, after all, the most sublime and the most trivial of pursuits, this compulsive impulse to formulate truths. 

The philosopher's version of Keats's negative capability is surely the ability to hold the sublimity and the triviality steadily in mind together, and to be ready at all times to call oneself out for thinking the cosmic hash can ever really be disturbed. And yet we must create a disturbance. That's what pragmatists think thinking's for. We sit in uncertainty, and stand up to make a stab at progress. Not to stand before we sit down to write, as Thoreau said, is vanity. It's right up there with childish idiocy.

WJ's next paragraph, after the sublime-and-trivial observation, declares "the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments." And that brings me to my latest podcast obsession, Kieran Setiya's Five Questions. 

I hope there will be another season, every episode I've binged so far has been excellent. [UPDATE: just learned there will be, at @KieranSetiya.] Each is a conversation with a contemporary academic philosopher, each begins with the question of how the  philosophers perceive the connection between their temperament and philosophical commitments. Kieran attributes the question to Iris Murdoch, who also thought it important to ask philosophers what they're afraid of. 

Philosophers who don't know their own temperament, or who don't think temperament relevant, seem to me to betray a shocking absence of fundamental Socratic self-knowledge. 

I really like Cheryl Misak's answer to the fear question. She's afraid of the same things we all should be afraid of, things like the anti-democracy surge we've witnessed in recent years around the globe and especially in the U.S., and the climate crisis, and injustice, etc. 

But of course the point of fear, for a pragmatist, is to invigorate a propitious response. Don't just sit there. Stand. Face the fear, fix what you can. You may not settle the universe's hash but at least you will have engaged with it, in a way Misak says philosophers generally haven't for twenty years or so. She notes that WJ used to "shout" at his peers for their disengagement from the public sphere. Childish idiots.

WJ at 180

 Happy 180th birthday, WJ. Happy 65th, SCR. 

The dance of common sense is more supple than most commentators, in and out of academia, trying to grasp what James meant when he said truth is what it is better for us to believe. But I've come to think it best to overlook the flat-footedness of some neo-pragmatists' glibness on this topic. There's far more depth and import in WJ's philosophy than is dreamt in most interpretations of his delineation of what it means for a philosophical view to "work" and successfully guide our experience. 

Some of my favorite WJ quotes: 

"Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament."--Letter to Schiller 

"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf." --Will to Believe

"The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights." Pragmatism III

I try to overlook the sloppiest glosses of WJ on truth. He didn't flatly declare it to be whatever is useful for a person. Common sense dances better than that. But he'd appreciate Linda Pastan's poem. "Why not
live each day as if it were the first," indeed. https://t.co/YO8FGQQwkq

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) January 11, 2022

Happy William James Day, friends.

The great pragmatist philosopher and father of American psychology was born on this day in 1842. Midway through a re-reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience, I will also spend some time with his letters today.

A hagiographic thread. pic.twitter.com/DYmxSzOSbU

— Jeffrey Howard 🐿️ (@Jeffrey_Howard_) January 11, 2021

Truth-ism?

LISTEN. Time to get back in the saddle. All holidays, moral and otherwise, must end.

For the record, I have been up at dawn every day through this winter-break interregnum, faithfully reporting to a journal whose circulation, unlike Henry's, shall in all likelihood remain exclusive to its author. 

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

There was something pleasantly liberating about not pushing Publish every time the sun hit my eyes, these past weeks. 

But there's also something usefully motivating about intending to do so. That's why I first started pushing these partially baked ruminations into the vast void of what we used to call the blogosphere, when I started the earlier version of Up@dawn almost thirteen years ago. I've come to regard blogging as more archival than reportorial: I post stuff so I can find it, somehow the internet is more accessible than my personal filing system. But useful motivation is also still a good thing. Whatever works, as we say.

School resumes next week, and the Chicago conference where I'm to present thoughts about pragmatism, authoritarianism, and truth is coming. I have questions. 

It's tempting to indulge the pattern-seeking impulse and add an 'ism to truth too, but my concern is really more with that form of post- or anti-truthism Colbert called truthiness. 

The big question: is Richard Rorty's posthumously-published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism the right text for our anti-democractic time? 

Or, has the fantasyland environment that’s emerged since his death in ‘07--the conspiracy-fueling I believe it because I want to dereliction of fealty to facts, reality, and truth Kurt Andersen named--so altered the philosophical landscape that we who value intellectual integrity and "the relevance of philosophy to life" must rededicate ourselves to a more robust (still a fine word, academic overuse notwithstanding) realism about facts/reality/truth than Rorty has been perceived to support? 

If the facts are the facts but the truth is what we make and say of them, is that a sufficiently robustious realism in either Rorty's terms or James's? And are those two terms, or the same?

Does the Rortian story about stories (the “truths” we make of the facts) enable the fabulists and conspiracy nuts? OR, is the anti-authoritarian emphasis EXACTLY what we need to combat them? 

And in general: is the philosophical/meta-philosophical debate relevant to the challenge of the historical moment? Should we be more focused on the neo-pragmatists' metaverse, or on Zuck’s?

Lots to chew on. Happy New Year.