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.