The value of philosophy

That was a crowded, exceptional, enlightening day. 

Picked up the first of our two visiting faculty candidates at the airport, in from Portland ME, and proceeded to crawl the first half of the way to campus in what I honestly assured him was an atypically-congested commute on I-24. Honestly atypical, I mean, in that direction at that hour. I don't know how drivers coming into the city and out again tolerate that volume of traffic, morning after morning and night after night. 

But the slower pace gave us plenty of time for quality conversation en route, which later continued in the office after he commenced his series of interviews with my colleagues, and then at lunch at the Boulevard. (Still recommend the Reuben, btw.) 

Mid-pm we and a small gathering of engaged students ambled over to Peck Hall to hear his take on "the value of philosophy," which he rightly said is demonstrated by the superior richness and probity of conversation it engenders in most devotees. 

Then to a pleasant dinner at Primrose Place, which demonstrated to him (he remarked on our drive to his hotel) that our crew seems compatible and  "cohesive"... a judgment it sometimes takes an outsider to observe. 

And then the less pleasant drive back to Nashville in pouring pooling gusting sheets of rain. When I finally pulled in under the carport I recalled something else he said during his "value" talk, that we all have an intrinsic and inchoate regard for the value of home, of place. Just as Wendell Berry says, as we'll explore next Fall in Environmental Ethics.

The whole exercise will be repeated next week with candidate #2. Sadly, for the sorrowful reason indicated below, I'll have to miss it. So I hope someone will ask about Bertrand Russell's take on the value of philosophy.

The philosophic mind, said Lord Russell, 

will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole...Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man's true freedom, and his liberation from the thraldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Thinking of oneself as a citizen of the universe, a true cosmopolitan, is (I've once again witnessed first-hand) one of the genuine consolations of philosophy -- particularly in times of personal loss and grief at the passing of a beloved fellow citizen. That value is priceless.

Grammy Dot

She was just fun. 

That's the one word you'd choose to describe her, if allotted just one, especially if you'd been around when she was playing with her granddaughters. Step-granddaughters, to be technical about it, but that's a distinction she never drew with our girls. And it definitely never occurred to them to think of her as anyone but their beloved, goofy, endlessly giving Grammy Dot.

She became my stepmom when she married my dad soon after I moved to Nashville to start grad school. I'd been away in school all during their courtship, which began not long after my parents divorced. Dad flew in to Nashville to give me the news of their impending nuptials, concerned about how I'd take it. 

She wasn't a stranger, she was the pleasant lady at the top of the street my parents had moved us to when I was just starting High School. My sisters and her daughters were friends. But I didn't really know her.

I got to know her and love her quickly enough, and over the ensuing years cultivated our common ground--baseball (her cousin was a former ballplayer, manager of the Cubs, general manager of the Mets), Mozart (I loved the piano concerti, she played them exquisitely), history (especially as related by Ken Burns), authentic St. Louis gooey butter cake, Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion (but not his politics, or mine--we knew where to draw the boundaries). 

And my dad, of course. They were a wonderful fit for each other, they both loved long (really long) driving tours of the country. They always made a point of passing through Nashville, whatever their destination. Mount Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota for the umpteenth time, the Pacific Northwest, Michigan's upper peninsula, wherever, all roads led to Tennessee. Especially after the grandkids arrived.

I'm so grateful for the visits Dot and I shared in recent years, after dad's passing, when I'd stop en route to my annual Kansas conference. She always had chocolate pie and coffee waiting. A nice ritual, a nicer memory.

Another enduring memory: Grammy Dot and the girls at the dining room table, playing cards or dominoes or some silly board game, none of them taking prisoners, locked in mock mortal combat, laughing, trash-talking, having the time of their lives.

I sent Older Daughter a postcard yesterday, with a quote from Jack London. It said simply: "I will use my time." 

Well, that she did. She answered a different call, not so wild, but what fine use she made of her time and ours. Thankfully for us, her time was more than double old Jack's. Wish it could go on and on. The lovely memory of her will go on and on with us. Thanks for the memories, Dot. You're unforgettable. You've shown us all how to go out swingin'.

 

Postscript. I've been honored with a request to share this at the funeral. Here's the preamble.

Good afternoon. I'm honored to have been asked to share a few words I've found consoling to write. 

This is a solemn occasion but, as you know, it was never easy to stay solemn around Dot for long--one of her many positive legacies. She well understood the wisdom often attributed (probably misattributed) to Dr. Seuss, don't cry becasue she's left, smile because she was here. Anyway, she's still here [❤]. But it's okay to cry. And smile. And celebrate this good life.

The feeling I find most appropriate to the occasion is deep gratitude, for all our improbable lives and today of course especially for hers. The merely-possible persons who might have been born in our place, it has been observed, outnumber the stars. We got to actually be here. With her. We are the lucky ones.

I teach (and study, and try to learn) philosophy. In my discipline we debate and discuss perennial questions like what more there may be to life and the universe than matter. Molecules in motion. Atoms and the void. Anything else? We’ve not settled that one yet. But I think the philosopher nailed it, who said:

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after...That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III

What good fortune to have known the beloved incarnation some of us called Grammy Dot.

Poet Jacqueline Berger, reflecting in her poem Why I’m Here on decades of family holiday gatherings, says it always felt like it would go on forever, that it could not be otherwise. But of course, days like this remind us, that feeling is wrong. This brief time we have together here is a gift. A treasure. 

Here, then, a few treasured memories of one of nature's better-realized possibilities...

==

Dot’s obit in the StL Post-Dispatch… Baue Funeral Home

Post-postscript, April 6. The funeral was dignified and comforting, delivering these remarks was personally consoling and therapeutic, the livestream closed the gap between Missouri and California, the other eulogists were great. And the methodist minister was a philosophy student years ago with my old classmates and friends Mark, David, and Del. Small world after all.

Achieving our country

Another long day ahead, a day when class goes well past the dinner bell and I get to meet again with the evening MALA students. But it won't be as long a day as the new Supreme Court justice-in-waiting has had to endure.

I wasn't planning to tune in to Day Two of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing, there are too many demagogues and transparently-racist vulgarians posturing and preening and trying to bring her down. Too many Ted Cruzes and Lindsey Grahams and Josh Hawleys and Tom Cottons and Marsha Blackburns. I finally turned on the captions and turned off the sound, so I'd know when it was safe to listen again.

There were just enough Cory Bookers yesterday. 

Don't ever let anyone steal your joy, your righteous pride in the perseverance of those who've overcome long odds to succeed in a society still not the promised land but, thanks to the patient labors and talents of people like Judge Jackson, is inching a bit closer.

There was a nice moment, too, when the Judge spoke of her early disillusionment as a freshman at Harvard, and the moment when a sympathetic stranger's words of encouragement meant everything. Such a contrast to the pygmy Senators who defile their office by trying (and this time failing, I am confident) to smear and defeat a great jurist and block another milestone on the road to (as we'll discuss in our "Good Citizen" class this evening) achieving our country. 

“But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in the terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.”

Richard Rorty would be pleased, when Judge Jackson succeeds we're all a long stride closer to becoming a land that actually lives up to the language of its creed. Liberty and justice for all. 

Alistair Cooke

He died in 2004, at age 95. He made more sense of America than anyone, a de Tocqueville for our time. My time, anyway. I've lost my original copy of his America, counting on Jeff Bezos to replace it shortly. His Letters are magnificent. He was a master of language but not its prisoner. He understood that words are our great bridge to one another (across the pond and across time) and to the natural universe. (He was wrong about the Big Bang, though.) A great gentleman, an unreplaceable voice, a vector of stories and (thus) experience. And thus, of philosophy. It's very nice to visit with him again.

Streams of experience

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains." 

That's Henry the natural man and transcendentalist, whose passion for the perpetual dawn is a great inspiration but whose detection of eternity eludes me. I do love to contemplate deep time and all it may yet deliver, but I really can't see through it to something sure to endure. 

It amused me to open Ed's email yesterday, just after posting "Don't ask me what time is," with a link to a short essay on the subject. James and his hero Bergson both thought hard about the perception of time in our experience, about the role of our distinctively-personal and subjective takes on experience in shaping that perception of kronos and kairos. 

The present may be specious but, in the moment, it's what we've got. We must attend to it, and to the next, and the next. Not ad infinitum, just again and again until all attention's spent. 

In other words, life as we know it is a flowing stream destined either to dry up or eventually merge with a larger sea. How adeptly and attentively we manage to dip our oars as we're carried along, we may presume, affects the quality of the day, a lifetime, maybe an epoch. 

Time lends itself to such metaphors, which convey a sense of the importance of taking experience seriously. That's been the hallmark of philosophers in the classic American tradition, but also of the best and wisest observers of the passing scene generally. 

That must be why, since I returned from the Chicago philosophy meeting, I've been so taken again with Alistair Cooke. I never really paid him much attention as the Masterpiece Theater host, but his Letters from America 1936-2004 back to Britain are wonderful dips into the streams of our experience. 

That's the rich sense of experience as attentive and not-unsympathetic encounter with an extravagant and exotic world in need of explication, elaboration, elucidation, appreciation, celebration, and constructive critique. Philosophers ought to start with that "thick" notion, not the thin deracinated conceptual shadow they too frequently find so dispensable.  

Getting up early

The great thing about getting up early, for me, is that it offers the unforced leisure to think unbidden, surprising, often-delightful thoughts and to revisit small but pleasing memories. It gives me time to read my favorite Times essayist, to rehearse my morning mantras from Marc to Henry, to snag the fleeting butterfly of the moment, and reflect on GK's daily poem. Here's today's:

Getting Up Early
by Anne Porter

Just as the night was fading
Into the dusk of morning
When the air was cool as water
When the town was quiet
And I could hear the sea

I caught sight of the moon
No higher than the roof-tops
Our neighbor the moon

An hour before the sunrise
She glowed with her own sunrise
Gold in the grey of morning

World without town or forest
Without wars or sorrows
She paused between two trees

And it was as if in secret
Not wanting to be seen
She chose to visit us
So early in the morning.

The small but pleasing memory that jogged this morning took me back to 1979, back when I used to check in each morning with Garry Trudeau. 

 

Oh, wow, indeed. Aren't words fun? They're really good at pinning, though not quite replicating, experiences and memories. They're time travelers, they're our time machines. But don't ask me what time is.

Good citizens

 What a long day that was, adding the 3-hour Master of Liberal Arts class (6-9 pm) to my usual wall-to-wall Tuesday/Thursday routine. Barely had time to bike from Bioethics to the other side of campus and scarf a Hershey bar before commencing my contribution (reprised from September) to the "Educating a good citizen" tag-team course.  

My block, "Pragmatism and the reconstruction of American democracy," looked last night at John Dewey. Next week, Richard Rorty. And of course, inevitably, lots of William James.

So what is a good Deweyan citizen? It's anyone committed to democracy, education, learning as "life itself" (not mere career prep), and willing to listen respectfully to all fellow citizens who attest the same commitment. 

My two go-to Dewey doctrines pretty much catch it. One, the ardent ambition to extend our "heritage of values" to the next generation in the expectation that they will follow suit and pay it forward ("The things in civilization we prize most..."). 

And two, that wonderful statement in The School and Society about the best and wisest parent. Same goes for the best and wisest citizen, for whom every citizen deserves equal access to public resources and opportuntity. So simply said, so sadly forgotten.

 

"Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy."

An ardently humane correspondent

 It makes the greatest sense to me, to look to WJ's letters for insight into both his personal temperament and his core philosophical commitments. Those were inseparable for him, comfortably so. Or more comfortably than for most philosophers, as he indicates in The Present Dilemma:

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises.

 We don't really write letters anymore, not like people did in James's day. If we did we'd still come nowhere near, most of us, the mark of playful delightful combined with wit and intelligence his most casual correspondence typically met. As his son said in the preface to the first abridged volume of his letters, "he could not write a page that was not free, animated, and characteristic." 

That went for missives to friends, family, and relative strangers alike. But you get the impression that no one remained a stranger to him long, or felt estranged. Even those who knew him only through his letters thought they knew him intimately, "it was plain to everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was ardently adventurous and humane."

He was already a literary charmer at age nineteen, writing to his family from school "a resume of [my] future history for the next few years... Thus: one year study chemistry, then spend one term at home, then one year with Wyman, then a medical education, then five or six years with [naturalist explorer] Agassiz, then probably death, death, death with inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously consider. This is a glorious day and I think I must close and take a walk. So farewell, farewell until a quarter to nine Sunday evening soon! Your bold, your beautiful, Your Blossom!!"

A bit florid, sure, but he's a teenager for heaven's sake. He doesn't yet know he's a philosopher and a blossoming peripatetic.

I think I too must close now and take a quick walk with the dogs before heading to school. Time is ever shorter and I can't quite joke around anymore about death, death, death.  

Tigers and children

LISTEN. We started our new read in Bioethics, Leana Wen's Lifelines: A Doctor's Journey in the Fight for Public Health, and the author's account of her mother's strict parenting in the traditional Chinese style inevitably reminded me of the "Tiger Mother" furore stirred up a few years ago by Yale professor Amy Chua.

“Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits, and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.”

That sounds like a defensible difference of parenting philosophy, until you learn that Chua (lately caught up, btw, in a campus scandal called Dinner-Party gate") at various times calls her children "garbage," threatens to destroy their favorite possessions if they aren't "perfect" piano virtuosos right now, denies them playtime with friends, tells them their only admissible activities are those in which they can win a gold medal, and on and on. 

I confess I've occasionally regretted my failure to stick with the piano lessons my parents encouraged, beyond the first couple of recitals. (I can still play Danse Macabre, or at least my fingers still "remember" the sequence of notes.)

But I've never regretted not being shamed, belittled, and humiliated by the people I loved and trusted most in the world. I've never regretted the time they allowed me to play baseball with the kids next door, rather than practice my scales for another hour. I've never regretted being treated like a free human being, respected as a Kantian end rather than saddled as a means to someone else's vicarious aspiration. I've never regretted being allowed to fail at something without being labeled a failure. 

For better or worse--no, for better I'm sure--we raised our girls under the Emersonian admonition to domineering parents everywhere: "You're trying to make another you. One of you is enough." Parental discipline is one thing, disrespect is something else. Persistent parental disrespect is abuse. Tigers can be more supportive in children's lives.

But I have to add, I'm glad Leana Wen became such a tiger for public health. 

An instinct of life

LISTEN. People like to complain about it, but I love Springing forward to DST. Afternoon stretches late into evening, our PM dogwalk requires no artificial illumination-no headlamp for me or neon rave-collars for the pooches. And the extended dark and quiet of pre-dawn, broken only by birdsong, provides the day's most peaceful and contemplative hour. 

Here I sit, sharing the peace with little Pita (her head on my lap) and big Nell (nestled into the opposite corner of the couch), pondering again the precious privilege of breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving. "Be happy for this moment," advises Omar Khayyam in this week's postcard to California. "This moment is your life." 

This life. It's our only bird in hand, which we're too quick to ignore in deference to whatever lurks uncertainly in the bush. “We realize this life as something always off its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we know to be the dawn fulfilled. In the very midst of the alteration our experience comes as one continuous fact. “Yes,” we say at the moment of full brightness, this is what I meant. No, we feel at the moment of the dawning, this is not yet the meaning, there is more to come.” 

William James wrote that, in The Knowing of Things Together, and I just reread it in the sidebar. Thanks to Jacques Barzun's dedication, noted yesterday, I'm planning to reread lots of things that remind me not to squander the moments of experience that compose this life, and the transitions and alterations that shoot out of the darkness and transform them.

I just reread this Barzun sentence: "For experience is an instinct of life, as Oscar Wilde said, and what matters is the way life is 'taken' by the experiencer."

That's right: the instinct to attend closely to our moments and extract from them all the life they offer is the source of our vitality. You could say it's our power. Our superpower. 

Barzun then says: "To know William James we go to his early letters and find there not only the quality of his power to experience, but also the germs of almost all his original ideas."

And so I shall go back and reread his early letters, to reaffirm the germ of the idea of experience as philosophy's indispensable source. Too many philosophers, I think, have lately neglected it. 

Rereading

LISTEN. Decided it was time to reread an old favorite, Jacques Barzun's 1983 A Stroll With William James. I envy that title, I've been strolling with James myself since about 1980.

I read it on publication, back in grad school; but when I first had an impulse to pick it up again a few years ago, c.2015 I think, I couldn't find it. So I hunted up a used copy online, placed my order, and then kind of forgot about it. When it arrived I plunked it on the shelf, where it's resided ever since. Until last night.

Tucked inside I found an interesting note, and an apt dedication "to the gentle rereader." I'm guessing Thom never recovered his volume. It's a good lesson for me, sitting on my own little collection of Jamesiana: hurry up, reread what needs rereading and write what needs to be brung out. 

Thom, if you’re out there I have your book. If not, maybe you shouldn’t have said “no hurry”… But maybe Mary appreciated her stroll with WJ. Hope so. pic.twitter.com/F6nfnFCVT7

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) March 14, 2022

The message

Waking to the weather I thought I left in Chicago, cold snowy and windy. 

But somewhere the sun is shining and Casey's at the bat, so it's Spring and a new dawn is breaking in my philosophy. A thaw is on the way.

That's due not only to the commencement at last of Spring Training but to something else that followed me home from the Windy City, an eagerness to get on with getting my message out. That'll require more words, and better ones, more tightly stitched. 

It'll require a more poetic touch, in the broad sense of poetry as a kind of evocative word-assisted pointing at something not itself quite verbal. I don't know if I'll get it done, but since Chicago it feels like I've turned an important corner: I've come to believe it's worth really attempting. My esteemed mentor reinforced that newfound confidence over lunch yesterday, as did my meliorist comrade later on zoom.

It's not that I think anyone is breathlessly waiting for my message, any more than William James thought (when he really thought about it) the world needed him to settle its hash. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Whitman, in August 1903,

I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be epoch-machend at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot—as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!  Letters II 

The common-sense world gets plenty wrong, of course, but my message is that it gets "experience" broadly right. That is, it understands that our conversations in philosophy and everything else of significance are not strictly about only themselves. They're about our lives, about what life is making of itself and will become, about what we take to be real and important and worth trying to communicate and pass along for the benefit of those whose experience is as yet less extensive and hard-won than our own. 

John Dewey was not making an abrupt linguistic turn when he said the things we value most are the residue of the "doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link"; he was talking about experience. He wasn't talking about talking.

So my message, not epoch-making or hash-settling but simply something I think needs (as Goober told Andy) to be brung out, is: we must not casually deride or dismiss experience in philosophy. We must not stop talking about it, but neither should we stop having and valuing and learning from it, and transmitting the best of it as the conveyance of that "heritage of values" we hope may be our most useful legacy. 

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A Common Faith

A small price

The MLB lockout is over, and I'm at once happy--for the arrival at last of the feeling of Spring that normally comes to me when "pitchers and catchers report" to Florida and Arizona in mid-February--but also disquieted by the ease of my own sudden shift of gears. 

Yesterday I felt (or said I felt) annoyed indifference to the squabble of billionaire owners and millionaire athletes that sullies the purity of the beautiful game of my childhood every time their "working agreement" expires. The game has less than nothing to do with anything that matters. To hell with them all.

Today I just can't wait to hear the crack of the bat from Scottsdale and Jupiter, to learn the latest on Freddie Freeman and the other free agents, to follow "my team" from April to October. (Or is it November, with the expanded playoff scheme?) Will they sign Albert for a career-capping curtain call as DH? Can they land a better closer? Will the birds soar this year?

Why do I care? Why should I?

The first question's easy to answer: I care because I started to care as a kid in 1967, when the Cards topped the Red Sox in a thrilling World Series. I was hooked for life. Hope sprang eternal every spring.

The second is more complicated. I'm going to think about it, in hopes of coming up with something interesting to say on the subject when my annual Baseball in Literature and Culture conference re-convenes in Ottawa (KS) in July. I'm thinking it must have something to do with our need to care about something not so fraught with doom and devastation as a pandemic and a brutal unnecessary war on civilians. It must have something to do with our need to have "the world" not so much with us.

For now, though, I'll just go with Roger Angell's answer. Again. 

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

“Our job”

LISTEN. Finished the library book I decided not to buy, when that Moleskine caught my eye. May have to go back and get it.

Rebecca Solnit's Orwell is a flawed but emboldening secular saint, an imperfect meliorist whose commitment to liberty, honest language, and the quotidian surface delights of this earth could not be more timely. The resemblance of this concluding passage to that James line I like to quote about how "the earth of things" must "resume its rights" is striking.

"The antithesis of transcendent might be rooted and grounded, and Orwell was attached to the ordinary joys and pleasures and the love of the things of this world and not the next. He wrote another one of his credos in the essay: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings." That is, he saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering and one's own flaws and others as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included. The commitment to the things of this world could also be the focus of a spiritual discipline, a willingness to sacrifice, and a warmth he saw Gandhi as lacking. In some sense, perhaps his unsaintly martyr Winston Smith became fully human through his misadventures, and his recognition of the beauty of the washerwoman was part of that, a new capacity to see imperfect and unidealized beauty. "Our job," Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, "is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have." He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there."
…
"The work he did is everyone's job now. It always was."

— Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit

Snagging butterfly moments

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone." 

That observation by Bloomsbury luminary Vita Sackville-West (on her birthday) has long inspired me, and may have tipped the subconscious scale for me yesterday afternoon at Parnassus. Younger Daughter and I were there, spending my birthday gift certificate. It came down to either Orwell's Roses or yet another Moleskine. 

I went (yet again) for the tabula rasa, recalling how effective the dog-themed New Yorker blank book she gave me for Christmas has been in motivating me to log and reflect on all our daily dogwalks. You really can't have too many fancy notebooks, if you want to capture those butterflies. 

They don't have to be fancy, I have drawers and boxes full of cheap little Mead pocket notebooks and post-it scraps and other random net-grabs. But the Moleskines are special. This one will reside alongside the dogbook on my desk and demand another entry or two daily. 

Before we left Parnassus for Donut Den, another certificate to spend, we made a point of lingering for a moment in the spot next to poetry where on Sunday we saw Dolly and her collaborator talking about writing. Can't hurt to try and tap some of that creative energy too.

There were other stops along the way. Whole Foods, to return Mom's amazon rejects. Grace's Plaza to renew auto tags (mission not accomplished, the kiosk was broken and the line was too long). That quirky store across from Whole Foods with the Schitt's Creek merch. Starbucks. Trader Joe's. Our first Father-Daughter Day in quite a while. Small memorable moments now snagged. Gone, not forgotten.

Bread and roses

Rebecca Solnit's "In Praise Of" chapter in Orwell's Roses, from my Spring Break leisure-reading list, includes this spirited defense--echoed yesterday in the Times by Margaret Renkl--of our "right to live, not simply exist."

If roses represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable, the struggle for them is sometimes not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush their workers but against other factions of the left who disparage the necessity of these things. The left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others suffer, and somewhere others will always be suffering. It’s a puritanical position, implying that what one has to offer them is one’s own austerity or joylessness, rather than some practical contribution toward their liberation. Underlying all this is a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures and beauties are counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned. Would-be revolutionaries often argue that only the quantifiable matters, and that human beings should be rational creatures content with what should matter and fit into how things should be, rather than what does matter and how things are. The roses in “bread and roses” constituted an argument not only for something more, but for something more nuanced and elusive—as Rose Schneiderman put it, “The right to live, not simply exist.” It was an argument that what makes our lives worth living is to some degree incalculable and unpredictable, and varies from person to person. In that sense, roses also mean subjectivity, liberty, and self-determination. Orwell's Roses

It's a misdirected solidarity with suffering humanity NOT to smell the roses while we can. And, it's a hopelessly confused "utilitarian" who scorns pleasure and happiness in favor of bread (here symbolizing mere survival). Take that bread, says Solnit's next chapter, and make buttered toast. Live a little. Enjoy life's little breaks. That's no betrayal of suffering humanity.

beauty for today, hope for tomorrow

Spring Break

 We were intending to come back to Arizona again this week, having so enjoyed Spring Training 2020 (until March 13), but players and owners have failed to negotiate a working agreement. So we're safe at home, the mid-TN weather has been fine, and professional sports is more than dispensable. Gonna enjoy the break.

www.azsnakepit.com

Sub specie boni

In the penultimate paragraph of William James's Talks to Teachers, he implores us to view our pupils--and life--under the aspect of good. Accentuate the positive, as der Bingle crooned, eliminate the negative. Affirm rather than negate. More colloquially: look on the bright side, keep on the sunny side, enjoy the glass half full. 

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good.

(He also offers terrific advice on how to build character and resolve, how to replace bad habits with good, how to access our "inner springs of joy," and substitute "the morning sun and air and dew" for the more debilitating daily intoxicants. I'll remember that last bit for the next time I must reflect upon prolonged surgically-necessitated abstinence.)

Well, I tried to relay that Jamesian/Spinozist wisdom to my teaching colleagues yesterday afternoon, when we convened to narrow our short list for a new Bruce in the philosophy departmnent. (My top two were actually Sheilas.)

We began with over a hundred applicants, I noted, now we're each down to five. They're all good. You don't play in the Series or the Super Bowl if you're not. So how about we make a positive case for our preferences, and see if that doesn't suffice to create consensus? Let the nattering nabobs of negativism go low, let's take the high road.

Nice try. It met with immediate resistance. Nyet. No no no. We must chip away at any shining armor in sight, knock them off their pedestals, persuade ourselves that no one is truly worthy of admission to our club.  Maybe we'll bestow begrudging grace on one or two survivors.

Score another win for "philosophy," another loss for positive experience.

And when the dust cleared, my top two had been dispatched.

The good news: we'll be inviting my third and fourth to campus. Coulda been worse. 

Coulda been a kinder, gentler process of deliberation too.

"Humanism first, atheism second": Philip Kitcher

 Today's poem, from Emily, is pretty direct. It opens with an apparent declaration that turns out to be misdirection. Going to Heaven! But then, in the last stanza, I'm glad I don't believe it...

For it would stop my breath,
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

She's earthbound and proud of it. So are the loved ones who've gone on before her earthbound, literally. Tucked under. Sown in leaves of grass, as the other great gray poet of demos put it.

 But she's also glad, for the sake of their temporal happiness, that they did believe they'd be going up and out on wings of angels. 

On my reading, that makes Emily a candidate for the secular humanism and a soft atheism Philip Kitcher models. We're about to pick up his Life After Faith in A&P, which opens with a nod to Willy James's repudiation of "fervent unbelief": He believes in No God and worships him.

Kitcher is Dickensonian and Jamesian in rejecting belief in god and heaven personally but defending it for those who find a value for life in it. That's friendly atheism, and perhaps some would call it tender-minded. I just call it civil and pluralistic. Also melioristic, insofar as such beliefs release in many their best constructive energies for making this earth better while they can.

Kitcher conversed a few years ago with the late Notre Dame philosopher and Stone curator Gary Gutting about these issues, making the case for soft atheism. 

The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice...

 Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both...

To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world. 

Sounds a lot like the views of another Gary I know, whose refined Methodism strikes me (like the best  Pragmatism) as a humanism too.

This conversation, like so many in the late lamented Stone series, exemplifies moral dialogue at its best. It's what Kitcher meant when he said recently, speaking of his new book Moral Progress, that "the source of moral authority is collective," not coercive or supra-human. 

And it shows that "listening to one another is incredibly important." That means listening to one another's words as well as to our hearts.

That's what

"The happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing," in the Jamesian way, means shutting up and listening not to words but to the rhythmic interpenetration of one's specific nature with the rest of nature. The occupational resistance of the chattering classes, especially the professorial branch thereof (lately rivaled by social media and the twittering classes), to such wordless silence is what so exasperated James and led him to declare:

“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. . . . In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” VRE XVIII

A point-of-view gun, the one that gives its victim a fleeting glimpse of the assailant's interior life, would be so much more constructive.

Philosophy is by its nature "talkative and explicit," where nature is mostly mute and inchoate. It's wonderful that our corner of nature has fomented words, but we must remember that it's just a corner. The universe is so much richer, so much more extensive and uncharted. The limits of language are not the limits of the mysterious and beckoning world we've not yet explored. 

Teachers don't generally perceive the wisdom of this insight, since no institution will employ us to conduct classes the way John Cage composed 4'33"-nor would we want to, in our boundless garrulity. We really like to talk. 

But some of us are also impressed by that glimmer and twinkle of living perception, in whose vague but shimmering sparkle we find ourselves struck temporarily silent. We're then given to eruptions like this, especially late in a semester:

"What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." 

It gave me the greatest satisfaction in Chicago the other day to share that statement with my pedantic peers, and then Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe's complementary POV in The Sportswriter.

Real mystery, the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away-live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . .”

I started teaching at 23, stopped at 32, started again at 41, and now at 65 don't plan to stop just yet. But I do intend to spend my terminal teaching time defending Frank's "lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder"... defending experience against the invasive/reductive form of philosophy that disvalues it. That'll be my spiritual/academic last act.

Poetry is a worthy ally in this battle. Rorty seems to have begun to grasp this, when he said late in life that he wished he'd spent more time with it. I wish he had too, and that we'd had an opportunity to watch him take another "turn"--an alinguistic turn, not renouncing verbiage but acknowledging its larger context in life. One good turn deserves a better.

I'll try, in mounting my own late defense of experience, to erect no monumental explanations woven only of words. As WJ said, the best an honest philosopher can do in this regard is point to the that of life. Each of us must fill out the what for ourselves. 

That's what experience means.

Our moment

 Flying home Sunday morning I opened Philosophy as Poetry. (My random earbudded seatmate was also reading an actual book. That's exceptional nowadays, in my limited flight experience.)

Rorty's old student Michael Berube says in the Introduction that he saw philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." That's hopeful and happy and melioristic, especially if our conception of what it means for humans to be humane includes the classic virtues of honesty and humility. 

Dishonest and arrogant creativity, as we've been seeing demonstrated more and more in the fifteen years since Rorty left us, leads to lies and heartbreak. I'm sure he'd not approve. I'd like to think he'd say the baby in the bathwater of misdirected empiricism is a more radically attentive commitment to acknowledging what actually happens, and doesn't, in our experience. That's the baby we've got to save and nurture and grow.

What I liked best about that book was the afterword by Rorty's widow Mary.

HE READ A LOT, THAT MAN. HE STARTED EARLY, AND he kept it up. Seeing where it took him, it’s easy to suspect that he persisted in philosophy after his (very) early years at Robert Hutchins’s University of Chicago because, of all possible majors, it was the one least likely to restrict the range of things he could justify reading. But he read not just out of antiquarian affection for the best that has been thought and said—but also with constant attention to the implications of what he read for our time, our moment in history. And he read—and wrote—because of his conviction that words matter, that our language is our world, and that by our words we can change our world...

"Dangerous women read," said the airport souvenir I almost brought home for wife or Younger Daughter (who was happy instead to have the Cubs decal for her rear window). Dangerous anti-philosophers too. And poets. Anyone who reads with constant attention to the implications for our time is going to have to notice that the most dangerous humans do not read, do not reflect, do not promise to ameliorate our world for the better. 

I think they're also going to have to notice that there's more to our world than our language. The right words can change our world. The wrong ones will doom it. And the tradition I favor, which seeks the tonic release of nature, helps the best philosopher-poets mark the difference.

Richard Wilbur was one of those. It's his birthday. I'll bet Rorty, late Rorty anyway, would have agreed with him: “I would feel dead if I didn’t have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.”

I agree with him. I also agree with Thoreau that we need some wildness in us, with Emerson that it is possible to experience a great exhilaration merely "crossing a bare common," and with James that sometimes it's best to "think of nothing and do nothing."

And then write about it. And then do something, with attention to the implications for our moment in history.