Substack test post

Will it travel to the old blog?
http://dlvr.it/SrTjJW

Substack test post

https://open.substack.com/pub/philoliver/p/substack-test-post?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The delivery (from "dlvrit") was partial...

So here's another trial post
http://dlvr.it/SrRYbX

Linguistic, conversational, AND metaphysical?

Does being linguistic and conversational animals automatically make us metaphysical animals too? We should answer as humans, say our authors, not just as academics. We are, they say,

"the kind of animal whose essence it is to question, create and love. We are metaphysical animals. We make and share pictures, stories, theories, words, signs and artworks that help us to navigate our lives together."

"Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life" by Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachael Wiseman: https://a.co/6G2ZUWN

How to overcome solipsism, hyperbolic scepticism, and hyper-individualism (but not vulnerability)

Similar to a point I like to make about philosophers who doubt their own substantial reality: they need to get out more. Walk (and walk away from metaphysical/epistemological nonsense). Breathe. Feel the ground beneath them. Live.

"Mary [Midgley] argued that the solipsism, scepticism and individualism that is characteristic of the Western philosophical tradition would not feature in a philosophy written by people who had shared intimate friendships with spouses and lovers, been pregnant, raised children, and enjoyed rich and full and varied human lives." --Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachael Wiseman

 

Looking forward to following this up with A Terribly Serious Adventure...

 

...Learning takes place when we are open to other perspectives, other experiences, other possibilities. Only when we actually understand what others are saying can we begin to respond instead of simply react. As Krishnan puts it toward the end of the book: “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”

The Culture That Explains America

No one thing explains America. That's why "Americana" is so rich. Gatsby, South Park, Ted Lasso, Her, Breaking Bad, …

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/20/opinion/nyt-columnists-culture.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The Culture That Explains America

The Nature of Joy

We all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once.

...I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with must tell us something about the nature of joy. The fallen world — peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering — is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/opinion/nature-pollinator-garden.html?smid=em-share

Elizabeth Anscombe

If you're not concerned with virtue, character, and what it means to live a good life, she thought, you're no ethicist.

And she was no slave to convention… IOT

LISTEN https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001n1yy?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Digging up bones

My Last Shopping List for Him

"…When we bury our loved ones in Greece, tradition requires that we exhume the bones after three years for lack of space; it's rare to get a two- or three-year extension…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/style/modern-love-greece-loss-last-shopping-list.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Last Shopping List for Him

Natural (compost) burial looks better all the time…

Henry on hubris

"Anthropocene, a popular twenty-first-century term, refers to the period in which human beings began to shape the world in fundamental ways through technology; machines, culture, and nature could no longer be disaggregated in the Anthropocene. Thoreau could never endorse Etzler’s deeply hubristic plan for the future. At best, Etzler’s promise for the machine age was a mirage. But even if such techno-social arrangements were realizable, according to Thoreau, a question would remain: Would they be, when fully and properly accounted, better or worse for us?"

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" by John Kaag, Jonathan van Belle: https://a.co/iCoxnDL

Dechurching

The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway

...Some people, usually self-described atheists and agnostics, said they didn’t miss anything and were happy to be rid of anything resembling worship. Unsurprisingly, those groups had the highest rate of dechurching of all: 94 percent for atheists and 88 percent for agnostics.

But many said they did miss aspects of traditional attendance, and often these people still believed in God or certain aspects of their previous faith traditions. They’d sought replacements for traditional worship, and the most common were spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity — basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/opinion/religion-dechurching.html?smid=em-share

Reading

Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It? Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield. --A.O. Scott https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/books/review/book-bans-humanities-ai.html?smid=em-share

Interesting. But Carl Sagan had deeper insight into the transformative time-traveling power ("magic") of reading:

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

Working at home

"'Walden is a book about a house, a simple one on a pond, but also a not-so-simple one, a disordered one, orbiting the Sun.'

Instead of bank accounts and stock portfolios, the economy was meant to support the cultivation and maintenance of a home, in its most intimate and edifying sense: the ability to dwell in the world as a flourishing human being. Now, at this point, we can imagine the objections: “My bank account does support my home and my ability to flourish.”

But the objection misses Thoreau’s point: a job might fill your bank account and allow you to pay your mortgage and to go on three-day vacations every three months, but it might also squander the majority of your life, even deform your life, a life that seems better spent in the deliberate fashioning of a good home. Take this as literally or as figuratively, as broadly or as narrowly, as you like. It is true in any case. Thoreau believed that a certain type of work allows us to inhabit the world in a way that makes us feel, makes us actually, “at home.” That is the goal of Thoreau’s economy."

"Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living": https://a.co/9w03NHI

Dad

J.C. Oliver (1928-2008), J.P. Oliver (1957- ) 

Bruce Cockburn

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Be Mine, a lovely Valentine for Father’s Day

I've just submitted my first crack at a review of Richard Ford's latest Frank Bascombe novel...

It’s hard to be objective about Frank Bascombe, he’s practically family after so many great “authorizations” by his progenitor Richard Ford. But I love Be Mine. The father-son dynamic is relatable. My dad was also infatuated with Rushmore, the badlands, the Corn Palace… Borglund’s stoneface monument to patriotic kitsch was (dad told me) the first piece of “news” from the “outside” world (beyond the farm) that he found fascinating and compelling, as a boy growing up in rural Missouri in the ‘30s. Its engineering audacity fired his imagination, and I think planted a curious wonder about the wider world that he later tried to convey to me. He took me on bonding adventures there (and elsewhere) too, as Frank took his weird son Paul. I wasn’t as weird as Paul Bascombe (who ever was?) but most children must at some point seem weirdly different, if not oppositional and belligerent, to their parents. The good ones accept and even encourage their offsprings’ autonomy… right to the end. As one of Frank’s old muses Emerson (far superior in wisdom to “old Heidegger”) said, they know the futility and injustice of trying to reduplicate themselves in a son or daughter. One of each of us is enough.

But I’ve not yet had enough of Frank. I hope Richard Ford’s not through with him.

Like all of the Bascombe books, this one will stay with me. Great stories re-frame your world, they give you slightly different lenses to see it by. This one might even give me a re-purchase on Heidegger, though I still think his best insights were far better (and earlier) glimpsed by WJ. 

For instance: "Once one has glimpsed the limits of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the dream of endless possibilities we once thought were ours—comfort, idleness, taking things lightly." Yes, but James expressed the dream of possibility and the urgent constraint of actuality much more lucidly. His "cash value" far exceeds the Nazi's.

Anyway... Be Mine is a pretty valentine. Maybe Richard Ford can do us one more Frank story, set possibly around a future hypothetical (but possible) Father's Day?

Henry at Work

A happy hopeful epigraph for John Kaag's new Thoreau book. (What a treat, waking to new work in my kindle library from two of my favorite authors. Which first, Frank or Henry?)

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

A fine line and a mystery

A promising beginning for Richard Ford's new Frank Bascombe novel:

"Lately, I've begun to think more than I used to about happiness. This is not an idle consideration at any time in life; but it is a high-dollar bonus topic for me—b. 1945—approaching my stipulated biblical allotment.

Being an historical Presbyterian (not-attending, not-believing, like most Presbyterians), I've passed easily through life observing a version of happiness old Knox himself might've approved—walking the fine line between the twinned injunctions that say: "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and "happiness is whatever is not bludgeoning unhappiness." The second being more Augustinian—though all these complex systems get you to the same mystery: "Do what, now?""

— Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford
https://a.co/6G6HYxH

The Beauty of a ‘Walk and Talk’

Taking a stroll with someone is a wonderful way to strengthen your social connections.

...Some of my most rewarding conversations have happened while on foot. The exchanges seemed to flow more easily, as if our steps were setting the tempo for our speech. But there may be a simpler reason that walks draw people out: Research shows that it can be less stressful to talk to someone when you’re walking side by side, with minimal eye contact, than conversing face to face...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/well/move/walk-talk-social-connections-conversation.html?smid=em-share

Charlie the stoic

David Von Drehle Looked Both Ways, Then Met His Latest Subject

After decades of covering well-known people, the Washington Post columnist was inspired by a man who lived on his block.

...Stoicism “has a bad rap as a philosophy,” Von Drehle said. “People think it has to do with not having feelings or not caring about the world. But what it teaches is, we can only control our own selves, our own will, decisions and actions. We don’t control people; we don’t control the world; we don’t control the future. I think Charlie finally drove home that wisdom for me.”

After White died, Von Drehle started thinking about what his friend had survived — including two world wars, a pandemic and the Depression — and realized his own children are up against similar challenges in this tumultuous century. That’s when he got cracking on “The Book of Charlie,” relying on recordings White had made with Voices in Time, an organization dedicated to preserving family stories. (White’s picture appears on their website, alongside other snapshots that make you wish you’d asked more questions of your grandparents.)

... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/books/review/the-book-of-charlie-david-von-drehle.html?smid=em-share

Ataraxia cubed

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cst1T-5vUvl/?igshid=NjZiM2M3MzIxNA==

"Managing Happiness"

I've gone back to school this summer.

I don't mean teaching (though I do have one independent study student, living abroad); I mean actually studying and learning, reading and watching and getting points and positive reinforcement for correct answers. It's my first-ever online MOOC course, Harvard's "Managing Happiness," which I stumbled serendipitously upon while scrolling, on the very first day of class. No commute required.

I've shared this with the students who've enrolled in the latest upcoming rendition of my MTSU Philosophy of Happiness course, in case any of them are interested in over-achieving and beginning early to polish the apple. It really would be a good prequel/preparation for what we'll do in the Fall.

The theme of our course this time is the crucial role of relationships (friendly, intimate, and otherwise) in our happiness or its absence. We'll be reading and discussing Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Haybron), The Good Life (Waldinger), Against Happiness (Flanagan et al), Four Thousand Weeks (Burkeman), and The Philosophy of Epicurus.

I completed Module 1 yesterday -- At the end of this module, you will recognize that happiness is a major area of study in neuroscience and social science: it is observable, measurable, and manipulable. You can learn to understand your own happiness and get better at happiness! -- and enjoyed doing it. Here's some of what I posted in the discussion boards, in response to various questions you can probably infer:

I stumbled across this course the day it was scheduled to begin, and registered for it because I teach a Happiness course (from a philosophical perspective, with attention to the thought of Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, J.S. Mill, William James*,...) and am always interested to see how others come at the subject. Then I was pleased to learn that Arthur Brooks, whose podcast and Atlantic Monthly work I've admired, is the teacher. I'm really looking forward to digging in.

*WJ said: If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
…
Growing up in the American midwest (Missouri), and living most of my adult life in the south (Tennessee), I've always been surrounded by people who insist on Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" as our shared birthright. But they also are strongly motivated by what William James (in a 1906 letter to H.G. Wells) called "our national disease":

"the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease." September 11, 1906

In over a century since, I don't think our disease has yet found a cure. Best not to catch it in the first place. Maybe a course like this can help inoculate the patient/student. I think discovering James's philosophy of happiness, and philosophy in general, has helped inoculate me.
...
I think the implicit message of my upbringing was that it's more important to be good and do the right thing than to be happy. This is generally the view I would later identify with Immanuel Kant, who thought it's more important to be worthy of happiness (because you've behaved rationally and dutifully) than actually to achieve it. My father was temperamentally disposed to happiness, but my mother suffered from manic depression which, from a child's perspective, made happiness seem fragile and randomly distributed. I think I decided at a relatively early age that I would have to take responsibility for my own happiness, that I couldn't count on it being delivered automatically in our household. Perhaps this was my good fortune, to learn this lesson while still so young.
…
I'm glad Arthur qualified "faith" as including one's life philosophy. The meaning of life, on my view, is not singular, and it is not dependent upon some form of supernatural or externally-sourced redemption or salvation. There are countless meanings, values, and purposes that life may subtend. I call myself a humanist, and agree with Kurt Vonnegut that doing the right thing without expectation of extrinsic reward or punishment is one of the central meanings of a good, fulfilled, happy life. I'm also sympathetic with John Dewey's notion of "the continuous human community" (from the first proto-humans of pre-history to who knows what in the remote future) as a deep source of meaning. And I think evolution and the prospect that it may allow the expansion of meaning and our "heritage of values" (Dewey again) is profoundly meaningful. And, like William James I call myself a meliorist: I think the largest meaning of our lives is bound up with the never-ending project of making life better.
...
Wife, grown daughters, sister, brother-in-law... at age 66, immediate family are all younger. Sadly, one of our daughters has chosen to move far away and maintains minimal contact. But I find it gratifying to stay in touch by sending her weekly postcards. When I do, I feel the connection between us. When she sent me a photo of a display she's made in her home, of those postcards, I was very deeply gratified.
…
My teaching colleagues and students are one community, my neighbors another, like-minded people (humanists, meliorists, Jamesians, baseball fans, dog fanciers) near or far, met or not, another. And I have a small friend group of half-a-dozen fellow former grad students, now all approaching (or having surpassed) retirement age, with whom I make a point of meeting up once a year in August before we resume our respective teaching responsibilities.
…
Teaching feels meaningful, especially so when I can tell that I've made an impression on a student. Learning things that will inform my teaching feels meaningful. Parenting, when our girls were young, felt like meaningful work AND play (I was for a time an at-home dad). Writing something I think is true and important always feels meaningful.

And that, by the way, is why I post to this and other little-noticed blogsites. It motivates me (in a way that standard academic work frankly does not) to try and write true and important things. And it helps me prepare to teach.

This MOOC is going to help me teach Happiness in the Fall, I can tell already. And it's going to be fun right now. Seems like a good way to spend a portion of summer.

"Never let the future disturb you..."

Marcus Aurelius, via @dailystoic: https://www.instagram.com/p/CtJsr4vOmJH/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=ZGUzMzM3NWJiOQ==

And seize what flees, says Seneca.

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Get up

…says the Stoic Emperor.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CtKTAOkvT0O/?igshid=NzJjY2FjNWJiZg==

The Art of Human Connection: WJ on the varieties of happiness – The Marginalian

… Observing "the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals," observing "how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view," observing how often and how readily we judge the outward choices of others while losing sight of the "inward significance" of those choices, James writes:

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.

Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention, how our bodies affect our feelings, and the four features of transcendence.

Maria Popova https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/06/02/william-james-talks-to-teachers/

In Defense of Humanity

We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence.

...As a small child in Concord, Massachusetts, I could see Emerson's home from my bedroom window. Recently, I went back for a visit. Emerson's house has always captured my imagination. He lived there for 47 years until his death, in 1882. Today, it is maintained by his descendants and a small staff dedicated to his legacy. The house is some 200 years old, and shows its age in creaks and stains. But it also possesses a quality that is extraordinarily rare for a structure of such historic importance: 141 years after his death, Emerson's house still feels like his. His books are on the shelves. One of his hats hangs on a hook by the door. The original William Morris wallpaper is bright green in the carriage entryway. A rendering of Francesco Salviati's The Three Fates, holding the thread of destiny, stands watch over the mantel in his study. This is the room in which Emerson wrote Nature. The table where he sat to write it is still there, next to the fireplace.

Standing in Emerson's study, I thought about how no technology is as good as going to the place, whatever the destination. No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon. It is why you touch the arm of the person beside you as you laugh. And it is why you stand in awe at the Jardin des Plantes, floored by the universe as it reveals its hidden code to you. Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic

Apple Vision: adorable, oppressive, both, neither?

Younger Daughter insisted we watch this yesterday, and then sought reassurance that I'd never get one. My wife just said it felt like a glimpse into a very different future.

 

Not sure how to think about it. Intriguing, but with a definite Black Mirror dystopian "ick" dimension. Is this the human future? Or a caricature of the future's likely disdain for our infatuation with techno-self-indulgence that cuts us off from vital connection with the natural world? But will the future even distinguish nature from technology? So many questions, so many possibilities. Luddism is not advised, but neither is total capitulation to a world of constant high-tech amusement. Remember Neal Postman's warning ("people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think") about amusing ourselves to death?

But I confess, if someone wanted to give me one of these things I'd definitely give it a test drive. Don't see myself walking around in the world with it, battery pack in pocket. And I don't want to see myself sitting alone in a room in my headset, blissfully oblivious to a lovely day on the other side of the window. 

Once again I return to the wisdom of the Cynic, the poor man's Socrates: solvitur ambulando. Perambulate, unencumbered by hardware (except maybe a stick), then amuse yourself a bit with the gadget. 

And then go back outside. WJ was right, wasn't he? Where we're headed is truly "the really vital question for us all..."

Let's not go here:

Copycats

Our girls beat the odds.

The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity - review of The World

…A recent study of occupations in the United States shows that children are disproportionately likely to do the same job as one of their parents. The children of doctors are twenty times as likely as others to go into medicine; the children of textile-machine operators are hundreds of times more likely to operate textile machines. Children of academics—like me—are five times as likely to go into academia as others… Maya Jasanoff, NYer

So far. It's never too late to go back to school, or learn a new trade.

Awe-walking

This Kind of Walk Is Much More Than a Workout.

Incorporating awe into your daily stroll can bring mental and physical benefits. Here's how to get started.

"...I'm an early riser, so I've started taking awe walks at dawn. I watch the sky change from violet to orange to fuchsia, and have seen a small colony of bees wake up and start to work. I even discovered a nest of baby robins, lodged snugly in a juniper bush two blocks from my house. Now I walk there every morning and listen to their faint, reedy chirping..." nyt

"A great stoic"

A centenarian+ whose simple credo was "do the right thing"...

See this Instagram video by @cbssundaymorning: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtEmgzQg3mL/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=ZGUzMzM3NWJiOQ==

Humanism

 Just posted a little goodreads review of Sarah Bakewell's Humanly Possible...

Terrific survey of secular spirituality and naturalistic thought. This life is indeed "the place to be happy," as humanists have always affirmed. I especially like Bakewell's discussion of the darwinian/evolutionary connection, so important and so widely misunderstood by anti-humanists. If the humanist tent is to grow in America, that misunderstanding is going to have to be corrected.

To that end, may I recommend an old hidden gem by one of the expert witnesses called to testify in the notorious Scopes "Monkey Trial" (Dayton TN, 1925):

"The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times." –Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1965), Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology (1922)

Curtis, by the way, was my first landlord: when my father was a veterinary student at the University of Missouri in the late '50s he, my mother, and I rented rooms in Dr. Curtis's home. I remember him fondly as the old man who retrieved dollar bills from my ear. I've read this book and other things by him, including an account of his time in Dayton. He was deeply imbued with the humanist spirit. He would have loved Sarah Bakewell's book.

 

  

What is humanism? (Humanists Intl)

24!

 Younger Daughter is 24 today. That's a hard one to grasp. 

  

I don't think I know anyone with a bigger heart, or greater generosity of spirit. She brought us donuts, on her birthday. Not just any donuts, but the ones I got hooked on back when I was doing recuperative PT next door to the donut den. That's who she is, a bringer of sweetness and light wherever she goes (with or withot baked goods).

On our recent drive to St. Louis her mom and I listened to a podcast in which women older and "wiser than me" were asked what advice they'd give their 20-something selves. The consistent answer: don't stress about the unknown future. Don't waste a moment of the present, it is so incredibly quickly past.

That's real wisdom. 

So is: eat your donut when it comes to you.

And if you're worried about the nutritional hit, remember: solvitur ambulando.