"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," affirmed the Sage who acknowledged his own occasional dips of enthusiasm but kept experimenting with words.
Emerson would have a thing or two to say to the young people who fret and worry about what others think of them, lack enthusiasm, doubt their own originality and prospects.
He said of the "meek young men" of his own day that they "grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” American Scholar
In Nature he said "The sun shines today also," so "Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
I've circled around again to Circles, the tenth of his first series of essays (1841), for reaffirmation of my own original relation to the universe. He'd of course prod me to "tell me what you know" rather than recycle his words, and I will. I do. I also share the circumspection he and I both admire in Montaigne: “Que sais-je?” We're all experimenting with words and visions here.
But so many of the words in Circles bear repeating. Here are some that struck me yesterday on re-reading.
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul… if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned…
There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us…
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side.
We can never see Christianity from the catechism:—from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may.
The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.
Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it.[RWE was 38.]
But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young… This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Life is a series of surprises…
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.
Abandonent. Let go the past, just for now. Write your words, imagine your vision. Let it rip.
Then circle back for another pass, as the gyre expands to contain your expanding imagination.
As Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You wouldn't worry so much about what other people think of you, if you realized how them they do."
"...in order to feel social anxiety, you have to believe that other people’s negative opinions of you are worth getting upset about, that it’s really bad if they dislike you and really important to win their approval. Even people who suffer from severe social anxiety disorder (social phobia) tend to feel “normal” when speaking to children or to their close friends about trivial matters, with a few exceptions. Nevertheless, they feel highly anxious when talking to people they think are very important about subjects they think are very important. If your fundamental worldview, by contrast, assumes that your status in the eyes of others is of negligible importance, then it follows that you should be beyond the reach of social anxiety."
"How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius" by Donald J. Robertson: https://a.co/aEJLAkT
Today's Teenagers: Anxious About Their Futures and Disillusioned by Politicians
…Members of Gen Z, ages 12 to 27, are significantly less likely to rate their current and future lives highly than millennials were when they were the same age, it found.
Among those 18 to 26, just 15 percent said their mental health was excellent. That is a large decline from both 2013 and 2003, when just over half said so. … "We have to get these kids caught up or they're going to have a world of hurt in their lives, and consequently in our country." … nyt
It's their birthday. Thomas Paine (notes Sarah Bakewell in Humanly Possible) said
"some people seem to think it an expression of humility to call "the fertile earth a dunghill, and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities." Instead, in Paine's opinion, it looks more like ingratitude."
…Paine's preferred principles were humanist ones: be grateful for life, do not make a cult of suffering, be tolerant toward others, and try to deal with problems as rationally as possible. He summed up his Enlightenment humanist credo: I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. The Age of Reason, with its message of fellow feeling, equality, happiness, and the enlightened celebration of a magnificent cosmos, brought Paine some far-from-happy experiences. —Bakewell, Humanly Possible
Anton Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."
His views on religion and morality were also those of a humanist: he disliked dogma and was skeptical about supernatural beliefs. As one twentieth-century admirer of Chekhov wrote: He said—and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy—that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings—and only secondly are we bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers. . . . Chekhov said: let's put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man. —Bakewell
John Lachs drew his last breath in November, but his wisdom continues to illuminate my thought and pedagogy. Incandescence of memory, not just forgetful presence, is also *transcendence.
Still reflecting on JL's Stoic Pragmatism epilogue, so packed with light and wisdom. The final segment:
"…The consideration that in the end we die has disturbed my enjoyment of life just as little as the fate of the food I eat interferes with the delight of a good meal. Focusing on the destination makes us forget the pleasures of the road. Should the eventual extinction of the sun send cold shivers down our backs? Surely not; such issues simply do not matter. Untold generations will have basked in the light before the dark descends. Their joy redeems eventual disaster, or at least proves it irrelevant. Sometimes it is best to avert our gaze, for viewing matters in context liberates the mind, but seeing them in their ultimate outcome can paralyze it…
Reflecting on what is possible over an unlimited period of time generates foolish theories, baseless hopes, and unending worry. A part of the reason why animals live better than some humans is their freedom from ultimate concerns; they act as if they knew that finite creatures are not designed to deal with totality.
Up to a point, life gets better in proportion to our ability to get absorbed in the immediate. Failure rehearses memories, caution advises planning; future and past squeeze us from two sides until life becomes the hurried conversion of one into the other. Even universities have become beehives that leave little time for leisured reflection or the life-giving moments in which one can simply be. Few things are more difficult for our burdened and busy generation... immediacy, which is not some unconceptualized given but simply the present in whose movement we can feel at home. Momentary forgetfulness can liberate us from the future and the past and reveal the exhilarating beauty of whatever comes our way. This is transcendence—probably the only sort available to animals.
I am grateful for living at a time when I can contribute to the recovery of American philosophy, a great and greatly neglected national treasure. The founding of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in which I gladly participated, serves as clear evidence that just a few determined and persevering individuals can have a lasting effect on the future of a profession. We need to continue expanding the canon by adding to it thinkers whose work is excellent but who have, for one reason or another, been neglected over the years. I work on this, as I work on bringing philosophy into contact with a broader public, with the conviction that the energy and vision of a small band of people can make all the difference we need.
The activist element in American philosophy seems to fit well with my temperament. I value the sort of robust engagement with the world that evokes personal activity and aims at social improvement. Scholarly imprisonment in universities strikes me as intellectually narrowing and emotionally impoverishing. It tends to make professors timid and compliant souls. I am interested in ordinary people and their problems because I see myself as no different from them; I simply cannot take claims about aristocracy of any sort seriously.
As a consequence, I love philosophy for the perspectives it offers on human difficulties and the tools it provides for their resolution. Thinking about what I see around me is one of the great pleasures of my life. Acting on what I believe combines the satisfaction of being a whole person with the exhilaration of an experiment. Academics who live only in the mind sadden me. Their truncated existence denies them the robust delights and the sound common sense of those who engage the world on multiple levels. A sense of practical reality is a badly needed balance to excessive cerebration.
Philosophy needs balance no less than do philosophers. Even if it could attain the precision of some of the natural sciences, philosophy would need the literary imagination to complete its task. Its product is not disinterested knowledge but a relationship that changes lives. To establish that relationship, we need to communicate both discursive ideas and visions. The manner of the communication can be as important as its substance; people respond to what is well thought and well said. The magnificence of philosophical ideas and the excellence of their expression are, therefore, integrally connected to their effectiveness. My ideal has always been to write philosophy with the beauty and inventiveness of Mozart's music, though I would also like for my ideas to be true in some sense on which philosophers will never agree. The momentousness of this ideal is measured best by seeing how far I fall short of it.
In the end, I do not want to be absorbed in the technical details of the problems of philosophy. My passion is to deploy philosophy to deal with the important issues that face us as individuals, as a nation, and as members of the human race. There is a large public waiting anxiously for what philosophy can offer—for careful thinking, clear vision, and the intelligent examination of our values. That is where the future of philosophy lies, that is where American philosophy has always pointed us, and that is where I will continue to be."
…Over time, Harvard, like many other universities, has allowed the core academic mission of research, intellectual inquiry, and teaching to be subordinated to other values that, though important, should never have been allowed to work against it.
Sometime in the twenty-tens, it became common for students to speak of feeling unsafe when they heard things that offended them…
"The meaning . . . of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings."
Howard Zinn, who died on this day in 2010
"I have an intense loyalty to people near to me, which shows itself in my readiness to go to great lengths to promote their good. This attitude defines my relation to friends, students, and family.
I also believe that although some things matter intensely, many of the things that upset people are of little significance. This conviction has enabled me to live without condemning much and without the desire to run other people's lives. The connected respect for autonomy has been the source of great happiness for me; I attribute my deeply satisfying relations to my children to mutual acceptance built on caring and on love. Love and respect have also served as the foundation of the extraordinary relationship my wife and I enjoy, sharing all the tasks and pleasures of life, and reflecting and writing together on the problems of education.
In graduate school, we are taught to write with footnotes, evoking authority for all questionable claims. Philosophers, like other human beings, find it consoling to run with the crowd and embrace few views that are out of favor. Knowing the fickleness of public opinion, I could never make myself believe that the number of people holding a position has anything to do with its truth. Accordingly, I have learned to write without footnotes, and, when it seemed appropriate, I have embraced wildly unpopular, though not intrinsically outrageous, ideas."
I find myself drawn again, at the outset of another semester's teaching, to the wisdom of John Lachs's Stoic Pragmatism, which begins with a simple truth— "Age clarifies"— and concludes with an epilogue I wish every teacher would commit to memory and practice.
"…I am unable to think of anything more important for the future of academic philosophy in this country than for it to become less academic.
Having had more than my share of bad instructors, I sought a job in education as a way to earn a living while I continued my philosophical reflections. I never suspected that I would develop a passion for teaching. Yet conveying to others the benefits I receive from philosophy has become a burning desire and a consuming activity in my life. I do it in a way that seems to some a form of witnessing, showing the immediate pertinence of philosophical ideas to my life.
Immense satisfaction attends my good fortune in having had the opportunity to make a contribution to the lives of thousands of undergraduates. I view this multitude of people as extended family: I keep in touch with as many of them as I can and cheer them on in the pursuit of their purposes. I hope philosophy has made a significant difference in their lives. I have also been fortunate in having launched more than sixty young philosophers on their careers. My relation to them is one of lifelong concern and support; helping them with their problems and careers is of vital importance to me. I think of these activities not as the result of optional commitments on my part, but as the continuing expressions of my philosophical beliefs.
People whose minds are energetic and who are interested in their fields find it easy to teach well. Bored instructors are boring and the self-absorbed fail to place themselves in the shoes of their students to see how what they say is received. Thinking before one's students' eyes—which means, among other things, teaching without notes—demonstrates what one expects them to do. Keeping in mind the interconnectedness of things and especially the relations of what one teaches to the ordinary concerns of students renders instruction vivid and, when things go well, even memorable.
By no means least, good teaching requires deep respect for students. The activity is hallowed because it enables one human being to contribute to the creation of another. Its chance of success is enhanced by embedding it in wider human relations; truly good teachers tend to offer caring companionship as the context of instruction. Perhaps all learning is imitation; if so, there is added reason for teachers to offer themselves as living examples to their students. Knowledge that makes little difference to the instructor's life is, in any case, rightly suspicious and may deserve to be disregarded by students…"
"…The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it's hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett's Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it..." GK
This reminded me of our brief discussion in CoPhi yesterday of the problem of Forrest Hall. I have a fix, which I've shared with GK's readers:
The ROTC building on my campus in middle Tennessee, and any number of residential streets hereabouts, still bear the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Old misplaced sentiment dies hard, administrative wheels grind glacially. But this could be a relatively easy fix: just drop an r, and commemorate the trees instead of the racist.
I once taught a class in Forrest Hall, and had some Opening Day fun with my classroom's militant decor.
Yet another one (finally!- after a week lost to weather) [but see Margaret Renkl, below: that week was a gift, not a loss], and even after all these years I still give it an excited exclamation mark. The first day of class, like the first day in MLB, is a seasonal highlight.
If you want to make a good first impression on your professor, class, do not tell me you don't know what "MLB" means. Most of you don't, these days. So I'll also have to explain what a scorecard is, and what it means to get to first base. In CoPhi as in life, the goal is to get there so you can eventually come home... and maybe "know it for the first time," as the poet from St. Louis said ("the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started"). He didn't come home, he went to England and made a new home there. I came to Tennessee and made a new home here. The simple point is: when you make it home, you score.
The state of higher education, not unlike the state of the American union, is chaotic and of uncertain future.
"It’s been quite a year. Colleges became flash points for protests over affirmative action, abortion rights, free speech and hate speech, affordability, equity, policing, sexual harassment and assault, unionization, and the Israel-Hamas war, provoking, arguably, the most divisive and contentious campus conflicts since Vietnam..." Inside Higher Ed
But all of that is not our concern on Day 1. Our job is to begin to learn some of the pedagogic ropes, to introduce our subject matter in broad strokes, and to introduce ourselves to one another. Who are you? Why are you here?
Students usually give a variety of responses to that second question, some quite literal (because I was conceived and birthed) or prosaic (because I needed the credit hours) or conformist (or so it seems, after a string of short answers all say because this school is close to home) or pietistic (because god put me here). Many seem to interpret why to mean how, offering a biological explanation of their origins rather than an existential exploration of their aspirations and intentions. It's all good, on Day One. Nobody's in the cellar on Opening Day.
But I would propose, to those who say (or didn't say, but think) they don't want to know why they're here because that would create more anxiety to fulfill others' expectations,
Sounds like you think your purpose is something necessarily imposed externally, rather than something you yourself discover, fashion, and have a personal stake in. Not to have a purpose that you've made your own and internalized is to court nihilism. Or, it's to turn yourself into a robot like that forlorn little guy on Rick and Morty who learns his purpose is to pass the butter. Thing is, whether we're originally "programmed" (by nature, genetics, experience, god) with a set purpose or not, being conscious, reflective, and free means we get to regulate and possibly even re-write the program. I hope you'll come to see philosophy as an invitation to do just that, to find and follow the purpose-driven life. Otherwise, your answer to why you're here is: don't know, don't want to know, don't care. Doesn't matter.
I say it matters. You're not a butter bot. Find your purpose.
And to those who matriculated here because they didn't want to stray too far from home:
Home is sweet, but again I encourage you all to push yourselves to expand your horizons and your conception of home. Growing up means making yourself at home in the wider world. Carl Sagan said it best: to be a true cosmopolitan is to be a citizen of the cosmos, no matter where you hang your hat.
What you want to do is what Jennifer Michael Hecht says the old "graceful life philosophers" like the Epicureans did:
The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one's path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you're done; just try to have a good time. — Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinsonby Jennifer Michael Hecht
The great task of a reasonable life is to stop searching maniacally for a way out of the “forest” (the natural universe). "Hang a sign on a tree that says Home" and be done with it.
I did that once, or got Younger Daughter to do it back when she was in her arts-and-crafts phase. The sign eventually faded but the message has stuck.
So to begin: Who am I, why am I here?
Well, I'm the designated instructor, a veteran MTSU prof and also (like the poet) a native of the St. Louis region who ran away, I not so far though as old Tom. (I had a professor at Mizzou who told me I wrote like Eliot. I chose to take that as a compliment, but many of my peers think less of poetic prose than I do. Their problem.) There's more about me in the sidebar bio, if anyone cares.
Why I'm here (in Honors 218): to introduce my field of study and promote the relevance and value of philosophy for life. Why I'm here on the planet: to ameliorate what I can, and keep moving forward-- to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.
And that, for present purposes, is who I am: a meliorist and a peripatetic, a guy who says most problems are made soluble-- or tolerable at least-- by putting one foot in front of the other and repeating. A guy who never took Latin but loves to say things like Solvitur ambulando and Sapere aude, and who likes to award bases to students who can translate such expressions and explain them. A guy who agrees with Carl Sagan that knowing we live on a pale blue dot ought to make us kinder, more humane, more enlightened, and more in love with life.
Time at last to make first contact. See you in class!
And that was the week that was. Don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened.
…In "The Book of (More) Delights," the poet and essayist Ross Gay writes about the gift of time that opens up whenever he unexpectedly arrives at an appointment early, or when the person he plans to meet is running late. Such unplanned changes in agenda can feel, he writes, "like the universe just dropped a bouquet of time, and often a luminous bouquet of time, in your lap."
That's what a snow day feels like here. A snow day in the American South on an overheating planet is exactly like an extravagant bouquet of luminous time that comes out of nowhere and lasts as long as it cares to, on a schedule we cannot entirely predict, much less control. Last week the sky offered an unexpected gift of time. Thank God I had no choice but to take it. —Margaret Renkl
And be glad it's finally time to get on back to school. Sure was pretty though.
Devin Moss spent a year ministering to convicted killer Phillip Hancock. Together, they wrestled with one question: How to face death without God. --
“It’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better,” he said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?” nyt
"People make a mistake in thinking that spirituality [necessarily]
has anything to do with religion, immateriality, or the supernatural."
The humanist chaplain should consider the words as well of my late great mentor John Lachs in Stoic Pragmatism, about not counting on winning the supernatural afterlife lottery. "I am prepared to be surprised to learn that we have a supernatural destiny, just as I am prepared to be surprised at seeing my neighbor win the lottery. But I don't consider buying tickets an investment."
Better to invest in smelling the roses, loving life, being grateful for the time we've got.
How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?
"…I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. For a moment, I panicked. Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. Where had they come from? Evidently, I'd had a thought—that was why I'd raised my hand. But I hadn't known what the thought would be until I spoke it. How weird was that?
Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a kid, my mother had often asked my father, "What are you thinking?" He'd shrug and say, "Nothing"—a response that irritated her to no end. ("How can he be thinking about nothing?" she'd ask me.) I've always been on Team Dad; I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was articulating thoughts that had been unspecified yet present in my mind..."—Joshua Rothman
"…Contrary to stereotype—which pictures Kant as a joyless automaton, rigidly stuck on his daily routine—Kant enjoyed wine, billiards, and fancy clothes. On occasion, we are told, he drank so much he couldn't find his way home. Kant flirted with women, told excellent jokes, and hosted much-loved dinner parties..." --Kieran Setiya
So that film "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant," depicting him as "famously abstemious and abstruse" (wroteRichard Brody in The New Yorker), gets it at least half wrong? That will please my Kantian friend Daryl, master carpenter and himself always the life of the party. But it won't please him that Kant thought beer makes people "boorish"… of course, Manny never tried PBR.
(Dr. Daryl’s sober judgment: “Well, he was a convivial host for dinner parties at his house, once he could afford a house (at age 60). Don’t believe the caricatures of grad school. I gave several papers that stressed Kant’s sociality. But caricatures retain a hold in undergrad & grad programs.” If I’m not to believe the caricatures of grad school, though, I’m going to require an extensive re-education. So are we all, I expect.)
Or, I presume, kombucha-my own favored brew these days. When I finally churn out my first good batch (I got a kit for Christmas, but they say winter is not a good time) I'll throw a symposium and offer it to my un-abstemious pals. We'll see if the probiotic elixir conduces to Veritas. Or just the usual badinage we like to sling, whatever else we're swallowing.
One last cheeseburger on French bread with a side of rings and a beer, at fabled (but gone) Rotier's on Elliston Place-Oct '19
It's a familiar text for James scholars, this early diary entry, but so much of his mature philosophy is already presaged by it. It's an essential touchstone, and a good launchpad for any daunting project.
"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—" the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grüblei in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Principiis obsta [or as Barney Fife said, nip it!]—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen [abstractions, intuitions], but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre [Disregard, & carry on]. Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] * doing and suffering and creating." *
Here's a nice Zoom-facilitated conversation with Socrates Express author Eric Weiner. (Thanks for sharing, Ed). We'll be reading and discussing his early chapters next week.
I've enjoyed Weiner's previous books, in particular his happiness travelogue The Geography of Bliss (2008). “Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.” Maybe "the greatest source of happiness is other people" (Sartre's "hell" and the wrong other people notwithstanding).
In Socrates Express's Introduction, Weiner mentions The Story of Philosophyby Will and Ariel Durant (1926). That was the first philosophy book I recall reading. Like Weiner's, my curiosity was piqued. And here I am today, anticipating another semester's opportunity to transmit the philosophy virus to a fresh crop of student subjects.
Weiner's first chapter skips ahead (past Socrates et al) to the Roman emperor/stoic Marcus Aurelius. Weiner says he and the emperor share an aversion to early-rising. But Marc's morning meditation inspires me, very much a morning person (I rarely fail to rise before dawn, when I most like to post my blog Up@dawn)...
"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."
That puts things in the right perspective, no matter how big a mess others may be making of their precious privilege. It reminds me to do better, to be a good meliorist--someone committed to doing what he can to make things better, and to be happy doing it. The emperor is thus for me a patron saint of the dawn.
And as Weiner admits, mornings set the tone for the day. For the life. Having a good morning is the best way I've found to get on with the work (at its best indistinguishable from play) of being human.
Another patron saint of morning was Henry David Thoreau, who Weiner and we will get to later. He concluded Walden:
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
So here's hoping the sun melts the snow and ice by Tuesday and we can finally get on with the dawn of our sluggish-to-start semester.
Spent the better part of the morning in the dentist's chair getting crowned. The doc thought it was funny when I said the experience was something like I imagined waterboarding must be. He also laughed when I said it could be worse, maybe. I should have asked for the nitrous, then I'd have been laughing too.
One good thing came of the ordeal (well, two-assuming he did a good job): Billy Joel's 1989 "We Didn't Start the Fire" played long enough in the background for me to pick up more of the lyrics than I ever have before. It's not a good song melodically, as the artist himself admitted--a pop musical equivalent of the dentist's drill--but I like long lists of things I'm familiar with. So it made the time go slightly quicker.
If we ever get back to school--Opening Day's again been canceled tomorrow--I'll ask the kids how many of the references they get. Bet I'll win that one.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye
...
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
...
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
...
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?
...
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
GK is happy in the morning with his toast and marmalade. I too favor the "nearsighted view" at dawn, which on reflection lends greater clarity, cheer, and ameliorative potential to the rest of the day. And to life. Same for lunch in the park, and writing (or thinking about it) in the reading room. Not sure about the subway though.
"This happiness is the result of taking a nearsighted view of life as opposed to the kind in which you wake up and begin thinking about the Middle East…" Life beckons
A guy nicknamed The Melancholy Dane is probably not a reliable authority on this subject.
"People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness." — Søren Kierkegaard
On the other hand...
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
"Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary." HDT, via Maria Popova
Did that yesterday, a long solo walk sans my usual canine cohort. They're not built for frigid arctic air, and little Pita is not built for deep drifts.
So my spirits sagged a bit at first, missing my pals. But there is indeed something elevating about the uncanny quiet of a landscape locked down by uncustomary extreme weather. We can go entire winters in middle Tennessee without as much snowfall as surprised us yesterday. It was still snowing at 2 pm but the storm had lessened considerably.
I got to start breaking in my new Chocoruas, the Timberland boots named for WJ's favorite lake and mountain. They made a satisfying crunch in the powder, the only sound around. The streets were empty, save a sledder or two. All was calm, all was bright. I was toasty in my rarely-worn old parka.
Was it a spiritual experience? By my definition of the word, rooted in the etymology of respiration and inspiration, it was. It redeemed the forced disruption of routine that I usually find disorienting. And it sharpened the contrast of indoor to outdoor life, making the simple return to hearth and home itself an experience to savor.
This was supposed to be Opening Day at school, a spiritual experience of another sort. I look forward to it Thursday. But today, I look forward to another long winter walk.
Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
...Of the 2,500 licensed drivers who responded to the AAA survey, 22 percent admitted to switching lanes at high speeds or tailgating, 25 percent admitted to running a red light, 40 percent admitted to holding an active phone while driving and 50 percent admitted to exceeding posted speed limits by 15 miles per hour or more — all within the last calendar month.
Worse, a sizable number of respondents said they knew that people important to them would somewhat or completely disapprove of much of the behavior. They did it anyway, despite the risk of opprobrium and despite the fact that, as the AAA dryly noted in an accompanying news release, "a motorist's need for speed consistently fails to deliver shorter travel times. It would take driving 100 miles at 80 m.p.h. instead of 75 m.p.h. to shave just five minutes off a trip." ... nyt
"What unfolds when intentional spaces are cultivated to explore the essence of humanity?" That's just one of many questions that course instructor and Humanist Chaplain at Tufts University Anthony Cruz Pantojas asks students in a new course exploring the utility and significance of humanism. https://thehumanist.com/news/secularism/a-course-on-humanism-for-everyday-life
We have to work for our consolation and our happiness (not to mention survival) in this less-than-rationally ordered world, without guarantee of success. We have to be meliorists.
Kieran Setiya has another nice post, this one about self-destructive desires and their continuing hold on us long after we've seen and repudiated their darkness.
"What kind of world do we inhabit, in which things that bring us consolation at intolerable cost might continue to cost but cease to console?" Great question, not merely rhetorical. And great post (but as with Wittgenstein's Tractatus I'm not quite sure what to make of the numbers.)
In a better world consolation would be on tap, without cost. That's James's "wishing-cap" world, utopia, literally nowhere.
...the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers... In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first... We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button... Pragmatism VIII
So we have to work for our consolation, without guarantee of success. We have to be meliorists. The upside is that it becomes easier to identify the sources of false consolation, the "degrading poisons" of misleading allure, and renounce them. Smoking and drinking were relatively easy to give up, for me, compared to dreams of Utopia. But dreams of an incrementally better world are easier to believe in. Slightly.
I always look forward to your Saturday dispatches, Kieran. (And we're reading Life is Hard in my classes again this semester.) Thanks for this. Carry on.
These days I raise my glass of kombucha to health and happiness, and a longer better richer life.
The creative silence of morning is sacred, as was the joyous song of GK's show last night at the Ryman. We're so impressed by the stamina of an 81-year-old who can keep us up past our bedtime with a nearly 3-hour show. And he led us in song right through the intermission. The meanderingly silly Lake Wobegon monolog concluded with a heartfelt thanks to "friends, not fans"… a joyful night out, "miserable" wooden pews notwithstanding. Thank you, GK. Substack
I loved the whole show, especially the audience singing "It Is Well With My Soul," which I thought appropriate for an old gospel tabernacle. That crowd knew all the words. And the wooden pews makes the place so reverberant. It was odd that I forgot to put in my hearing aids and did the show without them and for some reason Heather and I sounded even better singing together. I hit some high notes I didn't know I had.
