Great Books (& good)

Reading a good book about great books is good, but probably not good enough. But maybe the better aspiration is to write good books, not just to read great ones.

 “In the subtitle to this book, the one you’re holding, I joke that you should read these books “even though it might destroy you.” There is certainly a sense in which the Great Books ruined me. At fifteen, all I wanted was to write adventure stories about a chosen-one hero who saves the universe. Now, at forty, I am writing a book where I argue that everyone ought to read Proust.

But if I was destroyed by these books, it’s a destruction I chose. These books don’t act mechanically on the nervous system, forcing people to adopt certain viewpoints. Instead, when you open the Great Books, you enter into a conversation with the past. You experience a much broader diversity of opinions than is possible if you stick primarily to contemporary literature. And from that diversity, you start to see possibilities that you hadn’t previously perceived. Whatever is best and most appealing in these books becomes a part of you, inextricable from your sense of self.

And in the end, when you look back on these books, it’s impossible to say what came from them and what was inside you all along. That’s one of the paradoxes of the Great Books—everyone who’s read them has felt altered by the encounter, but they’ve often been altered in very different ways. Some people read Plato and become skeptics, while others become Neoplatonists.

My aim in this book isn’t to tell you exactly what’ll happen if you read the Great Books, it’s just to convince you that there is a good chance something will happen. Because I think the real fear isn’t that the Great Books might destroy us—we long to be destroyed, long to be altered. The real fear is that we’ll spend a lot of time slogging through these old tomes and experience nothing at all. And that, I think, is a fear that is usually without merit. If you spend enough time with the Great Books, I am certain that you will be altered by the experience.” — What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia

Skeptics

An old post...

Good citizens are skeptics of the moderate, non-Pyrrhonic sort. They think critically, they call out false beliefs rooted in pseudoscience and superstition. They seek truth, facts, and reality. And they do it with humility, kindness, and compassion.

Carl Sagan was a good citizen.

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive... The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. Carl Sagan, 1996

==

Today in CoPhi it’s skeptics. Or sceptics, if you prefer the British spelling. Or you can follow their lead and refuse to commit. “Don’t commit, and you won’t be disappointed.”

I haven’t generally found that to be a reliable guidepost in life, instead taking my cue from the lesson James’s “first act of free will” (noted last time) seems to me to teach: don’t just sit there, stand and select a destination. And get going. As my old pal the [now-retired] Carolina prof says, do something – even if it’s wrong. And as James also said, “our errors surely are not such awfully solemn things.” Lighten up. Pick a path. Move.

But that’s my therapy, it may not be yours. Some of us really do prefer sitting on a fence, avoiding firm opinions, keeping all accounts open. And there’s no doubt, a healthy dose of skepticism is good for you. But how much is too much?

My answer is implied by the bumper sticker message on my bulletin board: “even fatalists look both ways before crossing the street.” If you stop looking, you’re either too skeptical or not skeptical enough. Probably a lunatic, too. Or the ruler of the universe. “I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.”

Point is, we need beliefs to motivate action lest we sit and starve like Buridan‘s ass, or cross paths with a cart and get flattened. Prudence demands commitment. Commitment is no guarantee against error and disappointment, but indifference and non-commitment typically leave us stuck in the middle of the road or drop us off the cliff.

That wasn’t Pyrrho‘s perspective, jay- and cliff-walker though he was. Fortunately for him, he seems always to have had friends steering him from the edge. His prescription – but is a skeptic allowed to prescribe? – was to free yourself from desires, don’t care how things will turn out, persuade yourself that nothing ultimately matters, and you’ll eventually shuck all worry. Or not. If we all were Pyrrho “there wouldn’t be anyone left to protect the Pyrrhonic Sceptics from themselves.” Prudence wins again.

Prudence and moderation. “The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get closer to the truth,” or further at least from falsehood and bullshit. Easier said than done, in these alt-fact days of doublespeak. “All the great philosophers have been [moderate] sceptics,” have sought truth and spurned lies, have deployed their baloney detectors and upheld the bar of objective evidence. Sincerity alone won’t cut it.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These anti-realist doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry… Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial-notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
So, be a skeptic. But to paraphrase David Hume and Jon Batiste, stay human. (“Be a philosopher, but amidst your philosophy be still a man.”)

Read Skeptic magazine, which in the latest issue doubts the possibility of eternal youth and features the parodic perspective of Mr. Deity. [The latest issue is actually about nationalism.] Skeptic’s editor Michael Shermer says “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” And, “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.”

Pyrrho must not have been that crazy, to have lived to nearly ninety. “He did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life,” said a defender, he just suspended judgment as to their ultimate import in the larger truths of things. Or maybe he just wanted to protect his batting average, so to speak. If you never swing, you’ll never miss. But you’ll still strike out if you take too many.

David Hume, again. He was a skeptic but he didn’t let that interfere with living. He ventured opinions but couched them in philosophic humility. He knew we couldn’t all be Pyrrho, for “all action would immediately cease” and “the necessities of nature” would “put an end to [our] miserable existence.” Miserable? He must have been having a bad day. Generally he was of great cheer and humane disposition.

So let’s not throw in the sponge on humanity just yet. What a strange expression, “throwing in the sponge”-it comes from the Roman Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who told a story about a painter who stopped trying so hard to paint the perfect representation of a horse’s mouth and discovered that sometimes it’s best to just let fly. Fling your sponge, let it land where it may. Okay, if you’re just painting. If you’re living a life, though, maybe just a bit less skepticism is prudent.

Is it possible to go through life questioning and doubting everything, committing always to nothing, and holding no firm opinions? Is it desirable or useful to try doing so? And do you know anyone who doesn’t look both ways before crossing the street?

10.11.17

LISTEN

Bucking up on climate

This is supposed to be a post about rational responses to the climate crisis, but I have to detour en route...

It was so good to see the Hall of Fame induction broadcast from Cooperstown yesterday, returning to July and a packed crowd. Another "return to life," another recovery of something special the pandemic's made us stop (at least for awhile) taking for granted. Big Papi is in, and so at last are octogenarians Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat. Bud Fowler, Gil Hodges, Minnie Minoso, and Buck O'Neil were admirably represented by Dave Winfield, their spouses, and his niece, respectively.

"Baseball immortality" is pretty special, and all those guys deserve it. Especially Buck, with as great a claim to the "soul of baseball" moniker (and "character, integrity, and dignity") as any. His friends and greatest advocates Bob Kendrick, Joe Posnanski, and Ken Burns deserve to bask in Buck's sunshine too. 

Not many of us deserve immortality, but this guy... @nlbmprez @JPosnanski https://t.co/ZWQr7D0tg1

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 24, 2022

The thing so many love most about Buck, who I'm pretty sure I met briefly at the original Negro Leagues Museum in KC back in '92 before Ken Burns made him famous, was his inextinguishable beneficence of spirit and joie de vivre. Just a few years older than his negro leagues peer Jackie Robinson, he was never bitter about missing a shot at the show. He implicitly understood that Deweyan wisdom I like to cite, that we must live our lives in precisely the time we're allotted. Buck took pride in helping pave Jackie's way. "I got here just in time."

And isn't that a good model for how we, at this precarious time, should be thinking about the role we have an opportunity to play in paving the way for the generations just at our heels? We have an opportunity to acknowledge the pivotal hinge of history this moment embodies, to seize the moment, to reject short-sighted self-destructive policies with regard to the environment, politics, social diversity, international comity, and so much more. We have before us the possibility of acting with character, integrity, and dignity before our brief turn on the stage of existence is through. And we have Buck O'Neil's example of how to personify those ideals with grace, hope, charm, and cheer.

And so, the climate crisis...

Not many of us are feeling much hope or cheer about that lately. Yesterday's Times ran an editorial that begins,

The American West has gone bone dry, the Great Salt Lake is vanishing and water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great life-giving reservoirs on the Colorado River basin, are declining with alarming speed. Wildfires are incinerating crops in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while parts of Britain suffocated last week in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a single United States senator, Joe Manchin, to destroy the centerpiece of President Biden's plans to confront these very problems... nyt

This informed observer, speaking for many, is ready to toss in the towel:

Where, then, are we left with American climate policy? Not anyplace good. Joe Manchin has squandered his party’s best opportunity to mitigate catastrophe, and Joe Biden has few options for what to do next. I hate to sound defeatist, but I don’t see an alternative. If you aren’t despairing about the climate, you aren’t paying attention. 

So it's a  breath of fresh air, this morning (as on most Monday mornings lately), to turn to Margaret Renkl:

In a democracy as polarized as ours, trying to move the needle on climate is a conundrum: We can’t just bully people into demanding dramatic action, and our elected officials won’t take dramatic action until Americans, including those who vote Republican, demand it. If Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, couldn’t move Senator Joe Manchin to vote for his party’s signature climate legislation, what hope do the rest of us have of convincing our own obstinate Uncle Joes?

But reading Katharine Hayhoe’s new book, “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” has made me reconsider my silence. [This reminds me as well, btw, of E.O. Wilson's The Creation: an appeal to save life on Earth...] What if the average Uncle Joe, one who hasn’t made himself a millionaire by way of the coal industry, isn’t as hard to talk to as I imagine? More to the point, what if the skeptics actually aren’t everywhere? What if everybody else is just as terrified to talk as I am?

...You’d never know it from listening to red-state politicians or right-wing “news,” but only 14 percent of Americans are outright climate deniers.

Nevertheless, says Dr. Hayhoe, “a lot of the news outlets are doubling-, tripling-, quadrupling-down on fear-based messages because they think more fear is going to make more people pay attention. What they don’t realize is this: Most people are already worried. And if you’re already worried but you’re not activated, more fear is not going to activate you.”

And here's where I catch an echo of old Buck, whose repudiation of fear and bitterness, whose  positive and hopeful attitude, whose joyful embrace of the opportunity to pave the way for his successors, could "activate" us. "The solution," Renkl writes, "is to offer a vision of a better future. People are willing to make all sorts of changes if they’re convinced it will make a difference."

In fact, people are generally willing to change on the chance of making a difference. No guarantees required. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature, as WJ put it, than that willingness to live for a chance.

This is why it’s so important to learn how to talk about climate change with others. Convincing people on both sides of the aisle that they are not alone in their fears, that there are solutions to the challenges we face, and that their own actions can make a difference is the first step toward holding politicians to account. MR

Buck up, in other words. Let's talk climate. Let's give ourselves and the next generations a chance. 

The paternal condition

LISTEN. Back from our beach holiday, but that June mood persists. Long hot days when those who don't rise at dawn are to be pitied for missing the literal and figurative cool of aurora. The triple-digit forecast has been downgraded to 99, but sitting here with the pups in 59 degrees with windows open anticipating a pleasant walk... that's the glory of summer. 

And Father's Day is part of the glory of summer. Younger Daughter plied me with thoughtful presents (not least of which was a sumptuous breakfast), but none could exceed the simple gift of her presence. I'm not taking it for granted, Older Daughter has been two time-zones away for years. The strongest parental bonds stretch and won't break, but there's a lot to be said for geographical proximity.

And despite the sacrifices and losses and occasional disappointments there's a lot to be said for the experience of parenthood. Fathers Day is a good time to reflect on that, on the expectations we bring to it and the reality that confounds some of them. But my expectation was always that it would be a privilege and a pleasure to spend quality time with growing minds, and to anticipate the ways in which they'd add value to a world in dire need of amelioration. That expectation hasn't been confounded, it's been rewarded. Being Dad to two smart, funny, creative young adults who are making the world better than it would or could have been is a profound joy. 

So that's my answer to the anti-natalists and other parental skeptics. I'm with Ezra Klein on this, and with Hannah Arendt. Natality is the hopeful flipside of mortality, the "miracle" that just might redeem this mysterious unfinished project we call humanity. 

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.” The Human Condition

I'm also with those who say that, contra Elon, we may already have enough people. What we need more of is happy people, engaged in the noble melioristic struggle to save the world. That's the point, for me, of Fathers Day. And Mothers Day. And Teacher Appreciation Day, if that's ever a thing.

 

James P. Oliver, 1957-

James C. Oliver, 1928-2008

Montaigne fini, pas fini

LISTEN. Time to close Sarah Bakewell's fine Montaigne bio. Our time with him for now is ended, but not finished. I think he's now in a dead heat with David Hume as one of my favorite skeptics. But I do have reservations.

For instance, if amor fati means "cheerful acceptance of whatever happens" I cannot join him in being firmly wedded to such a complacent-sounding stance. Loving one's fate, as I understand the concept, does not mean loving everything about everyone's fate and cheerfully renouncing the meliorist's mission to work for better futures all around. The tenor of Bakewell's discussion, in terms of Christian salvation, suggests a narrower focus--on one's personal fate--than pragmatic meliorists prefer. 

But if amor fati is more about renouncing impotent, debilitating, self-destructive regret for one's own past errors and fallibilities ("18. Reflect on everything; regret nothing") while still learning from them and cultivating conscientious, humane regard for others and a "willingness to leap between different people's points of view," that elicits my cheer.

The three great Hellenistic traditions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism are bound to Montaigne and bind him to so many of us, Bakewell observes, by their and our shared pursuit of eudaimonia and ataraxia. We're all just trying, just essaying, to flourish and get us some peace. 

Virginia Woolf pops up a couple of times, in Bakewell's later pages, to appreciate Montaigne's "beautiful vision of generations interlinked" and to endorse his vision of life as an aim and purpose "unto itself." It's not at all surprising that the author of A Room of One's Own should so admire the modest sage of the tower. The minds of several centuries now have been "threaded together" in an open-ended conversation with the humbly great Essayist, in a way that presages Richard Rorty's vision of philosophy as a perpetual conversation across time and place. 

And the affirmation of life as its own end echoes another Rorty theme, the repudiation of anything non-human as eligible or worthy to resolve our inescapably human problems and conflicts. There's never been a less "authoritarian" mind than Montaigne's. Hence my wish to enlist him as a pioneering humanist and primordial pragmatist.

There's one other reservation I cannot resist mentioning. 

Bakewell concludes with an image of Montaigne engaging with his cat. "They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes." And in that glance, we're to believe, he found the seed of "his whole philosophy."

In the glance of an aloof, indifferent feline. Really?

For most of us, I think, that's the wrong answer. 

But never mind. Que sais je?

n oor wot

To the journey

LISTEN. In our Happiness reading today we find Montaigne audaciously telling the king that if he likes the book he must like the author. But is that so audacious? Of course books convey the core humanity of their creators. The good ones do, at any rate. Montaigne must have inspired Whitman's “This is no book, / Who touches this touches a man . . . ”

We noted of Kant, in CoPhi, that he'd never ranged further than forty miles from his native Konigsberg. But Susan Neiman reminds us what an ordeal it would have been, to traverse such "stony excuses for roads" in the 18th century. Travel must have been even more of an "extreme sport" in Montaigne's day, never knowing when you might happen upon plague or pirates.

Nonetheless, Montaigne loved "the feeling of going with the flow" and "avoided all plans." Abroad in the land he saw "everything afresh and with full attention." When's the last time most of us really did that?  I'm always astounded at fellow flyers who lower the window shades before the plane even ascends. How blase we've become about getting from A to B. 

And the daily commute is more harrowing than adventuresome. On my way to school yesterday I passed the burnt shell of a truck on I24, hoping the driver got out in time. The return trip, which I always postpone 'til 6 to avoid the worst traffic, was still intolerably dense with dangerously reckless lane-switching Richard Petty wannabes. 

I spoke with the metro bus driver outside my building the other day, hoping he'd tell me his trip had quickened since the last time I rode twenty years ago or so. It hasn't. But one of these days the stress of the drive is going to finally be too much, worth trading for a little extra transit time detouring to Smyrna and La Vergne while leaving the driving to a pro. 

First-world twenty-first century problems, right? If Montaigne could remount his horse, I can hop back in the Corolla. Today, anyway.

Montaigne aspired to a cosmopolitan identity, and accordingly sought (and gained) Roman citizenship. Nowadays you don't have to align with imperial national power, to claim such a status. You just have to renounce narrow nationalism, One of the great puzzles of this historical moment, surely, is why in recent years we've seen such a retrograde march backwards to the last refuge of scoundrels. Real patriots are at home everywhere. With enough of them we'll eventually defeat Make [____] Great Again nationalistic bluster and nonsense. 

Montaigne shared an odd attitude with Freud, when viewing antiquities and relics: first wowed, then underwhelmed. Reality always has a hard time competing with our dreams and fantasies. Analyze that, Herr Doktor Professor. Is our dreamscape too large? Or too small?

Lend ears to all and mind to none, was Montaigne's Pyrrhonian principle. Listen up, but keep an open mind. Seems a reasonable approach, but of course we want our leaders to sift the relevant evidence slowly and judiciously and then to issue a judgment and lead. Temperamental skeptics are possibly not generally well-suited for that form of pro-activity. A philosopher's better place is probably on the sidelines. Same for academics generlly. Trouble is, our "leaders" tend not to understand the value of academic detachment. Like Georgia's board of regents they're prepared to toss tenure and academic freedom.

Was Montaigne "an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher"? If you write about everything, you'll eventually philosophize. But the best philosophers, premeditated or not, understand that everything is their proper purview. The trick is figuring out which dots connect to which, and which are best left to stand alone. That's the essayists' mission. The English Montaignes, the William Hazlitts, aimed to. be "alert to everyday life as it really is." Shouldn't that be every philosopher's aim? Relevance is no accident.

In honor of the Hazlitts, here's their best line: "Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking!"

Or not.

The nectar is in the journey!

More than happiness

LISTEN. Who could ask for anything more? Cards have now won eleven in a row. I want twelve. 

Stoics and Buddhists, according to our new author in Happiness today, want more. But more what? More life? More time? More equanimity? More acceptance? Just more, says Thor. "I just think that’s what being a New Yorker is all about, being hungry for more," says the star hurler with the high school education who is also "a  multidimensional human being with feelings and problems and goals outside of sports."

 More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age is Antonina Macaro's contribution to the growing body of literature commending "mindfulness" and (in the blurbed words of secular Buddhist Stephen Batchelor) "the pragmatic and therapeutic dimensions of philosophy." 

Owen Flanagan is another secularist who finds natural wisdom in Buddhism. Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True) too. “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” Wright and Stoic resurrector Massimo Pigliucci agree that Buddhists and Stoics like Marcus Aurelius come to similar conclusions "from a different metaphysical starting point."

“Think, remind yourself every time do you have a problem, every time you have an issue with other people, remind yourself of the big picture. You think about the extent of time, think about the extent of space, and the part that you are within it, and you will see that, (a) your particular concerns are actually not that important, but also, (b) that you are connected to everything else and that therefore the rational thing to do for you as a human being is to try to do your best to improve society at large."

“The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death.” ― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

Macaro declares herself neither Buddhist nor Stoic, favoring Aristotle and noting that Epicurus has yet to enjoy a resurgence of interest and attention akin to that lately visited on the Stoics. She notes as well the Stoic connection to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Therapy is of coure the keyword, and the binding thread of most ancient philosophies. Relieving distress and improving the experienced quality of lives was pretty much the entire point. But that's not to say that happiness is the entire point. "Happiness is not everything." But it may be the thing most indicative of whether our therapeutics are working. 

Stoics are not Skeptics, but if there's a significant connection between Stoics and Buddhists it's natural to wonder about the connection between Buddhists and Skeptics too. Was Pyrrho influenced by Buddhists? Committing to firm beliefs about the nature of reality, for instance, seems to have been anathema to both traditions. Not to commit to beliefs, even provisionally and experimentally, is to travel without a map (or gps). It doesn't seem smart. It doesn't seem likely to work, if one of the points of a journey is to arrive at a destination. Or at least approach it. So: is happiness a destination, or a journey?

Well it's both, isn't it? So shouldn't we want more reliable maps, more accurate satellite positioning, more stable infrastructure of all kinds, smooth roads and clear skies and plenty of pleasant diversions along the way? And more charging stations for our more efficient and eco-friendly vehicular conveyances?

Lots of metaphors to unpack, then, on the road to less suffering and more happiness.  Will metaphysics help or hinder? Will god-talk? James said his religious act was to defend experience against "philosophy," and that in general the religious impulse for most of us is driven not by a yearning for that sort of transcendence. What do Buddhists and Stoics think about that?

And what do they think about Nabokov's "common sense" view of our predicament, our "cradle above the abyss," our "brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"?  What do we?

I think Humbert-squared's creator was on to something uncommonly acknowledged, with those stark images. As was the Venerable Bede, which is why this was our wedding scroll:

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark...It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle." --Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

Contrary to the popular notion of cold dispassionate Stoics and monkish meditating Buddhists, then, we'll treasure human connection above all, if we truly seek a life of more happiness. We'll value community, we'll work on relationships, we'll want to leave a legacy. We'll care about what life is going to be like here, after we're gone.

And in the words of the late psycho-novelist Irvin Yalom, we'll learn to "temper the anguish of our finitude" in the face of life's brevity, fragility, and beauty. We'll realize the rainbow wisdom that "we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones..."

We'll ride our winning streaks. Life brings suffering, of course, lots of it. But it also brings pleasure and joy. Happy people get this. And they want more.

Stoics & Epicureans

LISTEN. It's Star Trek Day AND Hall of Fame Induction Day. 55 Years since I first started following the exploits of Kirk and Spock and Brock and Gibson... And did you see what #55 did in St. Louis last night! 

Mr. Spock is the best candidate for a segue to today's CoPhi content, I suppose, behind his half-human stoical facade. The enduring epicurean friendship of Pujols and Molina might be another.

Live long and prosper, and seek insight into the conditions of good and happy life. Having and treasuring elective passions of no ultimate consequence is surely one of those. See Bertrand Russell on "impersonal interests" (Conquest of Happiness, ch15)...

==

“Insight,” Josiah Royce’s name for philosophy–“this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth…this game of reflection”–sponsors, he says, the philosopher’s “return to life.”

Return to life – I don’t recall being at all struck by that phrase or even noticing it, on my first reading of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It may have registered subliminally, though, because it grabbed me sharply later when I came across William James’s insistence that “the return to life can’t come about by talking.” 

Curious indeed. I wonder if Royce and James talked about that. They must have, they talked incessantly. James was sure that Royce’s talk led to the wrong “insight,” the metaphysical idealism which–from James’s point of view–subsumes individuals under an Absolute scheme of rational order (“intellectualism”) that absorbs their autonomy and co-opts their freedom. Royce, for his part, was convinced that James’s talk led to intellectual anarchy and atomistic isolation. 

Both were sure that life itself, or rather our sense of continuity with all the currents of life, hung in the balance. Both avidly sought the terms of our return. Ours? Or theirs? Most non-philosophers, and perhaps most people generally, are unaware of feeling so entirely detached from life that they must urgently investigate the way home. We all have our bad days, but many fewer of us regularly experience an Oz-like “not in Kansas anymore” sense of ourselves as cut off from the only life we’ve known and loved. Or say so in public, anyway. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland are exceptional and extreme. Most of us escape the rabbit hole. Right? 

Well, James and Royce were exceptional. Both thought it their job to clear the path back from Wonderland, back to Kansas, back to life as they thought they knew it. “I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe’s hash in one more book,” James mocked himself and his vocation a few short years before he died. The hash remains unsettled, though it must be said that James’s empiricist form of settling has enjoyed more general sympathy in the decades since his and Royce’s departure than the latter’s absolute metaphysical idealist approach. But as we know, popularity is not the last word. Words aren’t even the last word. “I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk…” 

The Stoics and Epicureans, like the Skeptics before them, understood too that “this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth” has to issue in something more tangible than talk if it’s to provide useful therapy. 

An old post:

There are three obstacles to happiness, Epicurus said– fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods– but all can be removed easily enough.

“Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it… Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. Accept the pain, embrace the sting… and you’ve vanquished your worst foe, the one in your head.” (J.M. Hecht)

Strike one, strike two… and since any gods there may happen to be, out there in the empty spaces between the stars, are quite evidently “totally unconcerned with human affairs,” fear strikes out. Be happy.

Seneca‘s end was not so happy, but it was more or less consistent with his life. He did not strain against the leash of perceived necessity. But does he illustrate the limits the of therapeutic acceptance, and cross the line into defeatist resignation? [text… J-L David painting]

Other Stoics are better role-models. Cicero‘s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) is a neglected classic. Bottom line: “If you want truth, you have to avoid making up anything.”

Marcus Aurelius had a cold unblinking eye for harsh home-truths. He poses a question never more timely than right now, for a celebrity-besotted society like ours:

He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will also die very soon… But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what then is this to thee? And I say not what is it to the dead, but what is it to the living?

Not enough to live for, is what. But the Philosopher-Emperor finds life worth living all the same, for those who cultivate a properly-stoic sensibility. Contented are those who learn to comprehend the universe,

by contemplating the eternity of time, and observing the rapid change of every several thing, how short is the time from birth to dissolution, and the illimitable time before birth as well as the equally boundless time after dissolution.

Our time is brief, but  so then also is our pain. From this perspective, the trite modern phrase about not sweating the small stuff (because it’s all small) can become meaningful and profound.

The skeptic Sextus Empiricus offers an interesting observation on anthropomorphic God-projection, as Jennifer Hecht summarizes: divine virtues are thought to be “fully realized versions of human virtues.” But “that did not make sense unless God had our weaknesses.”

Weaknesses like impotence, fallibility, and ignorance: whose acknowledgement by us is also our greatest strength. So, says Sextus, your God is too small.

But of course, as a skeptic, he must always add: for all we know.

10.2.19

Stoics & Epicureans @dawn

==

"I too am an Epicurean..." 

And, see Jefferson in Fantasyland p.51: "Question with boldness even the existence of a god..."

Skeptics, fake and for real

We're still in the deep freeze here, with classes canceled for a third consecutive day. But we're more fortunate than many, in places like Austin, we still have power and heat and light. So why not think about some old dead French philosophers? Weather is a passing thing (though climate is more persistent), doubt and uncertainty are forever.

LISTEN (recorded Sep. 2020). Tomorrow in CoPhi we'll turn to three French philosophers, Descartes the pretend-skeptic, Montaigne the real one, and Pascal the gambler who wanted desperately to suppress his doubts in deference to the promises of faith.

Rene Descartes "meditated" himself into a conjured and contrived form of doubt, but never really doubted for an instant that the world revealed by the senses--beginning with the senses themselves, and our perception of ourselves as sensate creatures capable of encountering a world--is real enough. What he doubted was not his and our existence as embodied knowers, but the status of that knowledge. For him, if we're not indubitably certain then we know nothing.

C.S. Peirce the fallibilist, as noted in How the World Thinks, said it's an error to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in real life. That's one of Descartes's errors. His mind-body "ghost in the machine" dualism is another. The worry that life is but a dream is fun to discuss and make movies about (Matrix, Inception etc.) but whether we're dreams or dreamers may, as the Chinese sage said, be a distinction without a practical difference.

Blaise Pascal is best known for his famous Wager and its "What have you got to lose?" premise, but I'm more struck by his statement that the immensity and silence of the night sky terrified him. Fear in general seems to have motivated his approach to theology, specifically fear of eternal damnation. As we said in one of our Zoom sessions yesterday, fear-based thinking and living is ill-advised in politics. Probably in religion too.

Michel du Montaigne's rhetorical/skeptical question was Que sais-je? What do I know? The answer depends on what we want from knowledge. If not Cartesian certainty, but practical guidance tempered by humility and a willingness to revise our beliefs and practices in the light of what we learn, then I think he knew quite a lot. He learned to get back on the horse that throws you, and knew that life should not be lived in fear of dying or anything else.

In Fantasyland Kurt Andersen says Christian religiosity is "the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all" (89), and that Enlightenment skepticism received a religious make-over in America that predisposed the national mind to become an incubator of conspiracy-mindedness. The QAnon nonsense is just the latest incarnation of an old tendency, going back to the Freemasons whose big secret mission, said Ben Franklin, was that they had none.

Wouldn't it be nice if nations and traditions just stopped insisting on exclusive divine sanction for their beliefs?

In How the World Thinks we wonder about Islamic notions of "perfect divine transcendental unity" and their dis-unifying consequences.

Is ordinary experience, day to day, "nothing more than a powerful illusion"? 149 Does anyone ever really act as if they believed that? Is it possible to function effectively and happily with such an attitude? Or in predestination and one's pre-"recorded destiny"? 154 Or in natural disasters that kill innocent people according to "God's will" for which the victims are nonetheless "culpable"? 155

More too on Harry Frankfurt's "bullshit" (162) and Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" and Stephen Hawking's greatly exaggerated reports of the demise of philosophy (167). And a question about reductionism that reminds me of a mantra we met in the Atheism course several years ago: "physics fixes the facts." But not all of them, Baggini says, not if fixing means reducing. There are no car batteries in fundamental physics...

WJ 4 -- "Sustaining a thought"

LISTEN. With all due respect to free will skeptics like the estimable Gregg Caruso, I think James's use of the concept -- understood explicitly in terms of sustained effortful attention as a lifeline and a purchase on what he called "the moral business" -- casts the typical academic free will/determinism "business" in shade. Like now-musty old wrangles over materialism and idealism, much scholarship surrounding this issue is simply irrelevant, from a humane point of view.

From 2009:

Last week time in Robert Richardson's James bio, our budding philosopher "just about touched bottom." He'd lost his dearest friend, possibly the love of his life. He couldn't commit to anything. He couldn't envision his own future. He needed something solid and reliable to hold onto, something to embolden his will and get him up and doing.

On the last day of April, 1870, young William James recorded a new diary entry: " I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. [He's been having a lot of those!] I finished the first part of Renouvier's 2nd Essay and saw 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-- untl next year-- that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."

And: "Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative... needful for the acquisition of habits." Young Willy already knows what older William will make so much of in Principles of Psychology, where habit is christened "the enormous fly-wheel of society."

And, explicitly rejecting suicide as an un- "manly" choice, he writes: "(I will) believe in my individual reality and creative power... I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built on doing and creating and suffering."

He's firmly rounded the corner on his darkest days, and is moving towards the light-- or at least trying to talk himself into it.

Originally published 10.2.09


Charles Renouvier (Information Ph'er)... How I Arrived At This Conclusion: A Philosophical Memoir

A bigger picture

When the big picture keeps getting darker, writes Margaret Renkl (as paraphrased by a Times headline-maker) it helps to zoom. Chance the Gardener was right, there will be new growth in spring. That's the bigger picture.  But zoom in, for a closer peek into dark corners, or out, for a more expansive view? In reveals life in fine-grained detail, the not-quite-micro world we normally miss. 

Bigger still is the cosmic perspective that only comes into focus when we zoom out, so effectively refracted in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. "The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.” Well, we bring our capacity to notice and appreciate the beauty, and to talk about it. There are always better things to talk about than most of what preoccupies us day to day. We must put the news in its place.

In CoPhi today we turn to the ancient Skeptics, whose unwillingness to commit and thus risk error and possible conflict shrinks and diminishes the picture dramatically. The better skeptic commits to the search for knowledge and truth, even while doubting its completion. We also note Dayton Tennessee's outsize claim to evolutionary-historical importance. Ask me about my first landlord.

In A&P we again wonder if justice can be retributive or retribution just, and entertain a view called neuronaturalism -- the thesis that, in imagining options, evaluating them, and making a decision, "each of those mental processes just is (or is realized in) a complex set of neural processes which causally interact in accord with the laws of nature." 

Part of my neural processes are already on their way to Chicago, where I'm scheduled to participate in a panel for the William James Society. One of our panelists has had to withdraw because her flight from China has been cancelled, hope the forecast of a big snowfall doesn't cancel mine from Nashville.

I'll be continuing my reflections on James and his pal Josiah Royce, and whether I've long tilted too far to the former's corner without giving the idealist his due. In other words, have I missed a bigger picture in which pragmatist and idealist stride together in affirmation of naturalism, meliorism, and "the beloved community"? Probably.

“Unless you can find some sort of loyalty," said Royce, "you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.” My advocacy of James is some sort of loyalty, but it doesn't (I now think) require or gain from a repudiation of his friend's mostly-complementary non-competing views. 

“If this life is not a real fight," said James, "in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

There's still room in Royce's world for nobility in the fight for liberty and justice for all. I didn't see that before, now I do. I'm finally seeing a bigger picture.

Stoics & Epicureans and the return to life

LISTEN. "Insight," Josiah Royce's name for philosophy--"this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth...this game of reflection"--sponsors, he says, the philosopher's "return to life."

Return to life - I don't recall being at all struck by that phrase or even noticing it, on my first reading of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It may have registered subliminally, though, because it grabbed me sharply later when I came across William James's insistence that "the return to life can't come about by talking." 

Curious indeed. I wonder if Royce and James talked about that. They must have, they talked incessantly. James was sure that Royce's talk led to the wrong "insight," the metaphysical idealism which--from James's point of view--subsumes individuals under an Absolute scheme of rational order ("intellectualism") that absorbs their autonomy and co-ops their freedom. Royce, for his part, was convinced that James's talk led to intellectual anarchy and atomistic isolation. 

Both were sure that life itself, or rather our sense of continuity with all the currents of life, hung in the balance. Both avidly sought the terms of our return. Ours? Or theirs? Most non-philosophers, and perhaps most people generally, are unaware of feeling so entirely detached from life that they must urgently investigate the way home. We all have our bad days, but many fewer of us regularly experience an Oz-like "not in Kansas anymore" sense of ourselves as cut off from the only life we've known and loved. Or say so in public, anyway. Alice's adventures in Wonderland are exceptional and extreme. Most of us escape the rabbit hole. Right? 

Well, James and Royce were exceptional. Both thought it their job to clear the path back from Wonderland, back to Kansas, back to life as they thought they knew it. "I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book," James mocked himself and his vocation a few short years before he died. The hash remains unsettled, though it must be said that James's empiricist form of settling has enjoyed more general sympathy in the decades since his and Royce's departure than the latter's absolute metaphysical idealist approach. But as we know, popularity is not the last word. Words aren't even the last word. "I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk..." 

The Stoics and Epicureans, like the Skeptics before them, understood too that "this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth" has to issue in something more tangible than talk if it's to provide useful therapy. 

An old post:

There are three obstacles to happiness, Epicurus said– fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods– but all can be removed easily enough.

“Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it… Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. Accept the pain, embrace the sting… and you’ve vanquished your worst foe, the one in your head.” (J.M. Hecht)

Strike one, strike two… and since any gods there may happen to be, out there in the empty spaces between the stars, are quite evidently “totally unconcerned with human affairs,” fear strikes out. Be happy.

Seneca‘s end was not so happy, but it was more or less consistent with his life. He did not strain against the leash of perceived necessity. But does he illustrate the limits the of therapeutic acceptance, and cross the line into defeatist resignation? [text… J-L David painting]

Other Stoics are better role-models. Cicero‘s De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) is a neglected classic. Bottom line: “If you want truth, you have to avoid making up anything.”

Marcus Aurelius had a cold unblinking eye for harsh home-truths. He poses a question never more timely than right now, for a celebrity-besotted society like ours:

He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will also die very soon… But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what then is this to thee? And I say not what is it to the dead, but what is it to the living?

Not enough to live for, is what. But the Philosopher-Emperor finds life worth living all the same, for those who cultivate a properly-stoic sensibility. Contented are those who learn to comprehend the universe,

by contemplating the eternity of time, and observing the rapid change of every several thing, how short is the time from birth to dissolution, and the illimitable time before birth as well as the equally boundless time after dissolution.

Our time is brief, but  so then also is our pain. From this perspective, the trite modern phrase about not sweating the small stuff (because it’s all small) can become meaningful and profound.

The skeptic Sextus Empiricus offers an interesting observation on anthropomorphic God-projection, as Jennifer Hecht summarizes: divine virtues are thought to be “fully realized versions of human virtues.” But “that did not make sense unless God had our weaknesses.”

Weaknesses like impotence, fallibility, and ignorance: whose acknowledgement by us is also our greatest strength. So, says Sextus, your God is too small.

But of course, as a skeptic, he must always add: for all we know.

https://osopher.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/epicureans-stoics-skeptics/

Stoics & Epicureans @dawn... Stoicism-g'r

Nothing matters? I'm skeptical

LISTEN. As late as about 3 pm yesterday I was prepared to declare, on the last day of the 162-game regular major league baseball season, that it didn't matter to me who won the National League Central Division pennant. Then, my team ran the score against the Chicago Cubs up to 9-0. Suddenly I was nine years old again and nothing mattered more. That's how you stay forever young, and reconnect with Trump-loving family members. Is it a cure for overdoing democracy? I believe it just might be.

Pyrrho and the ancient skeptics didn't want us to have beliefs, but also somehow wanted us to believe (or entertain the notion?) that "nothing matters" -- or so we're told in our CoPhi chapter on them. But would it matter, if nothing matters? This is no deep paradox, just a shallow confusion. But it makes for good animated satire.

	Philosophy Matters (@PhilosophyMttrs)
10/4/18, 12:30 AM Nothing Matters Part 2: Rick and Morty and Nietzsche ... buff.ly/2yavB9d

In any event, much matters. The late Christopher Hitchens' statement about nihilism and meaning matters to me:

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Hitch-22 [10.4.18... More old "skeptics" posts]

==
But enough of skeptics and nihilists, I want to think instead of Josiah Royce and his 1892 Spirit of Modern Philosophy. It so earnestly affirmed that life and ideas matter, and that philosophy is the discipline most directly devoted to their articulation, that it would never have occurred to me back in 1978, when I first picked it up as a green undergrad (when green still just meant naive and uninstructed), to give either nihilism or extreme Pyrrhonic skepticism a moment's consideration. It helped me, back then, to imagine I had a clue of what the German pre-Heglian metaphysical idealists Fichte and Schelling were up to, with their mystifying talk of the autonomous noumenal self, objective transcendental consciousness, etc. I'm scheduled to share that reconstructed imagination with a gathering of Royce scholars at Vanderbilt in a little over two weeks.  I begin with this text:

No, the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. His immediate end may have been unattained; but thousands of years may not be long enough to develop for humanity the full significance of his reflective thought.

This early (for undergrad me) statement of the long view, always the best philosophers' reflexive purview, anticipated (I see now in retrospect, looking back) the radically mind-expanding shift of perspective I'd find in The Long Now - the raised-consciousness commitment to deep time as ours, in our present, and the eponymous Stewart Brand-led foundation that's been raising consciousness and ethical acuity with projects like the Clock of the Long Now.  The concept of a 10,000 year clock, meant to symbolize and motivate the long-term thinking we need to break our cycle of addiction to unsustainable short-sighted consumerism, was Danny Hillis's idea. Announcing it in Wired in the millennial year 01995, in the spirit of Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, he professed:

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future. 

Of course, as Greta Thunberg has reminded us, you can't just hope. You have to earn it. You have to do something.

More Epicurean (etc.) happiness

LISTEN. Following up on our first Happiness class discussion of Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, & Cynics Tuesday, here's an old post on Jennifer Michael Hecht's discussion of graceful-life philosophies...

Hecht @home

Jennifer Hecht contributes a weekly post to “The Best American Poetry” blog, ranging over all kinds of topics including happiness and atheism. Take a look.

She noted recently, at the passing of People’s Historian Howard Zinn (who inspired both impassioned admiration and criticism), that he blurbed Doubt.

And check out her musings on “poetic atheism“: How strange to find our little thinking and blinking faces amid a universe that is for the most part not alive at all. Believers say,  “If this weirdness is true, why not believe angels,” but adding nonsense is not helpful.

Hecht is one of the breed of kinder, gentler atheists, like Rebecca Goldstein (of whom a reviewer writes: “Whether or not God exists, in moments of transcendent happiness we all feel a love beyond ourselves, beyond anything. [She] doesn’t want to shake your faith or confirm it”).

Neither shaking nor confirming? Sounds agnostic, though it may simply be “doubtful” and pluralistic. In any case, she has a rich and largely-neglected story to tell. The New Atheists stand on the shoulders of giants. Atheism is not new.

About those Greeks…

Hecht really sheds fresh light, in Doubt: a history, on the naturalizing impulse of the pre-Socratic and Hellenic thinkers. For instance, Democritus (the beautiful regularity of the universe was neither created nor maintained by the guiding intelligence of a god), the Cynics (Diogenes‘ advice is that we stop distracting ourselves with accomplishments, accept the meaninglessness of the universe, lie down on a park bench and get some sun while we have the chance)and Stoics (feeling a part of the community of the universe) and Epicureans (there are no ghostly grownups watching our lives and waiting to punish us… we might as well make an art of appreciating pleasure… in this beautiful moment one is alive) and Skeptics (I do not lay it down that honey is sweet but I admit that it appears to be so), with fresh slants on Socrates (among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth) and Plato (whose form of the Good has been illicitly conflated with God for two millennia).

What I like most in her section on Greek doubt (or as I prefer, Greek spirit): the forest metaphor, which offers the most timeless but (in an age of restless spiritual “cherry [*berry?]-picking”) also timely wisdom: The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest… 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… Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time.

As Epicurus realized, it is accepting the finality of death that makes it possible to enjoy the pleasures of the garden. This is a very different garden than the one we got kicked out of in the Eden story. This time you have to eat from the tree of knowledge to get in.

That’s James and Sagan redux: at home in the universe, at ease with the human condition.

==
And, another old post that may be worth pondering today...

Back to Pyrrho and Epicurus... but first a quick follow-up on Plato and Aristotle. Check out this version of School of Athens.

As for Aristotle’s eudaimonia, in some ways it anticipated Epicurus’s garden and what Jennifer Michael Hecht calls “graceful-life philosophies” that proclaim in all simplicity: “we don’t need answers and don’t need much stuff, we just need to figure out the best way to live.” Then, and only then, will we be happy.

As for Pyrrho: If you’d asked him Who rules the Universe?, he might have replied: Lord knows. Cats, again. And pigs.

 

Reminding us of Pyrrho’s famous pig, who impressed Montaigne by riding out a storm at sea with much greater equanimity (and, crucially, much less comprehension) than his human shipmates, and of J.S. Mill’s declaration that it’s “better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” Hecht comments: “This whole pig-versus-philosopher debate is pretty hilarious, yes?”

Yes. But I agree with Spinoza and Hecht. “The happiness of a drunkard is not the happiness of the wise,” though of course there are happy occasions when it has its place too. Bottom line: “Knowledge and wisdom are worth it,” it can be everything to have found true love and meaningful work, and both– all-- can end in a flash, without warning. Stay on your toes, but don’t fret too much about the storm.

One more little animal image for Pyrrho, whose name I prefer to pronounce compatibly with this mnemonic trick: just remember that a pyrrhonic skeptic is like a piranha fish, toothily devouring every proposed candidate for belief. Cats and pigs too, probably.

And as for Epicurus, Jennifer Hecht‘s got his number. It’s listed.

For an Epicurean, somewhere there are beings that are truly at peace, are happy… The mere idea of this gentle bliss is, itself, a kind of uplifting dream. After all, we human beings know a strange thing: happiness responds to circumstances, but, basically, it is internal. We can experience it when it happens to come upon us; we can induce it with practices or drugs; but we cannot just be happy.

No, we must work to “solve the schism” between how we feel and how we want to feel. Happiness is a choice and a lifetime endeavor, and though it comes easier for some than for others there are tips and tricks we can use to trip our internal happy meters and achieve ataraxia, peace of mind, simple contentment, “tranquillity, or the freedom from disturbance and pain that characterizes a balanced mind and constitutes its first step toward the achievement of pleasure.”

Stop fearing the harmless and remote gods, Epicurus said. Stop fearing your own death, it’s not (as Wittgenstein would echo, millennia later) an event you’ll ever experience. “Life is full of sweetness. We might as well enjoy it.”

*Sissela Bok calls Epicurus a hedonist, but that's only technically correct. Yes, he said pleasure's at the heart of happiness. But what kind of pleasure?

A happy life is tranquil, simple, loving, and above all free from pain, fear, and suffering, available to all regardless of social status, nationality, or gender. Such a life of pleasure, Epicurus held, would of necessity have to be a virtuous one; ...

That’s Alain de Botton, author of a text I used to use in this course, and controversial proponent of religion for atheists. (Don’t confuse him with Boethius.) His interview with Krista Tippett was instructive. Like Jennifer Hecht, he wants us to use philosophy to enhance our bliss and sweeten our dreams.

Pyrrhonian deep skepticism and moral/cultural relativism share a common root. Simon Blackburn voices the right reply to those who say we can function without beliefs, or without discriminating between better and worse beliefs, when he points out that this is simply impractical and socially dysfunctional. Not only might you get run over by a racing chariot or step off a cliff, you also scatter seeds of discord within your community and perhaps even your family.

So I too “would defend the practical importance of thinking about ethics on pragmatic grounds.” To pretend  with “Rosy the Relativist” that we can all simply have and act on our own truths, our own facts, without confronting and negotiating our differences and critically evaluating our respective statements of (dis)belief, really is “farcical.” Lord knows.

I’ve been thinking some more, btw, about a student’s question whether Oprah is a philosopher. I’d say she has philosophical moments, sometimes asks the hard questions, and is indeed seeking to have and share a “graceful” (if opulent) life. So, sure. Same for the poets (like Whitman) who let us off the hook for contradicting ourselves (“I contain multitudes.”) I don’t think the Philosophy Club should be exclusive or restrictive. Many of my colleagues would disagree, amongst themselves, at their annual association meetings and in their ivory towers. They’ll never give me a car, either.

Anyway: we won’t suffer a meaning deficit, though, if we live simply and naturally in the company of friends who’ll help us conquer our fears and address our many questions about life, the universe, and everything. That’s the Epicurean way, when we decide nature’s already provided enough for our peace of mind and our contentment. That’s ataraxia.

So finally there are these dots, connecting Epicurus and Pyrrho:

Epicurus, though no friend to skepticism, admired Pyrrho because he recommended and practiced the kind of self-control that fostered tranquillity; this, for Epicurus, was the end of all physical and moral science. Pyrrho was so highly valued by his countrymen that they honored him with the office of chief priest and, out of respect for him, passed a decree by which all philosophers were made immune from taxation.

Tranquility and a free ride: now that would make me happy. A free ride to the APA, not so much.
==
More oldies on this theme: Happily home... Safe at home... The triumph of experience... "Brave thinking about truth is the secret to happiness"