Garden wisdom

LISTEN. John Dewey got a mention in the Times. In an opinion piece, by an academic, but still it's a rare and welcome echo of a time in this country when philosophers' views were valued and sought after and considered by the broad educated public. Dewey's (and Molly Worthen's) rejection of academic irrelevance is as timely as ever.

I'm also happy this morning that one of my favorite novelists has a new book out. Richard Powers has just published Bewilderment. Hope for a Grieving Kid and Planet May Lurk in the Human Brain, headlines the Times review.  That sounds right. Where else are we going to find it? The brain is wider than the sky.

Also, the Cards won again. Nine straight. Roger Angell was surely right, “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team," but forming and honing the habit of caring is anything but foolish. It teaches me to care in class and in life about bigger things. It's an affiliation that pays its way. 

We conclude our very short intro to Epicureanism today. I wanted us to read it early in the semester because it's a view I find both enticing and challenging, and thus a good benchmark against which to measure subsequent Happiness philosophies.

I am enticed by the Epicurean appeal to friendship and small-scale community, the invitation to repudiate ungrounded fears of eternal perdition and a punitive afterlife, and the encouragement to reject the false promise of materialist consumerism. I am challenged by the suggestion that we can conscionably pursue our personal happiness in some remote garden, far removed from the push and pressure of politics. 

I hope our course generates enough smart deliberation to help me resolve the tension between enticement and challenge. Can I declare, with Mr. Jefferson, that I too am an Epicurean? 

If I cannot resolve the tension, I'll just have to continue to be a pragmatic pluralist with regard to Happiness. That is, I'll continue to deny that any single approach to our quarry is wholly and exclusively adequate. I'll continue to be enticed by Epicurean virtues and challenged by Epicurean disengagement. And I'll continue pursuing a good and happy life. One could do worse. As tensions go, it's not an unhappy one.

Next we'll consider their rivals the Stoics, in light of the stoic dimension of Buddhism. A central point of contrast is the notion that we ought to love our fate, and cultivate that attitude when it's not spontaneous. "It was necessary, the Stoics believed, to adopt a philosophical attitude towards the unfurling of events, understanding their inevitability... There is a beauty and nobility in the Stoic conception of amor fati..." Well, say the Epicureans, there's also beauty and nobility in resistance to fear and misery. They have "no such exalted notion of the ultimate wisdom of Providence and no... love of fate." 

I'm still with them, in that debate, but I look forward to our coming conversations. We'll see. We'll differ. We contain multitudes, it's very well that we'll contradict one another. That's one of the things friends are for.

==

LISTEN (9.'19). "For the Epicureans," writes Catherine Wilson, "politics implied a striving for power and admiration which was incompatible with virtue, pleasure, and peace of mind." So, they retreated to their garden outside the city and cultivated "true friendship." Tempting. I've definitely had a touch of the apolitical blues lately, the seductive cure for which seems to be disengagement from the civic arena and investment in relationships of trust and mutual support that don't depend on polarized party partisanship.

But somebody's got to hold the pols to account. It's a false dilemma that pits private against public life. Did the Stoics have a better understanding of this?

"The earliest humans, Lucretius proposed, were wild shaggy creatures living solitary lives in caves and forests... they raised themselves by degrees to a condition of civilization." Are we there yet? We're only as civilized as our institutions and practices and (as has been much remarked in the past three years) norms allow us to be. That's why even Epicureans sometimes have to summon the grit to exit the garden, enter the arena, and prosecute a case against those who threaten our tenuous hold on civilization in the name of truth and philosophy.  

"The normalization of Drumpf and Trumpism—allowing those things to be defined merely as a political problem needing a political cure—degrades democracy. Calculating political advantage, too, narrowly misses the point of taking part in politics, which is to defend values."

Or as old Neil, gadfly to southern men and Republican presidents from way back, said: let's impeach the president. Then, we can all "avoid contact with the person causing [us] pain." To do nothing in the face of his incessant insults and anti-democratic degradations would be to surrender to fatalism, and as Wilson concludes her little book:

Epicureanism is not a fatalistic philosophy. It lays great weight on human choices and preferences... It invites us to take pleasure in what is near at hand: in warmth, food, and drink, in moderation; in the company of those we happen, for whatever reason, to like; in the recurrence of spring after winter; and in the surround of foliage and flowers, and the appearance of new life.

There will be, as Chance the gardener (not rapper) knew, new growth in the garden in the spring. It's really very simple. And ordinary, and beautiful.

The library

LISTEN. Rained all weekend, so I didn't get to do the bikeride the doc finally greenlighted.

But I did have fun watching the Cards solidify the second wildcard, and the first installment of Ken Burns' latest trip down history lane. (And okay, I confess: the Titans' OT win in Seattle.) 

And reading.

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card, Arthur used to sing to our girls. 

(Older Daughter reminded me yesterday of another studious friend of our childhood, or rather her childhood and my lucky dadhood: Morris. Reminded me in turn of Wallace and Gromit and Frog and Toad...)

We're going to the Walker Library in CoPhi today and tomorrow, to prepare for October reports. After hearing from the librarians and reps of the writing center, I hope we'll have time to wander into the stacks. That was one of the more important components of my own undergraduate education at Mizzou, just roaming Ellis Library and pulling this or that volume from its random obscurity to see if it had anything to teach me. Kids these days don't do that or know why they'd want to. They don't know what they're missing.

Michel de Montaigne had a lovely personal library, up there in his tower. He knew that direct personal experience and vicarious experience via reading inform the best writing. He knew books, no less than life itself, had much to teach him. "Que sais-je?" ["What do I know?"] He knew quite a lot, actually, for a skeptic. PhilD

 

Maria Popova is a fan, of his, of books and libraries and reading generally, and of Sarah Bakewell's terrific introduction to Montaigne in How to Live.

What separated Montaigne from other memoirists of his day was that he didn’t write about his daily deeds and his achievements — rather, he contemplated the meaning of life from all possible angles, and in the process popularized the essay as a form. He began writing fairly late in life, when he was thirty-nine, and continued for twenty years, halted only by his death in 1592. The 107 essays he penned range across the entire spectrum of human concerns — from the grandly existential, like death and the art of living, to the universally human, like fear and friendship and sadness and love, to the seemingly trivial, like the customs of dress. Above all, however, he was interested in the simple yet infinitely profound question of how to live — which, Bakewell is careful to point out, is quite different from the ethical prescription of how we should live. She writes:

Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life — meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

Like Thoreau, he wrote of himself not so much from egocentrism but simply because first-person acquaintance is where we all must begin. "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

But readers get to know others much better, and are not restricted to the living. Or rather, readers live in the company of men and women of all ages. Writers live in the future too, or can at least imagine being read by future readers. 

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth... Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Carl Sagan

But as Mr. Twain pointed out, a person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't. And a citizenry that won't read, like those people on the bus in Mount Airy who insulted Ted Koppel yesterday on Sunday Morning, can't keep a democratic republic. 

See you at the library.

191 J23 Ol43

Material minds

LISTEN. Today in Happiness it's "Material Minds"--Epicureans believe in them--and "Religion and Superstition"--they don't. They don't, that is, believe in the supernatural sorts of religion that sponsor fear-mongering superstition. "The only incorporeal entity for the Epicureans was the void," in which nothing we'd call spiritual or soulful is apt to root... excepting, of course, our natural selves. "The mind grows up with the body," and departs with it. The entire interest and importance of life must find its place in the interim.

This may surprise or even shock the sensibilities of those who've been trained in the dualist mind-body tradition so favored for so long in the western philosophical tradition, but a corporeal notion of soul is actually "more appealing" than the strange specter of a "puppet-like" immaterial soul pulling our strings. The invasive alien-homunculus hypothesis is quite creepy, when you think about it.

[Before class, btw, there's another opportunity to participate in a public reading of the Constitution, in front of the Bragg Building. Yesterday's was kinda ruined by that fire-and-brimstone hellmonger who took up residence in front of Honors and forced us inside. But I did still get to read the 8th amendment and condemn cruel and unusual punishment. Time in the company of crazed fundy preachers counts as that, in my book.

Do any of us want to launch this season's Happiness Hour after class? Or is it still unwise to congregate in public places? If we do, it needs to be out on the patio.]

Epicureans are empiricists, insisting "that our beliefs about the physical world ought to be recognized as true or false by being tested against experience." Experience can of course be misleading, but it's only further experience that ever reveals its own past errors. The discernment of reality begins and ends with appearances. There is no ultimate touchstone of reality that is not itself another appearance. That's what Epicureans claim to know: a world of appearances. And they believe we need to keep on collecting appearances, if we value knowledge.

But they're not Berkeleyan empiricists. They're not metaphysical idealists in denial of material reality. They're atomists who believe in a spiritual but non-supernatural (and therefore mortal) dimension to life that we've got to grab and enjoy before the lights dim.

Hypothetical zombies aren't good at grabbing life and living in the light. Sure, "we can imagine brains like ours that are unconscious"--pretty sure I've encountered some--but they don't live the good life. They don't flourish. They don't achieve eudaimonia. That chance is solely ours.

And the Epicurean gods? They "neither create nor evaluate." They "do not care about us"... Who needs them? Well, maybe we need them as aspirational role models. They're "free of worry, fear, and vexation." Epicureans have high standards.

"Neuroscientists believe they have found areas of the brain that are particularly prone to religious ideation, as was suspected... by William James." But James still took religious experience seriously, and so (we may suppose) can modern-day Epicureans. What they won't take seriously is any suggestion that such ideation merits fear and superstition. But if your particular religious impulses quicken your heart and mind and give you some release from worry, fear, and vexation, well, pragmatic-pluralist Epicureans will take that seriously. We'll be suitably moved by such "ideals of piety and community" as can unite committed friends in the holy/secular communion of the Garden.

The expanded consciousness of a Democritean cosmopolite

LISTEN ('19). Today in Happiness we begin by noting the Epicureans' departure from both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in their thoroughly material approach to mind/soul. Our spirit is for them ineluctably embodied, anchored to our organism, dependent on our situation in the material world.

It's a feet-on-the-ground philosophy, a grounded worldview that potentially opens onto rich tapestries of experience. More ethereal souls would not understand, mediated as they would have to be in their recessive duality, cut off from the immediacy that may well be our surest source of happiness. “The notion that the soul is distributed and corporeal is in many ways more appealing than the notion that an incorporeal soul is lodged in the brain,” writes Catherine Wilson. As material spirits, our most ordinary encounters are capable of delighting us. Every fiber of our being may be alive and receptive to extraordinary perceptions.

May, not must. We have to attend to the inherent possibilities of delight, and constantly cultivate our perceptual acuity, lest we become dull and inured to the monotony of everydayness. If we don't, and if we've been saddled with a temperament given to misgiving and ruminative regret - very few of us, it seems, are entirely exempt from such feelings - we'll not flourish. "The worm at the core of our usual springs of delight can turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. But the music can commence again, and again and again, at intervals."

The music of life is available and on tap for those who've grasped their intrinsic consanguinity with the cosmos. You could call this insight Democritean cosmopolitanism. “To a wise man," wrote Democritus, "the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.” (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Elusive Structure of the Universe and the Journey to Quantum Gravity).

More simply: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." That's Carl Sagan, who was a big fan of Democritus.

The travel writer Pico Iyer just published an essay on this theme. In The Beauty of the Ordinary he writes of Fall and the cycles of the seasons,

the season’s special lesson is to cherish everything because it cannot last; from Vermont to Beijing, people relish autumn days precisely because they’re reminders of how much we cannot afford to take for granted, and how much there is to celebrate right now, this shining late September afternoon... I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring.And every day in late September brings us a little bit closer to October baseball. (Cards' magic number to clinch the Central is down to 3.) 

[And in 2021 I don't remember how that all played out. Is there a Happiness moral to be drawn? Maybe. I do know, in '21, that the Cards' sweep of the Mets last night that has them clinging to the second wildcard is making me happy this morning. Next they go head-to-head with the Padres, who are now their closest playoff rival. 

What matters, as Roger Angell has said, is our capacity to care... not about a game, about life. “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team..." But... (see slide #8)]

Bart Giamatti, not long before his own time here was cut tragically short, said he knew nothing's forever but needed to think so. "I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

George Santayana also said a similar thing. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."

And: "There's no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval." Life offers many happy returns, while we're here and paying attention in our animal bodies, with our animal minds.

But now, what if an artificially intelligent being emerges someday and somehow wires itself to attend to things and reflect on their beauty? Is that possible, conceivable, comprehensible by us? Would its "body" not then in some meaningful sense be the whole world?

But then, aren't ours - on the Democritean premise - that already? That which we perceive being inseparable from that with which we perceive, the composite of our material atomic substance, can't we already say we are the world? We don't need to de-corporalize and upload our consciousness, to have and enjoy this delightful insight. We just need to expand and open it.

Hobbes

LISTEN. In CoPhi today we take up Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. 

First, though, we participate in a public reading of the U.S. Constitution, a document that used to compel the reflexive assent of all our representatives in all three branches of the federal government. No more. So I think it's an entirely appropriate ritual demonstration of our commitment to the rule of law that we should line up behind the microphone in front of our building and take turns reading it out. Imagine what it will be like to live in this country when Constitutional law is no longer credible or enforced. Why, it might be something like living in a state of nature, in a war of all against all. It might be nasty, brutish, and short.

And we might find ourselves in that benighted condition sooner, not later, if we don't check the excesses of the Machiavellian "ends justify the means" politicians in our midst. There seem to be a lot more of them lately.

I confess, though, a grudging admiration for Hobbes, and not just because I'm so fond of his feline namesake. 

If I'd lived in (the original) Hobbes's time, in the Elizabethan age of English civil war, I too might also have thought that public civility, even simulated faux-civility, would only ever result from the top-down imposition of a regime of authoritarian intimidation. 

So here's a couple of old posts dedicated to the philosopher who warned us that our worst instincts are our strongest, and that we must "civilize" ourselves through fear not of one another but of a Leviathan state.

Hobbes “walked much and contemplated”

Machiavelli and Hobbes are on tap in CoPhi today. Students often come to them already intrigued with the former but unaware of the latter, though both their names have become adjectival terms of notoriety. Beware Machiavellian politicos and their ends-justify-the-means mentality, we all seem to have been forewarned, and beware Machiaveliian schemers generally. But while the last century spawned chilling examples of totalitarianism and its murderous toll, fewer of us have been alerted to the dangers of the Hobbesian superstate.

The explanation could have something to do with the evident sweetness of temper of “Tommy” Hobbes (as my old poli-sci prof at UMSL called him), who envisioned Leviathan but exemplified something more like the lamb in his personal conduct and bearing. Simon Critchley’s Book of Dead Philosophers offers an endearing glimpse of a true English eccentric. He “avoided excess ‘as to wine and women’ and stopped drinking at age sixty,” he “walked vigorously every day to work up a sweat… and expel any excessive moisture,” he sang “prick-songs” late at night to stimulate his lungs and lengthen his life.

My favorite thing about Hobbes remains, naturally, his peripatetic nature. He walked to work up a sweat but also to stimulate ideas, which he’d interrupt himself long enough to record by disengaging the quill from his walking stick. “He walked much and contemplated,” says Aubrey’s Life, “and he had in the head of his cane a pen and ink-horn, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it.”

Another explanation of the failure of “Hobbesian” to convey the menace it might is, of course, a certain sweet-natured cartoonish tiger-cat who resisted his namesake’s “war of all against all.”

“Hobbes was fond of his dram,” sang the Pythons. But he was fonder of his stick. His walking stick. (See below.)

I was amused when my old friend said he’d just spent five weeks in Britain and came away with nothing more philosophical than a visit to a castle where Hobbes had tutored. My colleague answered rightly by noting that an ancient English castle’s more likely to stimulate the philosophical imagination than is a dusty library in Tennessee. But in any event, Hobbes is a fascinating and over-maligned figure whose steps I look forward to tracking. As I wrote for students awhile back,

Thomas Hobbes is one of my favorite “authoritarians”: a walker who kept an inkwell in his walking stick, he lived to 91 in the 17th century and believed humans could be saved from themselves with the right kind of contract. Contrary to a student essay I once graded, he did not say pre-social contract humans were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes did say that’s what it would be like to live in a “state of nature,” without civil authority or police or government to keep the peace and impose order. It would be a “war of all against all.” If you don’t agree, asks Nigel Warburton in his Little History, why do you lock your doors?

Not, surely, because you think everyone’s out to get you. But it only takes a few miscreants, doesn’t it, to create an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust?

I’d like to think Hobbes might reconsider the extremity of his position, were he transported to our time. On the other hand, we might reconsider the benignity of ours, were we transported to his. Those were tough times: civil war, a king executed, murderous politics, etc. How much freedom would you trade for peace and safety, if there were no other way to secure it? How much have you? How secure do you feel? Still relevant questions in our time, and Hobbes’s answers were extreme indeed. But he was no monster, he was a peace-seeker and a civilizer. Most walkers are.

But, would life in a state of nature really be as bad as Hobbes thought? Most of us find most people less than totally distrustful, hostile, aggressive, and vicious, most of the time. On the other hand, we’re most of us hardly “noble savages” either. Civilization and its discontent-engendering institutions account for a percentage of everyday bad behavior, but surely not all of it.

The Hobbesian threat of insecurity and fear of violent death, in our time, may be great enough for most people to override their desire for personal freedom. Is safety more important than liberty? “Better red (or whatever) than dead?” Better to have government snoops monitoring your calls, emails, etc., than… than what, exactly?

Even if you agree with Hobbes that humans left to themselves would revert to base, aggressive, instinctive behavior, you may still also hesitate to agree that the only corrective for this condition is an all-powerful and authoritative central state. You may prefer not to concede the mechanistic, material model of humans as incapable of changing, of choosing to become more kind and compassionate, less fearful and selfish. You may hold out for a species capable of rewriting its default programming.

Speculations about human nature as inherently good or bad have always slighted the individuality of persons, absorbing it in abstractions about universal nature. We should seek instead to grasp the particularity of our separate natures. Our separate plural natures.

Philosophy's contribution to life

LISTEN. In Happiness today we consider  the Epicurean notion that "the alleviation of suffering and especially the suffering produced by fear and anxiety" is "the most important contribution of philosophy to life." That might be right. Surely, philosophies are deficient that fail to address the problem of suffering, that fail to acknowledge the contribution of fear and anxiety to our unhappiness. These are our problems, the gods have other problems of their own. If, that is, they have the problem and opportunity of existing in the first place.  

Or so it seems to us Epicureans. Epicurus said we can only be certain of what appears to us, of how things seem. Maybe philosophy can make still larger contributions. But fear-based suffering seems a good place to start.

"The god... who marks the sparrow's fall" would watch you and me too, presumably, but does the thought of constant survreillance make you happy? Many reformed ex-theists report feeling a tremendous release from judgment, upon abandoning the presumption of an ever-watchful eye in the sky. The Epicurean solution is divine apatheia. Gods should care less about our doings and sufferings. We breathe easier assuming they're not judging and inflicting. 

"Fearfulness promotes vigilance and caution" but may also reflect mistaken beliefs, so we're tasked to distinguish the fears worth heeding from those worth losing. What's on your legit-fear list? 

Mine includes climate change, authoritarian politicians, and mis-/dis-informed citizens. It does not include fear of a punitive afterlife and eternal damnation. I have a hard time imagining what it would be like really to harbor and entertain such fears as an adult human, though I remember clearly enough what it was like to be terrified by them as a child.

"Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the lord my soul to keep..." My parents, I always thought, were comparatively enlightened, progressive, and humane. But they taught me to recite that prayer. Or at least they didn't un-teach me, didn't insulate me from Southern Baptist hell-mongering Sunday School indoctrination. I'd had enough of it by age fourteen or so, having much earlier been frightened into "going forward" one Sunday morning and "repenting" so I could be "washed in the blood" etc. It all sounds so primitively barbaric. It was,though at the time it was just frightening and confusing. 

Will it ever be possible to discover how and why the structure and activity of atoms in the brain and nervous system give rise to consciousness and the subjective feeling of selfhood? And if we do discover that, will we feel somehow diminished in our humanity? Why should we? I can't think of any good reason. The peculiar configuration of atoms each of us instantiates, and the felt experience of being that particular configuration, is in each instance unique. The perception of self is perhaps the most human thing about us, with all the hazard and possible good fortune that implies. Our challenge is to gain self-possession and the right measure of self-reliance without being seduced by the dark side of too much self-importance. Egoman, as my friend says, must be held at bay.

Epicurus had a materialist view of soul, and if souls there be that's how they must be: parts of the finite organism, not ethereal fly-away free riders. And souls must be renewable in a secular return to life sense, for the duration of their mortal tenure. They must come to understand themselves as the ongoing "renewal of the living world... even in the constant presence of death and dying." They must nurture and prepare their replacements, the ever-aborning new souls, to perform the same function. And enjoy it.

Lucretius: "So the aggregate of all things is constantly refreshed, and mortal creatures live by mutual exchange... at short intervals the generation of living things are replaced, and, like runners, pass on the torch of life from hand to hand." Releasing the torch invites peaceful sleep, but not annihilation. The atoms disperse, new life is configured, and the race continues. 

That's what Robin Ince meant when he said some part of you may once have been, or may yet be, "mountains and apples and pulsars and... Napoleon's knee. That is a good thing. Unlike the occupants of the universe, the universe itself is not wasteful. We are all totally recyclable. And when we die, we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs. This is a wonderful thing." Weird and wonderful and unwasteful.

So it's not a perfect world, Plato's Timaeus notwithstanding. But it might just be good enough for the likes of us. Deconstructing the fears and anxieties that would block our embrace and enjoyment of the good-enough world is a worthy contribution. I'd just add a pragmatic/meliorist element: learn also to enjoy the effort of making good-enough better.

Free

LISTEN. A good night's sleep, especially after a bad one, is restorative. Of perspective, and cheer, and gratitude. I got one last night. Thank goodness, or just good fortune.  Either way, acknowledging and expressing gratitude is itself restorative, as I heard A.J. Jacobs saying in the middle of the night Saturday on my smart speaker when (I hypothesize) our Ubered Paneer Masala wasn't sitting quite right. Among the wise insights he shared with TED was the Jamesian psychology he paraphrased: it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than the reverse. Maybe that's how Augustine of Hippo finally consummated his conversion and stopped acting licentiously... 

I'm grateful to Younger Daughter, may I say, for the exquisite crab boil she arranged for us this weekend. It was also a pleasure to revisit the charming toy store we used to habituate, and walk the dogs together Sunday morning. And I'm grateful for the mlb wildcard race my team's still in. 

I also heard sage practical "health and wellbeing"advice on BBC 4, urging "small chunks of exercise across your day." Get up and move for five minutes, or ten, now and then. Take the stairs. Circle the building. Or, as I learned to do this summer when observing post-operative restrictions on my mobility, pace your driveway. Or your cell, if you're Boethius. It adds up. Might even set you free. 

On a more somber note, with the 9/11 anniversary just behind us, the self-sacrifice of the FDNY heroes (and those at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania) twenty years ago is simply astonishing. And inspiring. We should all be grateful.

==

LISTEN (9.20). Today in CoPhi we begin with Augustine and his famous pre-pious "ask" of God, for chastity later. Even Saints must sow their oats. His Manichaean "solution" to the problem of suffering, a less than omnipotent god who needs all the help He can get, still impresses me as more plausible than any standard Christian alternative. An all-hands account of how we can best counter the world's ills makes more sense and greater appeal than the claim that all's already right with the world. Clearly it's not.

The problem of suffering is the toughest nut for any conscientious person of faith to try and crack. Even if "moral evil" and the suffering it produces were entirely a product of human free will, and free will were a divine gift with no strings attached, there's still the sticky matter of natural geo-cataclysms. "Acts of God," in  the insurers' responsibility-ducking argot, are not on us. Victim-blaming is no solution.

Then, Boethius in his prison cell yakking with Lady Philosophy. But where was Lady Theology? And why didn't he write The Consolation of Christianity?

If "God grasps everything in an instant" and "sees past, present and future as one," how does that make us free? How does timeless presence exculpate the all-seeing Omniscient One? People have tried to explain this to me for years, but I think He's still on the hook if He's anywhere or anywhen at all.

Do humans really have a transparently self-validating idea in mind of perfection, an idea so compelling that we have no choice but to acquiesce in its logical necessity? And what would that do to free will, Anselm?

Aquinas's (and Aristotle's) First Cause argument leaves inquiring minds wondering about its unasked and unanswered question, obvious even to a child... or to children like J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, at least: what caused the First Cause? Nothing? If the First Cause domino provides its own impulsion , then so can a universe. And anyway, the impulsive force need not be conceived as possessing personal or moral properties. It could just be The Force, neutral with respect to our notions of good and evil.

In Fantasyland  it's time again to marvel at Ronald Reagan's duplicity or credulity (or both) in telling the legend of Thomas Jefferson's Constitutional Convention angel. When Drumpf tells a tale we all know he's bullshitting. Was Reagan?  Or was he an even scarier sort of Confabulator in Chief, one who actually believed his own phantasms?

Cane Ridge, Kentucky, the 19th century Woodstock? A come-to-Jesus fest is not the Garden either Epicurus or CSNY had in mind, I think. It was suggested in class the other day, though, that some people attend Bonnaroo and Burning Man seeking refuge from the commercial and militarized mania of our workaday world. Not my idea of paradise, but to each her own.

I'll never understand why so many Americans believe(d) Joseph Smith, either. Kant and Emerson would have something to say about that, about thinking for oneself and having an "original relation to the universe." To that point, I found my missing questions for last time, on How the World Thinks. One of them is: Should later thinkers consider themselves "mere commentators"? And: Should enlightened thinkers still venerate tradition?

If we can get past those, we'll take up time (one of Augustine's timeless topics) and karma. Both flirt with fatalism, as I see it...

Sep.'20

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Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Royce -- 10.7.19

Augustine, free will , and free speech -- 9.17.14

Christians 2, Philosophers 0 (Augustine, Boethius, Hypatia) -- 2.27.12

Epicurean citizens

LISTEN. Ted Simmons gave quite a nice Hall of Fame induction speech, thanking his friends the (Jon) Hamm family and invoking the Beatles  ("the love you take" etc.). But what a stark illustration of today's poem: “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth/Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!” #23 was eternally young in memory. Time!

In Happiness we turn to the Epicureans, who I generally and favorably distinguish from their Stoic cousins as more assertively pursuant of happiness, less accepting of unhappy fate, more inclined to assign disappointment not to an abstract "nature" with which we've failed to "harmonize" but to a correctable failure to identify and deconstruct our various worries and fears. The Stoics and Epicureans both offer good therapy, but the Stoics sometimes seem too quick to accede to conditions we might have hoped to alter. Acceptance, when all attempts to ameliorate an unwelcome status quo have failed, is admirable. Premature acceptance is unfortunate.

But... are Epicureans good citizens? Have they retreated too deeply into their Garden to engage responsibly in the affairs of the polis? That's one of the questions we first raised when we last took up this topic in this course. It's still open. We may be stardust, and golden, and billion year old carbon (etc.), but aren't we also every bit as much products and stewards of our own time and place? Can we be Epicurean communards and still discharge the duties of properly concerned citizens?

Looking forward to discussing that in Happiness today and MALA tonight.

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An old post:

LISTEN. It's on to Catherine Wilson's Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction in Happiness today.

We're catching up, since Tuesday's class was pre-empted by the panel discussion on Suffrage and the Constitution. The Epicureans famously retreated to their Garden commune, in pursuit of life's simpler and less mediated pleasures. Would they have been engaged at all in the sort of civic activism that brought women the vote in 1920, or that is attempting to bring young people out to vote in 2020, or that tomorrow will bring citizens (the younger the better) out to demand action on the climate crisis? Would they have acknowledged any "urgent need of acting now," if that perturbed their garden delights? Where can we find the right balance between personal gratification and public commitment?

Those are some of our questions today. Others include

• Is it in fact foolish to fear "complete and personal annihilation"? -“To fear death, then, is foolish, since death is the final and complete annihilation of personal identity, the ultimate release from anxiety and pain.” ― Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things... Gutenberg etext
• Do you think Epicurus was on the right track in thinking of atomic "swerve" as a "basis for free will"? 11 If they swerve randomly and unpredictably, how does that refute or challenge determinism? Or is his point that we can try to emulate their example and be random and unpredictable ourselves? Is random unpredictability really another name for freedom? (Remind me to tell my undergrad pub story...)
• Does Epicurus's analogy of atoms to "dust motes dancing in a sunbeam" remind you, as it does me, of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot ("a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" 12)? Do you see any parallels between Sagan's cosmic philosophy and Epicureanism? What about the "multiplicity of worlds" hypothesis vs. the view of Christian salvation as limited to "one small corner of the many world universe" etc. 16
• Do you think it will ever be possible to discover how and why the structure and activity of atoms in the brain and nervous system give rise to consciousness and the subjective feeling of selfhood?
• Do you agree that generation and dying are symmetrical processes? 51 In other words, do each of us owe the world a death? Do you find beauty and consolation in that perspective? Is death a peaceful sleep and a dispersal of spirit and soul atoms? 

Talking about these things is indeed an Epicurean delight, or can be. But gathering in the streets to demand social justice and climate sanity can too. A good Epicurean knows when to take a break in the conversation and go pound the pavements.

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)...

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“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

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"I too am an Epicurean..." 

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

Perspective, lists, and a good life

LISTEN. In CoPhi today it's bonus content for section H1, so as to keep them in sync with their Monday-Wednesday cohorts. They'll get the quick and abridged version tomorrow of William James's first Pragmatism lecture, Emerson's (and others') appreciation of the peripatetic life, and the philosophical significance of Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" before we move on to Stoics and Epicureans.

Also, we'll consider what philosophy is for.  Top of my list, in a word (and implied by those images of our little "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"): perspective. 

Making lists has been a theme in Happiness so far, from the things that made life worth living for Manhattan's Alvy Singer to the sources and springs of delight to today's modest and moving final list of life's small and saving graces. It all reminds me of Matt Haig's list in Humans. Lots of good happiness advice there, never mind that it comes from an extraterrestrial and is directed to a particular young human.

The list goes on. #94 is very good: You don't have to be an academic. You don't have to be anything. Don't force it...

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LISTEN ('19). We finish Daniel Haybron's very fine Very Short Intro to Happiness today.

More important than whether you're happy, says Haybron, is your contribution and legacy. Will you be deservedly well thought-of, for having lived well? So much the better if living well makes you happy, but in the long perspective of history the personal and subjective experience of virtue will barely register. Isn't that all the more reason to make happiness a priority? If you don't, who will?

That's not to endorse "acting badly" in the pursuit, but some will wonder what's to stop any of us from doing so. What compels conscience and compassion, aside from the unpleasant prospect of being poorly thought-of? Decency and virtue might be motivation enough, and their own reward, for the noblest natures. Others rightly care about the judgment of generations to come.

But then there are the deplorables, the philistines, the jerks. They claim the right to be terrible people. Until quite recently I would have said they were marginal to our civilization and not a threat to it. Lately that's less clear. "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." You may get yourself in big trouble.

"According to some studies, having kids doesn't make us happier." Having just graduated a couple of them, I've made my own study. I can't imagine the past 20+ years of my life without them. More than that: anticipating them was a source of happiness long before their births. But I know that's not everybody's experience.

"Any life dedicated to worthwhile ends is meaningful," even if the judgment of worth is uncertain or, again, awaits the verdict of history. While we live we have to make that call for ourselves, have to believe we've chosen worthwhile ends, if we're to experience that sort of meaning. Of course, we may never know.

We do know, don't we, that those gawking consumer-touroids on p.104 are draining life of meaning even if they think they're "making memories"? Like selfish and shallow people everywhere, they look more desperate and absurd than happy.

Happiness really is an aspirational ideal, something worth chasing no matter how elusive it may turn out to be.

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it," says Nobelist Daniel Kahneman. Hmm. As a professional thinking person that's disconcerting. But as Michael Lewis points out in The Undoing Project, Kahneman and his pal Amos Tversky have shed needed light on the extent to which we ought to mistrust our own intuitions about everything, including what will make us happy. “Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe." Well no wonder we often get it wrong. Wonder's that we ever get it right. On the other hand, “When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice."

More uplifting (and poignant) is that heart-grabbing missive from the battlefield that closes Haybron's book. "I am such a lucky person to have the life that I have." That says it.

Tversky said it too, commenting on his own fatal illness. “Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

And next we turn to another good short intro, in Happiness, on Epicureanism. 

9.12.19

Sources and springs, and beyond

LISTEN. Meeting the MALA class to talk about educating good citizens tonight. Is civic virtue a source of happiness, a by-product of it, or both? If by happiness we mean something like Greek arete, virtue, and eudaimonia, it must be both. The good life belongs to individuals whose personal flourishing is inseparable from the health and vitality of the polis and the various communities that compose it. And if we agree with John Dewey that good lives and good societies undergo perpetual reconstruction, never ceasing to learn and grow in response to their environing conditions, it must be both. Looking forward to a good conversation with the good citizens of our MALA community this evening. 9.2.21

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LISTEN. Today in Happiness we'll ponder the sources of happiness, or as I like to say (following William James) the springs of delight. And then we'll wonder what's beyond happiness: well-being, flourishing, eudaimonia. [First we'll catch up on "Measured Satisfaction" etc.]

Is delight the same as happiness? The floor is open, on that, but I've never been unhappily delighted. When I am delighted, I am well. It's close enough for me. I think it was close enough for James too, whose main point about the "falling dead of the delight" to which we're perpetually liable is that it is recoverable, and that the pursuit of happiness need never be finally abandoned. Delight can be recovered, repeatedly; a lease can be renewed, time and again; the vitality and delight of life at its highest pitch can be returned.

In our bleakest darkness we may and must anticipate the break of a new day... because, the alternative is hopeless resignation. To be delightedly happy is to remain vigilantly attuned to our own peculiar springs of delight. They're peculiarly ours. It's a myth to think that every happy person is happy in the same way, having decoded the same "secret"... and maybe that goes for families too. Sorry, Tolstoy.

[It was on this day (Sep2) in 1901 that Theodore Roosevelt uttered his famous words “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” He was vice president at the time and was giving a speech at the Minnesota State Fair... On another occasion, he said, “If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble, and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.” WA]

Teddy Roosevelt's favorite exclamation, after Bully!, was De-lighted! That capacity and receptivity  wasn't a natural spring for him, it didn't spontaneously flow. He cultivated it, dug it out, tended it... first in overcoming a sickly childhood, then in rebounding from the devastating loss of both wife and mother on the same day in his young adulthood. It's arguable that his robust appetite for the "strenuous" life was an over-the-top overcompensation, his "big stick" diplomacy an imperious excuse for American overreach.

But from TR's own point of view, again, he must have seen no alternative. As the positive psychologists say, he worked hard at eek-ing out as much positivity as his personal set-point allowed. Might he have done otherwise? That's a real and open question, philosophically. But personally and existentially he must have felt the strenuous life as his only salvation. Where, I wonder, does that place him on the spectrum of stoics and epicureans?

And what about this guy?

Some of us may be genetically predisposed to experience more delight, but "plenty of things can affect how happy we are" whatever our personal "set point." That can be an excuse for not trying, when the evidence is clear that "human beings are remarkably adaptable and resilient" and thus almost always capable of being happier.

 But beware, "people who place a higher value on money, possessions, and status tend to be less happy." Such extrinsic motivators are inferior, while the enlightened rich whose motivation is intrinsic and interior are often less materialistic than the poor. Go figure.

What else matters, besides intrinsic motivation? An outlook that's positive, accepting, and caring. And besides outlook? Security, autonomy, relationships, something to do that's skilled and meaningful.

But circle back to money, which is too frequently given short shrift in these discussions. It can't buy you love, but if you're pulling less than 75K you're going to notice the happiness-income link.

Aristotelians say its in our nature to pursue happiness and fulfillment as activities in accordance with virtue. So, if you could plug into an Experience Machine that made you feel happy, would you be happy? Wouldn't you like to find out?

"Desire theories assert that what's good for you is getting what you want." You can't always get what you want. What do you need? "People often want things that aren't good for them," so perhaps we should challenge James's contention that "the only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all..." MPML

As for the strivers and enjoyers, I find myself allied with the great E.B. White: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” So, different days for different desires?

Lots more provocative questions for discussion today. My favorites: Is happiness really a choice? Is accepting things as they are really responsible? How would YOU use the Experience Machine?

I'm happy to pass along this Happiness wisdom from cousin Mary, the poet:

Oliver said: “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.” http://writersalmanac.org/

(If you're landlocked, you're going to have to substitute for the clams.)

And as for Desire Theory, it's hard to dispute Calvin & Hobbes:

 

9.10.19