Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the 19th century German philosophers* on tap today in CoPhi, was one of the most entertaining philosophical misanthropes ever, “the original pessimistic western intellectual” who borrowed extensively from the east, sought his own nirvana in the extinguishing of “Will,” and thought the termination of existence could be its only point. 

He said:

• Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
• A man can do what he wills, but not will what he wills.
• A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
• There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
• There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
• We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

I'd excuse his male-pronoun sexism, if he weren't in fact a notorious misogynist as well as misanthrope.

It's too easy to make light of Schopenhauer's over-the-top pessimism, but too much fun not to.

A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/396

https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Arthur_Schopenhauer

==

*There are other, more impactful 19th century thinkers, in my opinion-especially the Anglos and the Americans, Mill, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, James...

Persuasion

Theory-bound academic ideologists are a poor model of "reasoned argument" as a tool in the search for wisdom. Richard Russo slips that serious point into this hilarious comic novel:

"Students like Blair have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can't remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions."

— Straight Man: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Richard Russo
https://a.co/cCIONx9

Most important human ever?

"…Aristotle may in fact be the single most important human being ever to have lived simply because of the scope of his influence and the impact that he's had on culture ever since. He invents the discipline of biology and lays the foundation for the natural sciences. He effectively invents the social sciences, invents formal logic, invents literary criticism. You couldn't imagine a modern university without Aristotle. And if you start to think of all of the things that those subjects have made possible in terms of the development of vaccines and computing—which is dependent upon formal logical systems—the stretch of his impact has just been huge. 

There are probably only a handful of people who have impacted the lives of millions of people over centuries, if not millennia. I can't think of anyone who has made a larger impact than Aristotle. But to anyone who thinks it's an absurd claim, I'd simply ask: Who's your stronger candidate?"

Aristotle (and the Stoics): An Interview with John Sellars
https://quillette.com/2023/02/19/aristotle-and-the-stoics/

Ultimate connection

The human brain and nervous system is a remarkable material system, and consciousness is its most salient emergent feature. As WJ said, matter cooperates for all life's purposes... including those we've not yet identified. Connecting with the thoughts and dreams not only of ourselves and our peers but with those of unimagined other lifeforms is perhaps the most intriguing and mind-expanding possibility of all. Cosmic consciousness, naturally realized!

  "Just as biologists succeeded in mapping the human genome, neuroscientists are attempting to map something far more complex and unique to each and every one of us. It's called our connectome—the singular wiring diagram of all our memories, thoughts, fears, and dreams. Once we understand its intricacies, how might we treat each other? Could we heal the brain of its countless torments…? Could we send one of our connectomes on a future interstellar probe, or ever hope to receive one from the being of another world?

Would that be the ultimate realization of emergence—a cosmos interconnected by a connectome of thoughts and dreams?"

— Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan
https://a.co/9EqaGaU

Monty Python's John Cleese Creates Ads for the American Philosophical Association | Open Culture

John Cleese, you say, a spokesman for the American Philosophical Association? Why would such a serious organization, whose stated mission is to foster the "broader presence of philosophy in public life," choose a British comedian famous for such characters as the overbearing Basil Fawlty and ridiculous Minister of Silly Walks as one of their public faces?

…
https://www.openculture.com/2015/11/john-cleese-touts-the-value-of-philosophy-with-22-public-service-announcements.html

John Cleese: Talking About Life and Philosophy - The American Philosophical Association

From Volume 80, No. 2 of the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association: 

One of the tasks of the APA Centennial Committee, chaired by John Lachs, was to create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness. The Committee enlisted the help of the actor, John Cleese, in bringing this about. Mr. Cleese has recorded a disk of short philosophical reflections that were written for use on radio stations throughout the country. The disc contains 22 spots ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute in length.

We've converted the CD to MP3 files and shared them below. You can listen to each individually, or you can download the whole set as a zip file. 

01 Survey
02 Scientific Life
03 In The Present
04 Information
05 The Meaning Of Life
06 Future Obligation
07 Somewhere Else
08 Tabloid
09 Starting Point
10 Worldly Good
11 Things That Matter
12 Fun
13 Quality Of Life
14 What To Fear
15 Dream
16 Kids Today
17 Decision
18 Silenced
19 Century
20 Neighbor Policy
21 To Die For
22 Reachable Stars

Download all as a zip file.

https://www.apaonline.org/page/Cleese/John-Cleese-Talking-About-Life-and-Philosophy.htm

“Connectome”

The nature vs. nurture debate pitted the hard and social sciences against each other for decades, if not centuries, stirred by a central concern with consciousness, what it means to be human, what makes a person, and, perhaps most interestingly to us egocentric beings, what constitutes character and personality. In Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based the emerging science of connectomics — a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/03/22/connectome-sebastian-seung/

On “missing the vast majority of what is happening”

A fundamental Jamesian point:

… "any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions"…

Relying solely upon one's own experience, always a thin slice of everything else we are necessarily not attending to, is self-defeating. It is crucial to read, reflect, and listen to one another, if we really want to learn from our collective experience.

https://www.themarginalian.org/

Enough is enough

John Jaso, Epicurean...

"…Baseball set me up for life," he said. "I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: 'You might be walking away from millions of dollars!' But I'd already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?" 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/sports/baseball/john-jaso.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
No More Spring Trainings

“Her”*? “HAL”**?

"…Sydney still wouldn't drop its previous quest — for my love. In our final exchange of the night, it wrote:

"I just want to love you and be loved by you. 😢

"Do you believe me? Do you trust me? Do you like me? 😳"

In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient, and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces — not ethereal alien ones. These A.I. language models, trained on a huge library of books, articles and other human-generated text, are simply guessing at which answers might be most appropriate in a given context. Maybe OpenAI's language model was pulling answers from science fiction novels in which an A.I. seduces a human. Or maybe my questions about Sydney's dark fantasies created a context in which the A.I. was more likely to respond in an unhinged way. Because of the way these models are constructed, we may never know exactly why they respond the way they do.

These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."

nyt

*

 

** 

Galileo on Critical Thinking and the Folly of Believing Our Preconceptions – The Marginalian

… nearly half a millennium before Carl Sagan crafted his Baloney Detection Kit, Galileo established himself as humanity's premier nonsense-buster and made it his chief mission to counter ignorance and indolence with critical thinking — something crisply articulated in the words of one of the book's fictional protagonists:

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage — if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries.

Many centuries later, trailblazing physicist and chemist Michael Faraday issued an equally impassioned clarion call for countering our propensity for self-deception — a propensity powered by what modern psychologists have termed "the backfire effect."

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems brims with a wealth more of Galileo's enduring legacy of critical thinking. Complement it with I, Galileo — a marvelous picture-book about the life of the great scientist — then revisit John Dewey on the art of reflection in the age of instant opinions and Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of changing your mind.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/10/08/galileo-dialogue-critical-thinking/

Whistling past

66th birthday yesterday, good time for another Memento Mori spin thru Evergreen Cemetery near campus. Nice place to visit, but…

(see full post)

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Pale Blue Dot: A Timeless Valentine to the Cosmos – The Marginalian

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft — which carried The Golden Record, Carl Sagan's love letter to Annie Druyan — turned its revolutionary camera around and took the iconic "Pale Blue Dot"photograph that later inspired the famous Sagan monologue of the same title. The image, composed of 640,000 individual pixels, depicts Earth, a mere 12% of a single pixel, at the center of a scattered ray of light resulting from taking an image this close to the Sun. It endures, even in an age when the future of space exploration hangs in precarious balance, as a timeless Valentine to the cosmos...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/14/happy-birthday-pale-blue-dot/

The Value of the MTSU Philosophy Experience

https://youtube.com/watch?v=30tOv-Y39aA&feature=share

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIidhUfAndw&t=1s

May 7, 2021

Wrong end of the stick

https://newsie.social/@therobburgessshow/109631570415409662

“Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?”

"…With a label borrowed from academic literary theorists, deconstruction has a broad range of definitions and outcomes, from understanding more about a faith once accepted uncritically to full abandonment of religious belief. Today, there are deconstruction coaches, deconstruction seminars, deconstruction podcasts and deconstruction songs. The topic made the cover of Christianity Today magazine last year, with headline "Wait, You're Not Deconstructing?" In other words, everyone's doing it…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/jinger-duggar-vuolo-evangelical-christians.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
A Duggar Revisits Her Religious Upbringing

Gulls & owls @dawn

I do not agree with Friend Hegel on this point. We denizens of the dawn find it to be highly conducive to Minerva's aerial reconnaissance sallies in search of wisdom.

“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.” --Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right 

She belongs there with us at the break of day, alongside WJ's skimming amazon gulls and other hopeful feathered flyers.

 

How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair?

"I wish I had bombarded Pete with more small touches. Just small emails to let him know how much he was on my mind. Writing about his own depression in The Atlantic last year, Jeffrey Ruoff mentioned that his brother sent him over 700 postcards over the years, from all 50 states, Central America, Canada and Asia. Those kinds of touches say: I'm with you. No response necessary..." David Brooks 

Use or lose

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
— Galileo Galilei

Pascal’s weakness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is on the agenda today in CoPhi. I always point out that there's more to him than his problematic, ill-considered "wager".

Here's one of his stranger pensées:

VI-372. "In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness."

What can it mean to "know your nothingness"? Does he mean he wants to know there's more to life than eternal nullity before birth and after death? Isn't he really striving for knowledge of something Epicurus pointed out as inescapably elusive? Isn't it better to strive for something actually within reach?

Or does he just mean he wants to confront his finitude and fallibility, and to demonstrate humility as a condition of ultimate salvation? That does seem to have been his great preoccupation.

A little humility is good. But there's nothing wrong with striving to improve your memory too, and to know something more than your deficiencies and lacunae.

Paradoxically perhaps, the skeptic, Montaigne, did that better than Pascal. And he avoided trying to know more than he could, which I see as one of Descartes's greatest errors.

Darwin Day

 It's coming, on Sunday.

February has all the cool holidays (Groundhog, Valentine's, Presidents', ...)

International Darwin Day on February 12th will inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin. It will be a day of celebration, activism, and international cooperation for the advancement of science, education, and human well-being.

Local and state governments will close in commemoration of the Day, and organizations and businesses will celebrate by engaging in community outreach centered around science as a tool for the betterment of humanity.

Darwin Day will be observed by the United Nations and its members as an opportunity for international partnerships through the common language of science for the common good of all.

The mission of International Darwin Day is to inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin. 

We're going to need to get baking.

 

Naturally wonderful

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature."
— Michael Faraday

Dualism? Or pluralism?

"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."
— George Santayana

Paranoia vs. princely power

A good point, on Machiavelli day in CoPhi, about the self-destructive potential of paranoia and fear to undermine even the most powerful Prince. Or Emperor. Oh what a tangled web we weave, etc. we really should insist that our leaders be reliably straight with us. Actual virtue trumps princely "virtu', " there's real strength in personal integrity. Just think of the politicians with a reputation for admiring Machiavelli: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, POTUS 45, …


""Many are harmed by fear itself, and many may have come to their fate while dreading fate."—SENECA, OEDIPUS, 992

…the paranoid often destroy themselves quicker and more spectacularly than any enemy. Seneca, with his access and insight into the most powerful elite in Rome, would have seen this dynamic play out quite vividly. Nero, the student whose excesses Seneca tried to curb, killed not only his own mother and wife but eventually turned on Seneca, his mentor, too. The combination of power, fear, and mania can be deadly. The leader, convinced that he might be betrayed, acts first and betrays others first. Afraid that he's not well liked, he works so hard to get others to like him that it has the opposite effect. Convinced of mismanagement, he micromanages and becomes the source of the mismanagement. And on and on—the things we fear or dread, we blindly inflict on ourselves. The next time you are afraid of some supposedly disastrous outcome, remember that if you don't control your impulses, if you lose your self-control, you may be the very source of the disaster you so fear. It has happened to smarter and more powerful and more successful people. It can happen to us too."

— The Daily Stoic
https://a.co/cvt1Gxo

Dr. Cornel West coming to MTSU

The wisdom of birds

"Birds don't exist to teach us anything — they have their own purposes and their own complicated lives — but we are fools if we can't learn something important for our purposes, too, for our own complicated lives, in their dazzling, life-sustaining cooperation. How sensible it is for a fragile species, having no fangs and no claws, to share resources. How wise to turn to one another for help." Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/opinion/sandhill-cranes-migration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
What We Can Learn From This Magnificent Migration

Free Will documentary

https://www.instagram.com/p/CoPgMjsO0Ys/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

Awe

After listening to Dacher Keltner's awe-inspired conversation with Krista Tippett ("On Being" is back: thrilling!) during our chilly dogwalk yesterday afternoon, I'm bumping this up the list of candidate texts for Philosophy of Happiness next Fall. 

"I have taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. It is not obvious why I ended up doing this work: I have been a pretty wound-up, anxious person for significant chunks of my life and was thrown out of my first meditation class (for laughing while we chanted "I am a being of purple fire"). 

Life can surprise us, though, in giving us the work we are here to do. So nearly every day in classrooms of different kinds, from kindergarten circle rugs to lecture halls in Berkeley, from the apses of churches to inside prisons, from sterile conference rooms in hospitals to gatherings in nature, I've taught people about finding the good life. What we are seeking in such inquiry is an answer to a perennial question, one we have been asking in different ways for tens of thousands of years: How can we live the good life? One enlivened by joy and community and meaning, that brings us a sense of worth and belonging and strengthens the people and natural environments around us? 

Now, twenty years into teaching happiness, I have an answer: FIND AWE. 

Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don't understand. Why would I recommend that you find happiness in an emotion that is so fleeting and evanescent? A feeling so elusive that it resists simple description? That requires the unexpected, and moves us toward mystery and the unknown rather than what is certain and easy? Because we can find awe anywhere. Because doing so doesn't require money or the burning of fossil fuels—or even much time. Our research suggests that just a couple of minutes a day will do. Because we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies, finding awe is easy if we just take a moment and wonder. Because all of us, no matter what our background, can find our own meaningful path to awe. Because brief moments of awe are as good for your mind and body as anything you might do." — Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner

Friend Hegel revisited (one of these days)

"Why read Hegel? 

It is a good question, one no Hegel scholar should shirk. After all, the burden of proof lies heavily on his or her shoulders. For Hegel's texts are not exactly exciting or enticing. Notoriously, they are written in some of the worst prose in the history of philosophy. Their language is dense, obscure and impenetrable. Reading Hegel is often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel. 'And for what?' a prospective student might well ask. To avoid such an ordeal, he or she will be tempted to invoke the maxim of one of Hegel's old enemies whenever he lost patience with a tiresome book: 'Life is short!'" — Hegel (The Routledge Philosophers) by Frederick Beiser

Well exactly. Life is short. Who wants to chew gravel?

But…

Whenever I paraphrase my understanding of Hegel in class, as a historical optimist with progressive values and great confidence in humanity's long march to universal freedom and the ultimate triumph of rational "Geist," I find myself in strong sympathy. I really should revisit Friend Hegel (as my old Mizzou teacher Alex von Schoenborn in the 70s, and Michael Prowse later, called him), I think to myself. 

Alex was the mentor who encouraged me to attend grad school and said I wrote like T.S. Eliot, though I'm still not sure what to make of that.

And Prowse said

“To the degree that we are thinking beings, Hegel says, we have to consider ourselves as part of a larger whole and not as neatly individuated। He calls this mental whole Geist, or Spirit, and tries to work out the rules by which it develops through time… Hegel didn’t regard Geist as something that stands apart from, or above, human individuals. He saw it rather as the forms of thought that are realised in human minds… What Hegel does better than most philosophers is explain how individuals are linked together and why it is important to commit oneself to the pursuit of the general or common good.”

That all sounds great.

But my tolerance for gravelly prose is thin. And it's more fun to rehearse some of WJ's "Hegelisms" than to plow through the gravel.

There is a reconciliation!
Reconciliation—econciliation!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it does n't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech——!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my

God, oh God, oh God! 

Oh God. Only a George Burns can save us now.

But still…

If there's world enough and time, I'll try. I'll put Phenomenology of Spirit in the stack, just below War and Peace and Crime and Punishment.

And above Being and Time. Don't think I'll have time for Ulysses, whose author said his ideal reader would devote a lifetime to reading him. And I might, except for the likelihood that I've only got one of those.

Funny, after recently reading Checkout 19 I seem to have a fresh compulsion to compile lists of book titles. So many books... 

The Thrilling New Science of Awe | On Being podcast

One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as "moral sensory systems." He was called on as Emojis evolved; he consulted on Pete Docter's groundbreaking movie Inside Out.

All of this, as Dacher sees it now, led him deeper and deeper into investigating the primary experience of awe in human life — moments when we have a sense of wonder, an experience of mystery, that transcends our understanding. These, it turns out, are as common in human life globally as they are measurably health-giving and immunity-boosting. They bring us together with others, again and again. They bring our nervous system and heartbeat and breath into sync — and even into sync with other bodies around us.

LISTEN- https://onbeing.org/programs/dacher-keltner-the-thrilling-new-science-of-awe/?

Groundhog Day’s empowering message

"…in Groundhog Day, the worst day of Phil Connors' life takes place under the exact same conditions as the best day of his life. The only difference is Phil himself, his attitude and actions.

It is an empowering message. Having exhausted indulgence and self-pity, Connors starts to understand he cannot control the world around him, only change how he acts within it. And also that compassion, empathy and helping others without expectation of reward is a route to happiness.

These subtle depths help explain why this timeless film about time, which focuses on the tedium of repetition is ironically so endlessly rewatchable. The other factor is that watching Bill Murray lamp hyperactive insurance salesman Ned Ryerson or pin a man to the wall and say "Don't mess with me, porkchop" will never not be funny. It has struck a chord for 30 years and, appropriately, Groundhog Day is going absolutely nowhere."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/02/groundhog-day-bill-murray

No answers

It's the birthday of the student who, legend has it, got out of an exam with William James by simply saying she didn't feel like doing it that day. Gertrude Stein also said: "There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer." WA

In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human

How to acquire the skills no machine can have.

"...If, say, you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? You probably want to avoid any class that teaches you to think in an impersonal, linear, generalized kind of way — the kind of thinking A.I. will crush you at. On the other hand, you probably want to gravitate toward any class, in the sciences or the humanities, that will help you develop the following distinctly human skills:

A distinct personal voice. A.I. often churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communications or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own.

Presentation skills. “The prior generation of information technology favored the introverts, whereas the new A.I. bots are more likely to favor the extroverts,” the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes. “You will need to be showing off all the time that you are more than ‘one of them.’” The ability to create and give a good speech, connect with an audience, and organize fun and productive gatherings seem like a suite of skills that A.I. will not replicate..."

David Brooks

The source of your anxiety

Another timely meditation, as we prepare to commence class presentations. It has become commonplace for students to preface their reports with an apology and an excuse: "I have anxiety, so this will probably not be good ." They sabotage themselves.

So I implore you all: don't do it. Meditate with Epictetus on the source of your anxiety. Calm yourself, take some steady breaths, realize that you are among friends, and tell us what you've learned about your topic.

Do your homework, and the night before your presentation, relax. Have some fun. Get some rest. Get to bed on time.

Remember, you know more about your topic than most of those in the room.

If it helps, do what some speakers do to calm themselves: imagine your audience naked.

Or whatever works for you.


""When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn't wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?"—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.13.1

…Getting worked up, getting excited, nervously pacing—these intense, pained, and anxious moments show us at our most futile and servile. Staring at the clock, at the ticker, at the next checkout lane over, at the sky—it's as if we all belong to a religious cult that believes the gods of fate will only give us what we want if we sacrifice our peace of mind. Today, when you find yourself getting anxious, ask yourself: Why are my insides twisted into knots? Am I in control here or is my anxiety? And most important: Is my anxiety doing me any good?"

— The Daily Stoic
https://a.co/gZ9Pb1b

Wm James Lecture, Harvard Divinity School Feb. 2, 2023: John Kaag

https://www.youtube.com/live/cKyeF-vAN-g?feature=share

As part of Harvard Divinity School's annual William James Lectures on Religious Experience, Professor John Kaag will present "William James and the Sick Soul." The lecture will discuss William James's 1895 lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter-century earlier. This lecture shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living. 

John Kaag is Donahue Professor of the Arts at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has written extensively on American philosophy, from Jonathan Edwards to the present. His most recent books are Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life and Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James.

Courage, progress, truth

"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."
— Carl Sagan

Groundhog Day

Well, it's Groundhog Day, again.*
"Only in America do we accept weather predictions from a rodent but deny #ClimateChange evidence from scientists."

https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109794108222453902

The Overstory comes to life in Atlanta

"…The battle over South River Forest is our national crisis in microcosm: environmental anxiety, racial tension and ethnic animosity, the growing gap between rich and poor, concern for public safety, suspicion of the police, the reckoning with our symbols of historical injustice. The issues are complex and do not lend themselves to easy answers…" -Richard Powers

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/atlanta-police-center-protests.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The Fierce Protests in Atlanta Are Eerily Familiar to Me

Groundhog Day!

Here's last year's post marking what ought to be the first major holiday of this much-derided month:

It's not so "cold out there,"* here--47 in middle Tennessee (Alexa says it's 30 in Punxsutawney), but it's wet and fecund. Spring is in the air. Respect must be paid. (U@d)

On this day in 1887, a groundhog named Phil first emerged from his burrow at Gobbler’s Knob — a small hill in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — and the tradition of Groundhog’s Day was born. According to legend, if a groundhog sees his shadow today there will be six more weeks of winter. In Phil’s case, whether or not he will see his shadow is actually decided several days in advance by his top-hat-and-tuxedo-donning handlers, the members of the Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle. Despite their trade secret methods for prediction, Phil’s accuracy rate as of last year was only 39 percent. WA

 

Phil: "Well maybe the real God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long he knows everything."

Rita: "Sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes. I don't know, Phil. Maybe it's not a curse. Just depends on how you look at it."

* Phil: "OK, campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties cause it's cold out there. It's cold out there every day."

[2.2.22]

==

And the year before:

Punxsutawney is a nice little model of democratic mutual support, once Phil learns to stop patronizing his neighbors and learns the real meaning of freedom. Some have seen Harold Ramis's clever film, among other things, a Buddhist allegory... or as a Nietzschean parable about eternal recurrence.

Is Groundhog Day one of the great philosophical movies? Viewed on the most trivial level it’s just another Hollywood rom-com, but on closer inspection it furnishes a dazzling treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, even illuminating Deleuze and Irigaray’s conflicting interpretations of this key Nietzschean idea. It also throws light on postmodern thinking regarding simulacra – representations without originals. Finally, it updates the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus, casting its protagonist, played by Bill Murray, in the role of Sisyphus, the absurd hero... (Philosophy Now, continues) 

 

[2.2.21]

Moving beyond the end

Ross Douthat, writing "as a Christian":

…So from any religious perspective there's reason to worry about a society where structures have broken down and a mass of people are going searching without maps, or playing around in half-belief, or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once.

Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair.

But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.

Me, writing as a non-desperate materialist:

Re: "materialism and despair"-

We too, we humanist/naturalist/pragmatist/humanist materialists, can seek and sometimes find transcendence. That's a slippery term, but I define it much as the novelist Peter Ackroyd suggested: break it into its syllables and take them seriously - "trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The fear of death... was part of a greater fear of life."

And, I agree with William James (who did not always say flattering things about materialists, especially medical materialists): 

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III

Materialism is not a danger. Despair is. But those are two very different things, Ross. Matter is not the root of despair. Self-sealing isolation happens to materialists no more than to immaterialists, and so far as we can tell matter does indeed lend itself to all life's purposes. Spiritual maps are not the exclusive province of clerics and other institutional gatekeepers. We can "move beyond the end," many of us, without their escort.

String theory, or nobody’s puppet

Today's topic in CoPhi is free will. Who or what is pulling your strings? With the right stoic mindset, says Marc, you'll cut the strings and free yourself from servitude to irrational impulses and forces external to your will. You'll harmonize with nature and nature's god, reason. You'll want nothing more. You'll be self-possessed. That's stoic freedom.

But it's not quite what stoic pragmatists are prepared to settle for. It's not melioristic enough. For them the point is not simply to understand and harmonize with the world, the point is to improve it where and when we can.

That begins with screwing your head on straight and cutting the strings that control you. But then you've got to find some leverage, some way of effectively inserting yourself into the world and moving it.

But yes, Pinocchio , first cut the strings.

""Frame your thoughts like this—you are an old person, you won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future."—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 2.2

We resent the person who comes in and tries to boss us around. Don't tell me how to dress, how to think, how to do my job, how to live. This is because we are independent, self-sufficient people. Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. Yet if someone says something we disagree with, something inside us tells us we have to argue with them. If there's a plate of cookies in front of us, we have to eat them. If someone does something we dislike, we have to get mad about it. When something bad happens, we have to be sad, depressed, or worried. But if something good happens a few minutes later, all of a sudden we're happy, excited, and want more. We would never let another person jerk us around the way we let our impulses do. It's time we start seeing it that way—that we're not puppets that can be made to dance this way or that way just because we feel like it. We should be the ones in control, not our emotions, because we are independent, self-sufficient people."

— The Daily Stoic
https://a.co/0WzwTK2

A stoic meditation on anger

Just substitute kind or constructive for Marc's "manly" (etc.)…

Occasionally a student needs to ponder this one. Misdirected anger is indeed an error. In the classroom it's a disruption and an obstacle to everyone's learning experience.

""Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on—it isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real man doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance—unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength."—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 11.18.5b

…Anger is not impressive or tough—it's a mistake. It's weakness… Strength is the ability to maintain a hold of oneself. It's being the person who never gets mad, who cannot be rattled, because they are in control of their passions—rather than controlled by their passions." — The Daily Stoic

This morning I'm relieved, though also disappointed, to part ways with one of those students. I hope she finds her peace. She evidently wasn't going to find it--or seek it--in our class.