A small price

The MLB lockout is over, and I'm at once happy--for the arrival at last of the feeling of Spring that normally comes to me when "pitchers and catchers report" to Florida and Arizona in mid-February--but also disquieted by the ease of my own sudden shift of gears. 

Yesterday I felt (or said I felt) annoyed indifference to the squabble of billionaire owners and millionaire athletes that sullies the purity of the beautiful game of my childhood every time their "working agreement" expires. The game has less than nothing to do with anything that matters. To hell with them all.

Today I just can't wait to hear the crack of the bat from Scottsdale and Jupiter, to learn the latest on Freddie Freeman and the other free agents, to follow "my team" from April to October. (Or is it November, with the expanded playoff scheme?) Will they sign Albert for a career-capping curtain call as DH? Can they land a better closer? Will the birds soar this year?

Why do I care? Why should I?

The first question's easy to answer: I care because I started to care as a kid in 1967, when the Cards topped the Red Sox in a thrilling World Series. I was hooked for life. Hope sprang eternal every spring.

The second is more complicated. I'm going to think about it, in hopes of coming up with something interesting to say on the subject when my annual Baseball in Literature and Culture conference re-convenes in Ottawa (KS) in July. I'm thinking it must have something to do with our need to care about something not so fraught with doom and devastation as a pandemic and a brutal unnecessary war on civilians. It must have something to do with our need to have "the world" not so much with us.

For now, though, I'll just go with Roger Angell's answer. Again. 

“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, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

“Our job”

LISTEN. Finished the library book I decided not to buy, when that Moleskine caught my eye. May have to go back and get it.

Rebecca Solnit's Orwell is a flawed but emboldening secular saint, an imperfect meliorist whose commitment to liberty, honest language, and the quotidian surface delights of this earth could not be more timely. The resemblance of this concluding passage to that James line I like to quote about how "the earth of things" must "resume its rights" is striking.

"The antithesis of transcendent might be rooted and grounded, and Orwell was attached to the ordinary joys and pleasures and the love of the things of this world and not the next. He wrote another one of his credos in the essay: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings." That is, he saw the willingness to suffer and accept suffering and one's own flaws and others as part of being human and the price paid for the joys also included. The commitment to the things of this world could also be the focus of a spiritual discipline, a willingness to sacrifice, and a warmth he saw Gandhi as lacking. In some sense, perhaps his unsaintly martyr Winston Smith became fully human through his misadventures, and his recognition of the beauty of the washerwoman was part of that, a new capacity to see imperfect and unidealized beauty. "Our job," Orwell declared in the Gandhi essay, "is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have." He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there."
…
"The work he did is everyone's job now. It always was."

— Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit

Snagging butterfly moments

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone." 

That observation by Bloomsbury luminary Vita Sackville-West (on her birthday) has long inspired me, and may have tipped the subconscious scale for me yesterday afternoon at Parnassus. Younger Daughter and I were there, spending my birthday gift certificate. It came down to either Orwell's Roses or yet another Moleskine. 

I went (yet again) for the tabula rasa, recalling how effective the dog-themed New Yorker blank book she gave me for Christmas has been in motivating me to log and reflect on all our daily dogwalks. You really can't have too many fancy notebooks, if you want to capture those butterflies. 

They don't have to be fancy, I have drawers and boxes full of cheap little Mead pocket notebooks and post-it scraps and other random net-grabs. But the Moleskines are special. This one will reside alongside the dogbook on my desk and demand another entry or two daily. 

Before we left Parnassus for Donut Den, another certificate to spend, we made a point of lingering for a moment in the spot next to poetry where on Sunday we saw Dolly and her collaborator talking about writing. Can't hurt to try and tap some of that creative energy too.

There were other stops along the way. Whole Foods, to return Mom's amazon rejects. Grace's Plaza to renew auto tags (mission not accomplished, the kiosk was broken and the line was too long). That quirky store across from Whole Foods with the Schitt's Creek merch. Starbucks. Trader Joe's. Our first Father-Daughter Day in quite a while. Small memorable moments now snagged. Gone, not forgotten.

Bread and roses

Rebecca Solnit's "In Praise Of" chapter in Orwell's Roses, from my Spring Break leisure-reading list, includes this spirited defense--echoed yesterday in the Times by Margaret Renkl--of our "right to live, not simply exist."

If roses represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable, the struggle for them is sometimes not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush their workers but against other factions of the left who disparage the necessity of these things. The left has never been short on people arguing that it is callous and immoral to enjoy oneself while others suffer, and somewhere others will always be suffering. It’s a puritanical position, implying that what one has to offer them is one’s own austerity or joylessness, rather than some practical contribution toward their liberation. Underlying all this is a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures and beauties are counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, decadent, indulgent, and the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned. Would-be revolutionaries often argue that only the quantifiable matters, and that human beings should be rational creatures content with what should matter and fit into how things should be, rather than what does matter and how things are. The roses in “bread and roses” constituted an argument not only for something more, but for something more nuanced and elusive—as Rose Schneiderman put it, “The right to live, not simply exist.” It was an argument that what makes our lives worth living is to some degree incalculable and unpredictable, and varies from person to person. In that sense, roses also mean subjectivity, liberty, and self-determination. Orwell's Roses

It's a misdirected solidarity with suffering humanity NOT to smell the roses while we can. And, it's a hopelessly confused "utilitarian" who scorns pleasure and happiness in favor of bread (here symbolizing mere survival). Take that bread, says Solnit's next chapter, and make buttered toast. Live a little. Enjoy life's little breaks. That's no betrayal of suffering humanity.

beauty for today, hope for tomorrow

Spring Break

 We were intending to come back to Arizona again this week, having so enjoyed Spring Training 2020 (until March 13), but players and owners have failed to negotiate a working agreement. So we're safe at home, the mid-TN weather has been fine, and professional sports is more than dispensable. Gonna enjoy the break.

www.azsnakepit.com

Sub specie boni

In the penultimate paragraph of William James's Talks to Teachers, he implores us to view our pupils--and life--under the aspect of good. Accentuate the positive, as der Bingle crooned, eliminate the negative. Affirm rather than negate. More colloquially: look on the bright side, keep on the sunny side, enjoy the glass half full. 

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good.

(He also offers terrific advice on how to build character and resolve, how to replace bad habits with good, how to access our "inner springs of joy," and substitute "the morning sun and air and dew" for the more debilitating daily intoxicants. I'll remember that last bit for the next time I must reflect upon prolonged surgically-necessitated abstinence.)

Well, I tried to relay that Jamesian/Spinozist wisdom to my teaching colleagues yesterday afternoon, when we convened to narrow our short list for a new Bruce in the philosophy departmnent. (My top two were actually Sheilas.)

We began with over a hundred applicants, I noted, now we're each down to five. They're all good. You don't play in the Series or the Super Bowl if you're not. So how about we make a positive case for our preferences, and see if that doesn't suffice to create consensus? Let the nattering nabobs of negativism go low, let's take the high road.

Nice try. It met with immediate resistance. Nyet. No no no. We must chip away at any shining armor in sight, knock them off their pedestals, persuade ourselves that no one is truly worthy of admission to our club.  Maybe we'll bestow begrudging grace on one or two survivors.

Score another win for "philosophy," another loss for positive experience.

And when the dust cleared, my top two had been dispatched.

The good news: we'll be inviting my third and fourth to campus. Coulda been worse. 

Coulda been a kinder, gentler process of deliberation too.

"Humanism first, atheism second": Philip Kitcher

 Today's poem, from Emily, is pretty direct. It opens with an apparent declaration that turns out to be misdirection. Going to Heaven! But then, in the last stanza, I'm glad I don't believe it...

For it would stop my breath,
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I am glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.

She's earthbound and proud of it. So are the loved ones who've gone on before her earthbound, literally. Tucked under. Sown in leaves of grass, as the other great gray poet of demos put it.

 But she's also glad, for the sake of their temporal happiness, that they did believe they'd be going up and out on wings of angels. 

On my reading, that makes Emily a candidate for the secular humanism and a soft atheism Philip Kitcher models. We're about to pick up his Life After Faith in A&P, which opens with a nod to Willy James's repudiation of "fervent unbelief": He believes in No God and worships him.

Kitcher is Dickensonian and Jamesian in rejecting belief in god and heaven personally but defending it for those who find a value for life in it. That's friendly atheism, and perhaps some would call it tender-minded. I just call it civil and pluralistic. Also melioristic, insofar as such beliefs release in many their best constructive energies for making this earth better while they can.

Kitcher conversed a few years ago with the late Notre Dame philosopher and Stone curator Gary Gutting about these issues, making the case for soft atheism. 

The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice...

 Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life. The doctrines they affirm and the rituals they practice are justified insofar as they support and deepen and extend the values to which they are committed. But the doctrines are interpreted nonliterally, seen as apt metaphors or parables for informing our understanding of ourselves and our world and for seeing how we might improve both...

To sum up: There is more to religion than accepting as literally true doctrines that are literally false. Humanists think the important achievements of religions at their best — fostering community, articulating and supporting values — should be preserved in fashioning a fully secular world. 

Sounds a lot like the views of another Gary I know, whose refined Methodism strikes me (like the best  Pragmatism) as a humanism too.

This conversation, like so many in the late lamented Stone series, exemplifies moral dialogue at its best. It's what Kitcher meant when he said recently, speaking of his new book Moral Progress, that "the source of moral authority is collective," not coercive or supra-human. 

And it shows that "listening to one another is incredibly important." That means listening to one another's words as well as to our hearts.

That's what

"The happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing," in the Jamesian way, means shutting up and listening not to words but to the rhythmic interpenetration of one's specific nature with the rest of nature. The occupational resistance of the chattering classes, especially the professorial branch thereof (lately rivaled by social media and the twittering classes), to such wordless silence is what so exasperated James and led him to declare:

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. . . . In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.” VRE XVIII

A point-of-view gun, the one that gives its victim a fleeting glimpse of the assailant's interior life, would be so much more constructive.

Philosophy is by its nature "talkative and explicit," where nature is mostly mute and inchoate. It's wonderful that our corner of nature has fomented words, but we must remember that it's just a corner. The universe is so much richer, so much more extensive and uncharted. The limits of language are not the limits of the mysterious and beckoning world we've not yet explored. 

Teachers don't generally perceive the wisdom of this insight, since no institution will employ us to conduct classes the way John Cage composed 4'33"-nor would we want to, in our boundless garrulity. We really like to talk. 

But some of us are also impressed by that glimmer and twinkle of living perception, in whose vague but shimmering sparkle we find ourselves struck temporarily silent. We're then given to eruptions like this, especially late in a semester:

"What an awful trade that of professor is," James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." 

It gave me the greatest satisfaction in Chicago the other day to share that statement with my pedantic peers, and then Richard Ford's character Frank Bascombe's complementary POV in The Sportswriter.

Real mystery, the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book, was to [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away-live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . .”

I started teaching at 23, stopped at 32, started again at 41, and now at 65 don't plan to stop just yet. But I do intend to spend my terminal teaching time defending Frank's "lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder"... defending experience against the invasive/reductive form of philosophy that disvalues it. That'll be my spiritual/academic last act.

Poetry is a worthy ally in this battle. Rorty seems to have begun to grasp this, when he said late in life that he wished he'd spent more time with it. I wish he had too, and that we'd had an opportunity to watch him take another "turn"--an alinguistic turn, not renouncing verbiage but acknowledging its larger context in life. One good turn deserves a better.

I'll try, in mounting my own late defense of experience, to erect no monumental explanations woven only of words. As WJ said, the best an honest philosopher can do in this regard is point to the that of life. Each of us must fill out the what for ourselves. 

That's what experience means.

Our moment

 Flying home Sunday morning I opened Philosophy as Poetry. (My random earbudded seatmate was also reading an actual book. That's exceptional nowadays, in my limited flight experience.)

Rorty's old student Michael Berube says in the Introduction that he saw philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." That's hopeful and happy and melioristic, especially if our conception of what it means for humans to be humane includes the classic virtues of honesty and humility. 

Dishonest and arrogant creativity, as we've been seeing demonstrated more and more in the fifteen years since Rorty left us, leads to lies and heartbreak. I'm sure he'd not approve. I'd like to think he'd say the baby in the bathwater of misdirected empiricism is a more radically attentive commitment to acknowledging what actually happens, and doesn't, in our experience. That's the baby we've got to save and nurture and grow.

What I liked best about that book was the afterword by Rorty's widow Mary.

HE READ A LOT, THAT MAN. HE STARTED EARLY, AND he kept it up. Seeing where it took him, it’s easy to suspect that he persisted in philosophy after his (very) early years at Robert Hutchins’s University of Chicago because, of all possible majors, it was the one least likely to restrict the range of things he could justify reading. But he read not just out of antiquarian affection for the best that has been thought and said—but also with constant attention to the implications of what he read for our time, our moment in history. And he read—and wrote—because of his conviction that words matter, that our language is our world, and that by our words we can change our world...

"Dangerous women read," said the airport souvenir I almost brought home for wife or Younger Daughter (who was happy instead to have the Cubs decal for her rear window). Dangerous anti-philosophers too. And poets. Anyone who reads with constant attention to the implications for our time is going to have to notice that the most dangerous humans do not read, do not reflect, do not promise to ameliorate our world for the better. 

I think they're also going to have to notice that there's more to our world than our language. The right words can change our world. The wrong ones will doom it. And the tradition I favor, which seeks the tonic release of nature, helps the best philosopher-poets mark the difference.

Richard Wilbur was one of those. It's his birthday. I'll bet Rorty, late Rorty anyway, would have agreed with him: “I would feel dead if I didn’t have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry.”

I agree with him. I also agree with Thoreau that we need some wildness in us, with Emerson that it is possible to experience a great exhilaration merely "crossing a bare common," and with James that sometimes it's best to "think of nothing and do nothing."

And then write about it. And then do something, with attention to the implications for our moment in history.

The open air

 Back from the chilly Windy City (#APACentral22), with a warm glow and an eagerness to hone my message and get it out there, or at least talk about it with my friends and peers (almost-coextensive sets) there again next year. I'll go back to the Palmer House ("the longest continually operating full-service hotel in the United States") every February from now 'til Doomsday if I can. I'm fired up. Ready to go.

My friend Myron, who was hired to succeed my friend Daryl at Western Carolina and seems to be everybody's friend, makes it worth the trip all by himself. I've never met a more gregarious, light-spreading, room-cheering philosopher. Everyone's brother, in the Cornel West mode. He chaired the SAAP session and, as so often at these affairs, was the last person I greeted in the lobby on my way out the door. He's a platonic role model for the dour Eeyorish-types (nod to Rorty, whose larger message--in spite of himself--I now see as one of happiness and hope and meliorism) that predominate in our profession. 

So what is my message? This morning I'll put it this way: words and talk can be great, they're our most promising tool of amelioration if we learn to deploy them in a consistently judicious and honest way, less to "explain" and more to explore and connect.

But an over-emphasis and over-reliance on words and talk, to the exclusion of a larger nourishing connection to nature and experience (which meliorists must not throw out with the soiled bathwater of an uncircumspect empiricism), can be ruinous. As one of my slides put it, responding to Rorty's statement that "a merely causal, not rational, linkage between thinking and independent reality will do, as an interpretation of the idea that empirical content requires friction against something external to thinking": 

We peripatetic melioristic radical empiricists suspect a large chunk of the history of western philosophy, the chunk eager to think without "friction," is a result of philosophers’ unhealthy sedentary ways. They need to get out more, to move about in what William James called the open air and possibilities inherent in nature. They’ll not then be so tempted to doubt in philosophy what they do not doubt in their hearts or on their feet.

In other words, far better this

    

than this:

  

Which is why I just had to get out at lunchtime for this:

Solvitur ambulando!

And that's why this morning's poem speaks so directly to me.

Go For a Brisk Walk

by Gene Guntzel

Go for a brisk walk every day
Either around dawn or sunset
And you may run into Chopin or Monet,
Charlotte Bronte or a mysterious brunette
Who turns out to be Maria Callas.
Bessie Smith, Jack Benny, you never knew,
The Duke of Earl slipping away from the palace,
Kafka and his fiancée strolling in the snow.
Melville whose book you meant to read,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, Princess Diana, Van Gogh,
Out walking, despite all they’ve been through.
“To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,”
Said Emily Dickinson. (She’s here, too.)
Life is hard. Oh Lord, the miseries we bear
And yet it’s good to get out in the open air. WA

We encounter plenty of words and talk, out walking, but we also encounter the ground beneath our feet and the sky overhead. We encounter gravity and friction. We gain insight. We regain perspective. We get hopeful and happy. 

Poets and polytheists

My recent immersion in Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism brings back that early-grad school thrill of finding a philosopher so transgressively unafraid to say iconoclastic things no one else was saying, with stylish over-the-top rhetorical excess. Who knew you could get away with deliberately misreading classic texts, to squeeze them into one's own preferred mold of thought? Or that you could so redefine familiar words like poetry that they now meant whatever you wanted them to mean, Humpty Dumpty fashion. 

[O]nce one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters, and Mill’s On Liberty provides all the ethical instruction one needs.

[P]oetry should take over the role which religion has played in the formation of individual human lives, and that nothing should take over the function of the churches... once you become polytheistic, you are likely to turn away not only from priests, but from such priest-substitutes as metaphysicians and physicists.

One can see [monotheists] as Nietzsche did, as blind, weak, fools. Or one can see them as James and Dewey did, as people who are so spell-bound by the work of one poet as to be unable to appreciate the work of other poets. One can be, like Nietzsche, aggressively atheist, or one can, like Dewey, see such aggressive atheism as itself a version of monotheism, as having “something in common with traditional supernaturalism.” PAA 28-9

Over-the-top, yes. But also provocative in ways that can positively enliven a classroom or an academic conference, as I suspect I'm about to confirm. The APA is already underway but I have another day's classes to teach before heading to the airport in the morning. I just hope the unruliest passengers aren't going to Chicago and don't turn up for "Promoting Happiness, Demoting Authority: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn Revisited" and "Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Hope and Happiness." 

==

Postscript.

Live-tweeting the philosophy conference

These conferences involve a lot more sitting and listening than I'm accustomed to. I've amused myself by tweeting about it... 

Last tweets from the conference, before flying home in the morning:

The earth of things

An old post from the Happiness blog, featuring a long-married pair of preeminent poets now both passed, reminding us why it's so vital that we humans keep moving forward and thinking about a better tomorrow. 

That's meliorism, which "treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become."

"It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism." Isn't it? Meliorists move forward, ideal by realized ideal, to see what may be made of our brief and flitting lives and of those still to come.

The poets remind us as well that we mustn't squander what James called the sufficiency of the present moment. It's in such moments of presence that the "earth of things" speaks most eloquently of the continuity of all time and the remembrance of things past.

I don't think happiness really comes to rocks and rainfall and wineglasses, but the poet is entitled to her license. I think her point is that it's here amidst the stuff of life, or for us it's nowhere. 

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away

...

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

--Happiness by Jane Kenyon 

Likewise, her husband the Sox fan. She's gone, and his attention has turned to his things.

William James, a poet among philosophers and an excellent philosopher of happiness, would have approved.

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. Pragmatism

Happiness on earth must be found on earth. Even those who invest themselves in dreams of heaven still do their dreaming here.

Such a simple point, but so elusive for so many.

Meliorism, humanism, hope, and happiness

 For those of us whose melioristic sympathies are rooted in William James's Pragmatism, the enlistment of Bertrand Russell as an ally in the moral equivalent of war may sound odd. James called him an ass ("Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. Ass!"), he took nasty swipes at WJ and said the "logical outcome" of the Will to Believe when applied to religion and politics would be carnage. "What is wanted is not the will to believe but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."

Nonetheless, I am struck more by the affinities of James and Russell and Richard Rorty as hopeful meliorists and humanists, and (though Rorty's general public demeanor was glum and Eeyore-ish) philosophers united in their pursuit of happiness. Those affinities far outweigh any differences as to the best interpretation of the relation between belief and knowledge. 

Meliorism, humanism, hope, and happiness are centered in forward-looking action, not armchair or seminar room contemplation. Rorty, Russell, and James (and let's add Dewey) share in the former's "protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality." Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism

James, it's true, defended the right of believers to humble themselves before "whatever they may call the divine." But his more characteristic disposition was to exalt the ways in which beliefs of all sorts could get persons formerly humbled and crippled by the challenges of living off their knees, up and moving forward.

It's always, for happy hopeful melioristic humanists, a question of what value for life our respective commitments and projects may deliver. It's always our really vital question: "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" 

Happy the philosopher whose center of gravity has shifted to this earth of things and finite humans questing to do their bit to make things just a little better. Going forward.

Bertie Russell, meliorist

 Yesterday's gorgeous sunny harbinger of spring, a sleeveless bikeride, two dogwalk 60s sort of day that we get randomly and delightfully in winter here in the mid-south, has yielded to clouds and a forecast of rain. Not complaining. Take delight where it comes, and anticipate more. 

Of course, weather finds other ways to try and kill us down here. So do our politicians. Pick your poison. I sometimes imagine what life would be like in New England. Would I have learned to love cross-country skiing and snowmobiling and seven or eight months of what we call winter? It sure looks great on screen, on Trout and Coffee and Ally Marie.

Imagination is one of our best tools, it enables us to describe and re-describe our lives and dreams. To dream, perchance to live. If you can think it you can maybe make it, or not. Either way, a flexible imagination is insurance against the possibility-denying platonic temptation to lock ourselves into an upper-case Reality without the prospect of amelioration. And we desperately need amelioration.

While I was out walking and riding in the sunshine yesterday I took Lord Russell with me. The BBC just brought out his inaugural Reith lectures of 1948, "Authority and the Individual." Younger Bertie was a platonist--"brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark"--, but he got over it. He became a meliorist. He grew up, into the understanding that our hopes, “though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,” remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a stronger democracy, a heritage of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a possibility.

Keep hope alive.

And that's how I think I'll conclude my remarks in Chicago next weekend at the APA, where it will probably not be sunny and sixty-something. It wasn't the last time I was there this time of year, right before everything locked down. But it'll be a nice place to visit again.

“We American college teachers”

This is quite a remarkable passage In Rorty's Universality and Truth lecture. Understand it, and you better understand his total weltanschauung.

"The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire 'liberal Establishment' is engaged in a conspiracy…These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with our fundamentalist students than do kindergarten teachers with their students…When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian Scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.' I have no trouble offering this reply, since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and require re-educating the children of southwestern Virginia in 1993..."

— Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/3psrY57

A good day

 Yesterday was excellent. First day of the rest of my life. 

Got it off on the right foot by walking away from my building, when I first arrived on campus at 8 am, rather than heading in. Just felt an insistent need for an immediate walkabout, without distraction or delay. 

That used to be my default, in every weather: walk to work (like Henry), right after the long benumbing auto commute. Lately I've gotten soft, in winter, preferring the instant comfort of central heating. 

But it wasn't that cold yesterday morning, 40-something, so I parked and pivoted in the direction of the Tom Jackson Building rather than the James Union. Then on past Murphy Center, the stadium, the baseball field, the KUC, the library, the science building, the Naked Eye observatory, through the Peck Hall courtyard, hard left at Kirksey Old Main... 

A brisk forty-minute ramble around our lyceum grounds and now I'm vivified, revitalized, and ready to work. I feel great.

And what do I find waiting for me at my office door?

Well, the day just kept getting better. Had our first midterm report presentation in CoPhi #6, on the Buddhist notion of anatta. Great job, Kloey. And thanks for bringing little chocolate chip cupcakes, Eden.

Then in #9 more of us finally found our tongues, eager to comment on Julian Baggini's observation that kids these days seem less interested in asserting fixed and essential identities with respect to gender and sexuality.

Then in A&P we voted to go outside and bask in the sunshine of the Peck Hall stoa as we continued our discussion of Richard Rorty's anti-authoritarianism. Just as we concluded, our resident Methodist minister noted with some amusement Rorty's cheeky statement about how "we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists..." 

And finally, in Bioethics we shared Claire's sweet treats and were treated as well to outstanding presentations from Patricia (on pandemics of yore) and Curtis on food insecurity, nutritional illiteracy and related issues. I was reminded to tout Cousin Jamie's spirited "ministry" and Michael Pollan's clever (and now brilliantly illustrated) Food Rules.

And I got to bring home the rest of the goodies. And reaffirmation, yet again, that it (just about any it) is solved by walking. Solvitur Ambulando. That might make a decent tattoo.

After all these years

 Well that was a lovely V/b-day, fed (Radish's falafel and Edleys' catfish and Younger Daughter's donuts-Krispy Kreme and Donut Den-and cake) and feted and collegially well-wished. My old pal in Alabama, who bought me a drink on my 21st birthday the day after his own, sent me a photo of his Medicare card. A club that'll have even us.

I was gifted with a green light, symbolizing hope and possibility. Hope mine shines steadier than Scott's and Gatsby's. "And one fine morning..."

The day began with a nice message from S "celebrating another trip around the sun, now you've caught up with me," and ended with Older Daughter's "hope you've enjoyed another rotation around the sun as much as possible during this confusing time." But of course the sun's but a morning star. Why shouldn't I enjoy going round and round it?

And as I told her, the old stoic's morning mantra helps keep the confusion at bay.

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

I do in fact begin each day with those very thoughts. I don't know what it exactly meant to Marcus Aurelius to run wth the stars, but to me it means being endlessly wonderstruck by the sheer scale and improbability of a cosmos that needn't have included me and those I love but nonetheless, "in our ordinariness" as Professor Dawkins effused in one of his humbler moments, did. Does.

Yesterday I thought also, inevitably, of the inexorable passage of time. Did you see Chevy Chase on Sunday Morning?

That must be why I took Oliver Burkeman with us on our dogwalk yesterday. Four Thousand Weeks aren't so many, when the bulk of them are behind you.

“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”

We're never going to "master time," the feeling of "total authority" is a crutch and a delusion (as Richard Rorty also keeps saying, long after his string of days ended), so we may as well "stop erring on the side of caution." Choose "curiosity over worry." Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things most days, after all. 

So stop worrying and enjoy your life. Breathe. Run with the stars.

Acceptance

The local electric utility sent its contractor over yesterday, without warning, to “trim” along the fence and power line. For some inexplicable reason they trimmed to the ground, tore up the backyard, took out a section of fence in Dogland and did not replace it, and left. 

Then AT&T came to install a fiber upgrade they said would disrupt service for no more than a few minutes. So naturally we’ve been without internet ever since, and I’m pecking out this post on the phone.

Also, a mysterious pain in my right hand again disrupted my slumber.

Good time for a carafe of Seattle’s Best, and Mark’s morning meditation (the one I’ve installed atop my digital diary as a daily reminder):

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." --Marcus Aurelius

Thanks, Emperor. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought.

But my reflections on RR’s pragmatic anti-authoritarianism have been squeezed, boiled down to just this: the chaos of our ludicrous fake-facts discourse and hyper-polarized politics just shows how unavailable anything resolutely authoritative is to us. 

Of course the facts are what they are, reality is what it is, but confirming the truth about facts and reality is a matter of messy “conversation”-not dispositive platonic imposition. 

Life is lived in lower-case, like it or not. I accept the lower-case universe. And I accept the moral of Carlyle’s quippy response to Fuller. Gad, we’d better.

The human abode

Interesting discussion in A&P yesterday of the Varieties of [Religious/Scientific] Experience, and their point of convergence in Carl Sagan's appreciation of WJ's longing to get back home. "Carl admired James's definition of religion as a feeling of being at home in the universe." What else is experience finally for, if not to acclimate us to our abode? 

The human abode, Dewey called it. Wherever we go, there we are. Wherever we are, there we go. Here we are. This is us, this natural world, this secular universe. The religious dimension of life here, on his view, embodies a "common faith" embracing nature and culture, anchoring us to the universe and to one another. Supernature can be dispensed with.

The way I'd put that point: supernatural yearnings are natural for some of us. Not for me, but for many. We can thus understand religion as the natural expression of that yearning to connect with something large and meaningful. We don't have to exit our universe to make that connection, it is implicit in the "natural piety" which is our inheritance and our birthright. 

Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just perspective in life.

Natural piety plugs us into the "continuous human community in which we are a link" and, Dewey concludes, furnishes "all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race."  We need to make it "explicit and militant"--but don't call it atheism, which in Dewey's analysis too frequently spurns association with religion and piety and that universal human linkage some of us call humanism.

So we turn next in A&P to Richard Rorty, who was more partial to Dewey than James. One of our questions, in which you may detect a Saganesque echo: Who speaks for pragmatism?

A bigger question: What practical difference does it make? 

What significant value for life hinges on whether we're Jamesians, Deweyans, Rortians, Humanists, Natural Pietists, Methodists, Genesis Creationists...? 

(I'm still puzzling over Gary's charge that Carl Sagan "misunderstood" Genesis, that it was never meant to be taken literally. That's enlightened Methodism for sure. But I think I understand from long experience that literal interpretations of Genesis are more nearly the rule than the exception, at least around these parts.)

But anyway, and most important of all: Can't we just all just get along? Those who come after us will have been counting on it.

A clean well-lighted corridor

First thing catching my eye, on parting the curtain this pitch-dark morn, is Venus blazing bright in the southeast. Good omen, for a semi-Thoreauvian who wears a tatted "morning star" under his sleeve. 

Or it would be, if omens were real. And maybe they are, in the natural non-mystical way that light prepares sight. Mercury and Mars are right there in Skyview's frame too, less nakedly visible but no less real. 

That's also the view from the pragmatic corridor, where I still find myself these days. Haven't made it to Rorty's bazaar yet, but I'll check it out soon. Like the star, the corridor invites expectation of hopeful hours ahead, hours of peaceable productivity and social amity. Expectation is not a promise, a guarantee, a specification of conditions, or a definition. But it is an inducement to get up and move, to risk a statement or two, to essay a thought and even dart to an aim.

The morning star for a corridor-roaming pragmatic mediator, just trying to keep all the tenants in Hotel Pragmatismo happy, is a symbol of civility. That's something sometimes hard to summon, when negotiating with adamantly insistent and demanding parties across the hall. But that's the mission, when you've taken the job of mediator. Pragmatism in that respect stands for no definite results save sustainable co-residency.  

So what are we talking about? We could be talking about definitions. Richard Rorty wonders about the best pragmatist definition of religion, and finds James deficient by comparison to the surprisingly militant Dewey who (he says) more adamantly forswears non-human undemocratic incursions from outside the natural and social bounds of the establishment (the "hotel"). 

Maybe. But from a mediator's circumscribed unpedantic perspective the best definition is probably none at all. "Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now." VRE II

Second-best would be the least disruptive of peace all along the corridor. It would be maximally inclusive, and would not presuppose contentious metaphysical supernatural entities or powers. 

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine...the immediate personal experiences will amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all.

There is nothing in the known universe more natural than immediate personal experiences, nor anything more promising of happiness. So that's what a good pragmatic hotelier will fill the time with. Definitions aren't really so crucial, but experience is. Experience of the divine, whatever you may consider it and however you define it, is (for a radical empiricist) a natural phenomenon. "Any total reaction upon life is a religion,"  a tie that binds an individual to life. There's no need to get militant about that. Is there? Except, at least, when individuals become imperious and authoritarian in their "reaction"?

The corridor is long, tidy, and lit. We should enjoy our stay.