And look for me on Bluesky @osopher.bsky.social & @wjsociety.bsky.social... president@wjsociety.org... Substack https://philoliver.substack.com (Up@dawn@Substack)... and Mastodon @osopher@c.im... (Done with X and Meta)...
Continuing reflections caught at daybreak, in a WJ-at-Chocorua ("doors opening outward") state of mind...
How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?
"…I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. For a moment, I panicked. Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. Where had they come from? Evidently, I'd had a thought—that was why I'd raised my hand. But I hadn't known what the thought would be until I spoke it. How weird was that?
Later, describing the moment to a friend, I recalled how, when I was a kid, my mother had often asked my father, "What are you thinking?" He'd shrug and say, "Nothing"—a response that irritated her to no end. ("How can he be thinking about nothing?" she'd ask me.) I've always been on Team Dad; I spend a lot of time thoughtless, just living life. At the same time, whenever I speak, ideas condense out of the mental cloud. It was happening even then, as I talked with my friend: I was articulating thoughts that had been unspecified yet present in my mind..."—Joshua Rothman
"…Contrary to stereotype—which pictures Kant as a joyless automaton, rigidly stuck on his daily routine—Kant enjoyed wine, billiards, and fancy clothes. On occasion, we are told, he drank so much he couldn't find his way home. Kant flirted with women, told excellent jokes, and hosted much-loved dinner parties..." --Kieran Setiya
So that film "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant," depicting him as "famously abstemious and abstruse" (wroteRichard Brody in The New Yorker), gets it at least half wrong? That will please my Kantian friend Daryl, master carpenter and himself always the life of the party. But it won't please him that Kant thought beer makes people "boorish"… of course, Manny never tried PBR.
(Dr. Daryl’s sober judgment: “Well, he was a convivial host for dinner parties at his house, once he could afford a house (at age 60). Don’t believe the caricatures of grad school. I gave several papers that stressed Kant’s sociality. But caricatures retain a hold in undergrad & grad programs.” If I’m not to believe the caricatures of grad school, though, I’m going to require an extensive re-education. So are we all, I expect.)
Or, I presume, kombucha-my own favored brew these days. When I finally churn out my first good batch (I got a kit for Christmas, but they say winter is not a good time) I'll throw a symposium and offer it to my un-abstemious pals. We'll see if the probiotic elixir conduces to Veritas. Or just the usual badinage we like to sling, whatever else we're swallowing.
One last cheeseburger on French bread with a side of rings and a beer, at fabled (but gone) Rotier's on Elliston Place-Oct '19
It's a familiar text for James scholars, this early diary entry, but so much of his mature philosophy is already presaged by it. It's an essential touchstone, and a good launchpad for any daunting project.
"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—" the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation and contemplative Grüblei in which my nature takes most delight, and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the form of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. Principiis obsta [or as Barney Fife said, nip it!]—Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in Anschauungen [abstractions, intuitions], but in accumulated acts of thought lies salvation. Passer outre [Disregard, & carry on]. Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be sure, can't be optimistic—but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in] * doing and suffering and creating." *
Here's a nice Zoom-facilitated conversation with Socrates Express author Eric Weiner. (Thanks for sharing, Ed). We'll be reading and discussing his early chapters next week.
I've enjoyed Weiner's previous books, in particular his happiness travelogue The Geography of Bliss (2008). “Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.” Maybe "the greatest source of happiness is other people" (Sartre's "hell" and the wrong other people notwithstanding).
In Socrates Express's Introduction, Weiner mentions The Story of Philosophyby Will and Ariel Durant (1926). That was the first philosophy book I recall reading. Like Weiner's, my curiosity was piqued. And here I am today, anticipating another semester's opportunity to transmit the philosophy virus to a fresh crop of student subjects.
Weiner's first chapter skips ahead (past Socrates et al) to the Roman emperor/stoic Marcus Aurelius. Weiner says he and the emperor share an aversion to early-rising. But Marc's morning meditation inspires me, very much a morning person (I rarely fail to rise before dawn, when I most like to post my blog Up@dawn)...
"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."
That puts things in the right perspective, no matter how big a mess others may be making of their precious privilege. It reminds me to do better, to be a good meliorist--someone committed to doing what he can to make things better, and to be happy doing it. The emperor is thus for me a patron saint of the dawn.
And as Weiner admits, mornings set the tone for the day. For the life. Having a good morning is the best way I've found to get on with the work (at its best indistinguishable from play) of being human.
Another patron saint of morning was Henry David Thoreau, who Weiner and we will get to later. He concluded Walden:
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
So here's hoping the sun melts the snow and ice by Tuesday and we can finally get on with the dawn of our sluggish-to-start semester.
Spent the better part of the morning in the dentist's chair getting crowned. The doc thought it was funny when I said the experience was something like I imagined waterboarding must be. He also laughed when I said it could be worse, maybe. I should have asked for the nitrous, then I'd have been laughing too.
One good thing came of the ordeal (well, two-assuming he did a good job): Billy Joel's 1989 "We Didn't Start the Fire" played long enough in the background for me to pick up more of the lyrics than I ever have before. It's not a good song melodically, as the artist himself admitted--a pop musical equivalent of the dentist's drill--but I like long lists of things I'm familiar with. So it made the time go slightly quicker.
If we ever get back to school--Opening Day's again been canceled tomorrow--I'll ask the kids how many of the references they get. Bet I'll win that one.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye
...
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
...
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
...
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?
...
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
GK is happy in the morning with his toast and marmalade. I too favor the "nearsighted view" at dawn, which on reflection lends greater clarity, cheer, and ameliorative potential to the rest of the day. And to life. Same for lunch in the park, and writing (or thinking about it) in the reading room. Not sure about the subway though.
"This happiness is the result of taking a nearsighted view of life as opposed to the kind in which you wake up and begin thinking about the Middle East…" Life beckons
A guy nicknamed The Melancholy Dane is probably not a reliable authority on this subject.
"People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness." — Søren Kierkegaard
On the other hand...
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
"Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary." HDT, via Maria Popova
Did that yesterday, a long solo walk sans my usual canine cohort. They're not built for frigid arctic air, and little Pita is not built for deep drifts.
So my spirits sagged a bit at first, missing my pals. But there is indeed something elevating about the uncanny quiet of a landscape locked down by uncustomary extreme weather. We can go entire winters in middle Tennessee without as much snowfall as surprised us yesterday. It was still snowing at 2 pm but the storm had lessened considerably.
I got to start breaking in my new Chocoruas, the Timberland boots named for WJ's favorite lake and mountain. They made a satisfying crunch in the powder, the only sound around. The streets were empty, save a sledder or two. All was calm, all was bright. I was toasty in my rarely-worn old parka.
Was it a spiritual experience? By my definition of the word, rooted in the etymology of respiration and inspiration, it was. It redeemed the forced disruption of routine that I usually find disorienting. And it sharpened the contrast of indoor to outdoor life, making the simple return to hearth and home itself an experience to savor.
This was supposed to be Opening Day at school, a spiritual experience of another sort. I look forward to it Thursday. But today, I look forward to another long winter walk.
Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
...Of the 2,500 licensed drivers who responded to the AAA survey, 22 percent admitted to switching lanes at high speeds or tailgating, 25 percent admitted to running a red light, 40 percent admitted to holding an active phone while driving and 50 percent admitted to exceeding posted speed limits by 15 miles per hour or more — all within the last calendar month.
Worse, a sizable number of respondents said they knew that people important to them would somewhat or completely disapprove of much of the behavior. They did it anyway, despite the risk of opprobrium and despite the fact that, as the AAA dryly noted in an accompanying news release, "a motorist's need for speed consistently fails to deliver shorter travel times. It would take driving 100 miles at 80 m.p.h. instead of 75 m.p.h. to shave just five minutes off a trip." ... nyt
"What unfolds when intentional spaces are cultivated to explore the essence of humanity?" That's just one of many questions that course instructor and Humanist Chaplain at Tufts University Anthony Cruz Pantojas asks students in a new course exploring the utility and significance of humanism. https://thehumanist.com/news/secularism/a-course-on-humanism-for-everyday-life
We have to work for our consolation and our happiness (not to mention survival) in this less-than-rationally ordered world, without guarantee of success. We have to be meliorists.
Kieran Setiya has another nice post, this one about self-destructive desires and their continuing hold on us long after we've seen and repudiated their darkness.
"What kind of world do we inhabit, in which things that bring us consolation at intolerable cost might continue to cost but cease to console?" Great question, not merely rhetorical. And great post (but as with Wittgenstein's Tractatus I'm not quite sure what to make of the numbers.)
In a better world consolation would be on tap, without cost. That's James's "wishing-cap" world, utopia, literally nowhere.
...the only fully rational world would be the world of wishing-caps, the world of telepathy, where every desire is fulfilled instanter, without having to consider or placate surrounding or intermediate powers... In our world, the wishes of the individual are only one condition. Other individuals are there with other wishes and they must be propitiated first... We approach the wishing-cap type of organization only in a few departments of life. We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button... Pragmatism VIII
So we have to work for our consolation, without guarantee of success. We have to be meliorists. The upside is that it becomes easier to identify the sources of false consolation, the "degrading poisons" of misleading allure, and renounce them. Smoking and drinking were relatively easy to give up, for me, compared to dreams of Utopia. But dreams of an incrementally better world are easier to believe in. Slightly.
I always look forward to your Saturday dispatches, Kieran. (And we're reading Life is Hard in my classes again this semester.) Thanks for this. Carry on.
These days I raise my glass of kombucha to health and happiness, and a longer better richer life.
The creative silence of morning is sacred, as was the joyous song of GK's show last night at the Ryman. We're so impressed by the stamina of an 81-year-old who can keep us up past our bedtime with a nearly 3-hour show. And he led us in song right through the intermission. The meanderingly silly Lake Wobegon monolog concluded with a heartfelt thanks to "friends, not fans"… a joyful night out, "miserable" wooden pews notwithstanding. Thank you, GK. Substack
I loved the whole show, especially the audience singing "It Is Well With My Soul," which I thought appropriate for an old gospel tabernacle. That crowd knew all the words. And the wooden pews makes the place so reverberant. It was odd that I forgot to put in my hearing aids and did the show without them and for some reason Heather and I sounded even better singing together. I hit some high notes I didn't know I had.
