A philosopher in the Sunday Times has an important question for young people and others who've so far had the privilege of being able to take bodily health for granted:
"…there is a limit to the happiness we can find in maintaining what is generally accepted as a healthy or beautiful body: If you are fortunate enough to live a long life, your body will break down. And it is not only age that can have its way with our bodies. Illness, accident or disability can quickly put an end to that bodily source of happiness. What then?
As a professor of philosophy exploring important life questions with my students — most of them young people whose conception of the world is more likely to be shaped by social media and corporate messaging than by the occasional course in philosophy — this is one I return to often: How can we come to understand the full range of the body's aesthetic potential and power?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/2022-good-news.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://c.im/@osopher/109616349414032351
In its very different style and mood, Jennifer Egan's The Candy House continues to explore Marilynne Robinson's theme of the "inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us"... We suffer from mutual, intractable, possibly ineradicable interpersonal opacity.
Or you could just call it a certain blindness.
“The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.” ― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House
Like kids in a candy house we can't stop sampling the stuff that sustains our separation and, in excess, makes us sick. For Egan it's subcutaneous social media that promises to "externalize" and over-share our experience. For Robinson it's the tendency to think we're in a good position to judge others' acts and motives even when we don't really have a clue what's going on in someone else's mind, or what their experience has meant to them.
These are themes I look forward to us exploring this coming semester in our course Experience, complementary sequel to last summer's on Rationality.
One odd incidental curiosity, I'd love to know whether it's purely coincidental: central figures in Robinson's and Egan's novels are, respectively, Reverend Boughton and a tech wizard called Bix Bouton.
Is that a knuckler, or what?!
…Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. 27
…the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. 29
…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp. 45
… And there was baseball… 50
…I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. 62
…I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth. 103
…you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. 108
…I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world! 131
…The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point. It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. 135
…presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, 141.
—my note: That's the nub of my objection to most religiosity. If our enjoyment doesnt matter, except by divine grace, then we dont truly value OUR lives. But I do. It does.
…his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. 142
…I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don’t care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting me watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.) 143
There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer. 165-6
…
…Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, Till death and Heav’n reveal the rest.—Isaac Watts And John Ames adds his amen. 190—My note:…Morris chair 270
I find the notion that we're just not supposed to know or inquire into some things superstitious... and the notion that pushing inquiry in every direction is somehow impious or impudent or hubristic doubly so.
…It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health. 272
…There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. 277
Also...
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”#philosophy #quotes #bot https://mastodon.lol/@Phil_O_Sophizer/109564291074074511
"I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth."
"Gilead: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson: https://a.co/434emDf
But not just any human.
"…A.I. can be helpful if we're looking for a light assist. A person could ask a chatbot to rewrite a paragraph in an active voice. A nonnative English speaker could ask ChatGPT to remove grammatical errors from an email before sending it. A student could ask the bot for suggestions on how to make an essay more persuasive.
But in any situation like those, don't blindly trust the bot.
Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" has been on my reading list ever since Barack Obama went out of his way to meet the author and discuss it with her. I finally started it, and just encountered an uncomfortably humbling insight many of us (I hope) can relate to:
"I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."
Gilead: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson: https://a.co/bicXECY
"How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season"
Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke saw a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His contemporary Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the great John Burroughs lauded as America’s greatest nature writer — captured this delicate dialogue between nature and human nature in his 1912 book Winter (public library | public domain) — a lyrical effort “to catch the spirit of the season… the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter,” to channel “the bitter boreal might… that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us.”
This year the winter solstice arrives on Dec. 21 in the shank of the dark afternoon. Officially the first day of astronomical winter, the solstice is better known as the shortest day of the year. I prefer to think of it as the longest night of the year, for I am making friends with darkness.
For most of my life, I looked forward to the solstice because it signals a shift to longer days. I was never a fan of winter, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets always felt to me like a kind of compensation for the cold. But my heart has been thawing these past years, watching as winter becomes ever more fragile, its cold imperiled by the changing climate, its darkness by our own foolishness and fear...
Like the legend of Mark Twain's premature obit. (But that, evidently, is not quite what Sam Clemens said.)
Ian Bogost says "ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think-Treat it like a toy, not a tool."
"When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last week, the first and most common reaction I saw was fear that it would upend education. “You can no longer give take-home exams,” Kevin Bryan, a University of Toronto professor, posted on Twitter. “I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments,” wrote Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist. That’s the fear...
Imagine worrying about the fate of take-home essay exams, a stupid format that everyone hates but nobody has the courage to kill." --Ian Bogost, Atlantic
“Wholes subscend their parts [in other words, a whole is less than the sum of its parts], which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible."
