"Brave thinking about truth"

Jennifer Hecht says "brave thinking about the truth" was the secret to happiness, for the old Greeks. They thought contemplation would "transform us and let us taste what there is to taste of transcendence."


“Transcendence” is a $4 word best approached in hyphenated stages-- trans-end-dance-- meaning simply, on Peter Ackroyd’s reading of the "Plato Papers," 

the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. 

So the Greeks tried to think bravely about life and death, and to make the best of things in the interval. My favorites are Aristotle and Epicurus. 

really hard

Two weeks from today the Tennessee Philosophical Association gathers once again at Vanderbilt. I'm expected to have something to say about John Rawls. As a past president of this organization I have to say: it is a great pleasure not to be in charge of organizing it this year, though the '07 symposium was great fun. (Just wish the Vandy video-tapers hadn't lost our taped tribute to John Lachs!)


I'm really looking forward to the keynote the night before from Duke's Owen Flanagan. He wrote The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. If I get to do that "Humanism and Meaning"* course someday I may use it. 


Flanagan says of Rawls (and Aristotle, and eudaimonia or human flourishing): 

"The project of human ecology conceived as eudaimonics then becomes seeking the world most beneficial to all human beings, including future ones."

Sounds like a good plan to me.






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*This course would resemble the "Atheism & Spirituality" course from last Spring, but this time with even greater attention to the reasons for affirming humanism (naturalism, atheism) rather than for rejecting theism. We'd explore and critique the claim that a humanist worldview is as meaningful to its adherents as theism is to theists, with John Dewey's A Common Faith, Andre Comte-Sponville's Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" and "Why I'm Not a Christian," and more recent voices as well. What makes life worth living, for those who do not seek for meaning beyond it? 

Sound like a good course to you? Vote for it in the Fall '11 survey.

shiny happy people

We didn't get around to noting, in class, two important observations on Aristotle's concept of flourishing.

Aristotle "calls someone eudaimon only if that person comes fairly close to the ideal life for all human beings, whereas our standard of happiness is more subjective and flexible. We do not have a defensible theory about which lives are ideal, and even if we did, we would not want to judge people happy only if they come close to the best life a human being can lead."

Richard Kraut is here expressing the liberal pluralism of our age, the democratic live-and-let-live mentality that shuns sharp hierarchies of value in the comparative estimation of different lives.

But the next observation, from Richard Taylor, is more judgmental:

There are those among us, possibly the majority, who "do much as their neighbors do and as their parents have done, creating virtually no values of their own, but absorbing the values of those around them. Their lives are lived like clockwork, and thought, which should be the source of projects and ideals, is hardly more than a byproduct of what they are doing... such people are by the ordinary standards that prevail quite happy-- that is, they are of good cheer, greet each sunrise with fresh anticipation, have friends, and spend much of their time exchanging empty remarks and pleasantries with others like them. They are, in a word, contented..."

But they fall far short of eudaimonia, they're "not fulfilled but merely satisfied."

And they expect no trouble from Mr. Deity's gatekeeper.

real virtue

Maybe it is time to trot out again old Ben Franklin's proposal for a new political party, our old ones haven't worked well together for a very long time. A United Party for Virtue, composed of excellence-seekers "acting only with a view to the good of mankind," is a pretty dream. (Hap Hyp, ch8).

But could just anybody join, on their mere word of wishing to transcend sect and narrow self-interest? I know what we'd all soon be shouting at one another: "You lie!"

Still, Aristotelian virtue-- maximizing potential, pursuing purpose, selflessly embracing the common interest-- sounds really good. It sounds excellent, in fact. Arete!

(Don't know much about Aristotle? Here's a three-minute primer from a vulgar Aussie-- mildly amusing, slightly informative.)

And Poor Richard is a good model of virtue in the American grain, not "goody goody" but (as Maira Kalman illustrates) with good and industrious intentions and a whole lot of zest and sparkle and wit. Sign me up.

And btw: HBO captured him perfectly, I hope. I much prefer his spirited wisdom to John Adams' New England testiness, even though I don't much follow Old Ben's advice about public anonymity. But young Ben, I'll bet-- the printer and Almanac publisher-- woulda been a blogger, under one name or another.

Can't say much for his singing in 1776, though.

Aristotle in Tennessee

Nashville may be the "Athens of the south" but I don't recall ever seeing Aristotle in the pages of the Tennessean before. He was right, before James extended the observation by pointing out that habit is the "enormous flywheel of society" that makes things go and keeps 'em going in the right direction. Way to go, Tennessean editor. More philosophy, please.