The meaning of life

(Also known as the "secret of happiness")...

A student in CoPhi yesterday posted the lyrics of a vulgar song by the old punk band The Dictators, purporting to express the meaning of life. I found it a bit reductive. Here's a more expansive view, from the conclusion of Bertrand Russell's 1930 Conquest of Happiness:

The happy man or woman is

a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.

The "secret" is this: 

Let your interests be as wide as possible , and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Maybe. But maybe those other Brits were onto something too:

Well, it’s nothing special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Fundamentally that's all the same advice, isn’t it? Someone should put it in a song.

The problem of good

Jesus and Mo are right: there is a lot of good in the world, along with the pain and suffering highlighted by the philosophical problem of evil.

"Whatever." That's not usually regarded, in philosophy, as a conclusive refutation.

But at some point you have to stop arguing and consult your heart, on this question of how much human suffering is too much to lay at the feet of Divine Perfection.

Bertrand Russell's heart, head, and wit led him to this incredulous question:

Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?

What do you think?

Bertrand Russell speaks to the future

Construction of the "clock of the long now" has commenced, time to think seriously about what we mean for it to say to remote posterity. Bertrand Russell gave this question some thought:

Americans, Wittgenstein, Russell...

PW 108-119


1. What school of philosophy thrived in St. Louis in the 19th century? What is the sensibility of traditional ("classic") American philosophy? 


2. Which Puritan minister echoed John Calvin's view that all humans are born depraved and deserving of eternal punishment?


3. Which American revolutionaries do our authors name as "philosophically talented thinkers"? What has been the "routine" stance of the American public towards philosophy?


4. Which American "anarchist" inspired Gandhi and King? Which American follower of Kant and Hegel promoted humanism and self-reliance and considered nature inherently spiritual? 


5. How did the new American philosophy distinguish itself from the European tradition? What was its unique style? What was it called?


6. Which logician rejected "eternal" and "a priori" beliefs as practically useless, and spurned the label "pragmatist" when he was credited with being the movement's founder? 


7. Who was the "radical empiricist" and pluralist who said religious beliefs may be justified if they help us navigate our experience and make sense of our lives? What is "pluralism" in philosophy? How does it reflect the American experience?


8. Who began as an "evangelical" Hegelian, rejected reductionism and dualism in philosophy, and insisted that children learn best by doing? 


9. Which Harvard student of James's defended "black pride"? 


10. Which German philosopher most influenced "the linguistic turn"? Which English philosopher was not content merely to memorize the arithmetic tables but wanted to show that they could be derived from logic? Who was his collaborator in this endeavor? To what kind of "atoms" did he try to reduce the world's complexity? What other kind of philosophy was he known for?


11. Which German philosopher founded a new approach to the study of consciousness that attempted to describe its essential structures? What did he mean by "intentional"?


12. Which student of Russell's proposed a "picture" theory of meaning and emphasized the "unsayable"? Why did he leave philosophy? What did he say when he came back?


13. What were Freud's pro- and anti-Enlightenment ideas? Why were his ideas considered outrageous?


14. What did Max Weber say about Calvinism?

pineal gland

Interesting NW class today, thanks to questions from Clark & Jon on (respectively) Earth's long-term good* and the ethics of carnivorousness [see Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place" & Omnivore's Dilemma], and then Kayla's report on the pineal gland. I'm sure we'll return to all of these topics in class again, but on the latter some might be interested in this article about Descartes' interest in that gland as the "seat of the soul":

Incorporeal volitions cannot move the corporeal pineal gland because this would violate the law of the conservation of energy. Descartes did not have this problem because he did not know this law...

As philosophy reduced the pineal gland to just another part of the brain and science studied it as one endocrine gland among many, the pineal gland continued to have an exalted status in the realm of pseudo-science. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, identified the “third eye” discovered by the comparative anatomists of her time with the “eye of Shiva” of “the Hindu mystics” and concluded that the pineal body of modern man is an atrophied vestige of this “organ of spiritual vision.” This theory is still immensely popular today. 

My own view, to paraphrase Ray Stevens: every gland is beautiful, in its own way... but none of them is likely to reconcile metaphysically-distinct res extensa  and res cogitans. It's part of the brain, whose works & wonders we've only just begun to grasp.

Oh, and about the symbolism of those pine cones: remember, futurists, the bristlecone pines from Clock of the Long Now?

Rings in some dead bristlecone trunks on the mountain [Mt. Washington in Nevada]  go back 10,000 years... 'Find a bristlecone you like and hang out with it. Forget the present. Think about the past and the future.'

Think, in other words, deeper than seven generations. Think really long-term, and don't despair.
==
* The way Clark phrased his question reminded me of this...



and this:

Plato

A good recent account of Plato's myth of the cave, by Simon Blackburn, followed by Bertrand Russell's discussion of Forms/Ideas/Universals:

no man's land

Intro Quiz 2-

1. What do you consider subversive or dangerous about philosophy? Is it subversive or dangerous in a good way or bad?

2. Is it really better to do "evil" than to do nothing? What do you mean by evil?

3. Are you a philosopher? What makes you (not) one? What's your definition of wisdom?

4. Karl Jaspers said the 5th century B.C.E. was the apex of the "axial" age. Why?

5. What was distinctive about Greece in the axial age?

A free man

Freddie William Roth (12.12.28 - 2.19.10) Builder, engineer, leader, beloved father, husband, grandpa. A free man. [obit] [obit jco] 

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed. 

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. Bertrand Russell, "A Free Man's Worship"

prickly

Here is an illustration of why atheists are tired of cowering quietly in the closet, and why I'm tired of people ridiculing Unitarians. If I ever get elected to anything, just swear me in on the Constitution-- or on Why I am Not a Christian, tabbed to "A Free Man's Worship."
==

Conservatives warn of lawsuit as atheist takes office in N.C. city
Tenn.'s constitution contains similar ban

RALEIGH, N.C. — Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government — but he doesn't believe in God. His political opponents say that's a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they've got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.

Bothwell's detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state's requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Constitution.

"The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me, and it's certainly not relevant to public office," the recently elected 59-year-old said.

Bothwell ran this fall on a platform that also included limiting the height of downtown buildings and saving trees in the city's core, views that appealed to voters in the liberal-leaning community at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. When Bothwell was sworn into office on Monday, he used an alternative oath that doesn't require officials to swear on a Bible or reference "Almighty God."

That has riled conservative activists, who cite a little-noticed quirk in North Carolina's Constitution that disqualifies officeholders "who shall deny the being of Almighty God." The provision was included when the document was drafted in 1868 and wasn't revised when North Carolina amended its constitution in 1971. One foe, H.K. Edgerton, is threatening to file a lawsuit in state court against the city to challenge Bothwell's appointment.

"My father was a Baptist minister. I'm a Christian man. I have problems with people who don't believe in God," said Edgerton, a former local NAACP president and founder of Southern Heritage 411, an organization that promotes the interests of black Southerners...

In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that federal law prohibits states from requiring any kind of religious test to serve in office when it ruled in favor of a Maryland atheist seeking appointment as a notary public.

But the federal protections don't necessarily spare atheist public officials from spending years defending themselves in court...

Bothwell was raised a Presbyterian but began questioning Christian beliefs at a young age and considered himself an atheist by the time he was 20. He's an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, and he still celebrates Christmas, often hanging ornaments on his fishhook cactus...Merry Christmas!

value of philosophy

A colleague and I are scheduled to tape an interview on campus tomorrow, to discuss (among other things) the value of philosophy to our students, to the university, and to the culture at large. Just in case we don't get all the right words out, here are two of my favorite sources on this topic-- Bertrand Russell and John Lachs:

The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect…

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. Bertrand Russell, The Value of Philosophy

Teaching the young involves activities that pull in different directions: the culture’s practices and values must be handed on, but they must also be criticized and suitably revised. In doing the former, teachers act as servants of the past, giving a favorable account of the fruits of long experience. In doing the latter, they labor for the future, presenting ideas for how our practices can be improved. The first activity is centered on sketching the geography of what exists and explaining the rules governing it; the second is about the ways the possible can bring improvement to the actual. The first without the second yields stagnation, the second without the first creates chaos. When properly related, the two preserve what is of value from the past even as they encourage active dreaming about a better future. John Lachs, MTSU Lyceum address, 4.14.09

Bertie Russell, action hero

"Well, this is unexpected"...

No kidding! — "a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics.... The story proper opens on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Bertrand Russell is giving a public lecture at an American university on the role of logic in human affairs. Angry isolationists in the audience challenge Russell to explain how logic could justify participating in a world war. Ah, he responds, but what is logic? In a series of flashbacks, Russell recounts his epic struggle with that question..."

Great! Keep 'em coming, Logicomix!

pre-B'Bang?

Time interviews Brian Clegg about his book Before the Big Bang. Interesting. But he's apparently not read his Bertrand Russell: positing a God behind it all just pushes the mystery back a notch, it doesn't solve anything.

Still, it's a natural and reasonable (if not quite intelligible) question: "What came before the Big Bang?"

In your book, you describe the Big Bang theory as having "the feeling of something held together with a Band-Aid."

Scientists will often portray the Big Bang as if it were known fact, but it isn't. It's a theory within a very speculative field of science, cosmology, which is about as speculative as it gets. I'm not saying the Big Bang theory isn't true, but it's a work in progress.So what are some of the theory's major flaws?

There's an expectation that the Big Bang should have produced a rippling effect, almost like an aftershock, where we could see subtle variations in gravity that have carried on ever since then. A lot of money has been spent on experiments to try and detect these gravity waves and they literally have never, ever found anything. Even if they do exist, they're probably not at levels we could detect. And why did it happen at all? There is no sensible answer for the Big Bang unless you move over into the religious side and say, "Well, it began because God began it." That's why quite a lot of scientists are nervous about the Big Bang. They quite prefer having something that doesn't require somebody sort of poking a finger in and saying, "Now it's starting."

What it's all about

Annie Dillard was a wise twenty-something in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Answering a curious London cabbie:


Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about," and, do you know, he couldn't tell me... I know what it's all about, and I wish I didn't. The parents die, the next generation lives, ad majorem gloriam, and so it goes.

And so it goes.

Dawkins' passion

Richard Dawkins is today's Bertrand Russell, at least with respect to free-thinking. In God Delusion he writes:

God is "a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochist, capriciously malevolent bully."

Why is Dawkins so aggressively atheistic - much moreso than Russell, in fact? This interview gets at that. He's not just against religion, he's for something he thinks is a lot better.

Happy Birthday, Bertie

May 18 is the birthday of philosopher Bertrand Russell, born in Trellech, Wales (1872), into one of Britain's most prominent families. His parents were free-thinkers, and his father was an atheist, but both his parents died by the time he was four. They left their son under the care of radical friends, hoping he would be brought up as an agnostic, but his grandparents stepped in, discarded the will, and raised Bertrand and his brother in a strict Christian household.

As a teenager, Bertrand kept a diary, in which he described his doubts about God and his ideas about free will. He kept his diary in Greek letters so that his conservative family couldn't read it. Then he went to Cambridge and was amazed that there were other people who thought the way he did and who wanted to discuss philosophical ideas. He emerged as an important philosopher with The Principles of Mathematics (1903), which argued that the foundations of mathematics could be deduced from a few logical ideas. And he went on to become one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century. His History of Western Philosophy (1946) was a big best seller, and he was able to live off its royalties for the rest of his life.

He said, "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."Writer's Almanac

He also said:

Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen in this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. ("Why I am not a Christian")

Dr. Flicker read his Russell.

Not-Good Friday

Natural events eclipsed the human tempest (threatened department merger or elimination) my colleagues and I have been preoccupied with lately. A young mother and her 9-week old infant lost their lives and home in an instant, as a tornado gouged an ugly ten-mile swathe through this region yesterday.

Inevitably, obscenely, survivors rushed to thank God for sparing THEM.

A grinning buffoon of a minister, sporting a tee-shirt reading: "Give Blood: Play Hockey," cheerfully announced that he and his congregants couldn't wait - on this Good Friday - to see what exciting thing the Lord would cook up next.

Survivors solemnly insisted: "It's God's work." Great. As George Carlin used to wonder, incredulously: "'God's will'? Who does this guy think He is?"

Bertrand Russell had a saner perspective:

It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill?

Or storms that randomly steal the lives of young mothers and their infants?