squirrel philosophy

"I tell this trivial anecdote of the squirrel because it is a peculiarly simple example of the pragmatic method." William James


Frazz

mystical intoxication

moral holidays

How Yoga Won the West - NYTimes.com

More philosophy in the Sunday paper:

When the Hindu sage Vivekananda made his way to America over a century ago,

The Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James was fascinated by the 31-year-old Indian and quoted at length from Vivekananda’s writings in his seminal work, “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

“A very nice man! A very nice man!” Vivekananda reported after his first meeting with James, who called his new friend “an honor to humanity.”

The novelist Gertrude Stein, then a student of James’s at Radcliffe, reportedly attended Vivekananda’s 1896 talk at Harvard — which so wowed the college’s graybeards that they offered him the chairmanship of Eastern philosophy. He declined, noting his vows as a monk.

How Yoga Won the West - NYTimes.com:

'via Blog this'

Exam day advice

Here’s the best test-prep advice I can pass along:

If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, “I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.” Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently. William James, “Gospel of Relaxation“

If you’ve been up all night cramming, in other words, good luck. You’ll need it. But if you’ve been diligent, have steeped yourself in the subject all semester long, and either went out to play or to an early bed last night, your luck will be the residue of design. You’ll do fine.

But don’t try too hard to relax.

It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not.

Care tomorrow. Today, just show up and do your best.

Hegel was not a Cubs fan

Probably not a Cards fan either. But I hit upon a fun new way of trying to explain Hegel yesterday in Co-Phi, inspired by an essay on 19th century St. Louis Hegelians Henry Brokmeyer and W.T. Harris:

Hegel’s progressive unfolding [of rational consciousness, geist, Utimate Reality] thrived on conflict, what Hegel’s popularizers (but rarely Hegel himself) referred to as “thesis and antithesis.” Hegel stuck to lofty abstractions like Being (thesis), Nothing (antithesis) and Becoming (synthesis.) Henry Brokmeyer, not so much. His unimpeachably practical list of theses and antitheses encompassed nearly every aspect of American life: religion vs. science, abolitionism vs. slavery, St. Louis vs. Chicago.

It just so happens that St. Louis defeated Chicago on Sunday to keep their flickering MLB postseason hopes alive. What could be the "world-historical" significance of that? Or of the fact that the lowly Astros knocked the Cards off last night, dropping the Braves' magic number to 2?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say: none at all. But I still like Hegel's largest message, as reported by the authors of our Co-Phi text. "We're all in this together." I wonder if they came to that after a hit of nitrous? Or after reading "On Some Hegelisms"...

"The interest of history is detached from individuals." Squashed Hegel

Jameses

A new blog is devoted to exploring the correspondence between brothers William and Henry James. The Philosopher and The Master, toe to toe (or pen to pen). Should be fun to follow.

A sample post:

9/07/2011

Wm to H'ry, July 15, 1865. Age: 23

"No words, but only savage inarticulate cries can express the gorgeous loveliness of the walk I have been taking....How often my dear old Harry wd. I have given every thing to have you by my side to enjoy the magnificent landscape of this region."

W^m seems to be feeling better.  The plea for H'ry's company is a motif that runs through the entire correspondence.  Though he claims that words can't express the loveliness of his walk, much of the letter sets out to achieve just that.  The return address reads "Original Seat of Garden of Eden."

Lonely, but feeling adventurous

Life only avails

Interesting convergence of tweets from William James and John Dewey this morning, spotlighting the indispensable contribution of real life experience to intelligence and wisdom:

WillmJames William James 

I can NOT understand a determinism which rejoices in clearness and distinctions, and which is at the same time alive to moral ones... unless it be that the latter are purely speculative for it, and have little to do with its real feeling of the way life is made up.

7 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

JohnDeweyBOT John Dewey 

The only discipline that stands by us, the only training that becomes intuition, is that got through life itself.

7 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Both put me in mind of one of my favorite lines in Emerson: "Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose..." Or, as I was saying yesterday: just get up and move, pay attention to what's around you and try to learn something from it.

polysyllabic humanity

What I think Wade Davis is really saying about cultural diversity:

Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner... Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. 

--William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

bliss

Classroom conversations of recent days remind me that many students are intrigued by the metaphysical possibilities they imagine (or claim) can be found in deliberately-altered states of consciousness. It was ever thus. William James shared the feeling, but finally resisted the lure of his own experiments in psycho-pharmacology and creative dentistry (catalyzed by the "subjective effects" of nitrous oxide, which btw is apparently a leading cause of ozone depletion). 

James: "It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning." Varieties of Religious Experience 

Eric Weiner has a lighter take on the subject, in his Geography of Bliss. His experience in a Netherlands "hash cafe" is very funny, and this observation seems right to me:

...at least half the fun of engaging in illicit activity is the illicit part and not the activity part. In other words, smoking hash legally in Rotterdam is not nearly as much fun as doing it illicitly in your college dorm room with Rusty Fishkind, knowing that at any moment you might get caught.

Still, though, he wonders: "What if I felt like this all of the time. Wouldn't I be happy all of the time?"


Depends on what "happy" means. I'm teaching Happiness 101 again next Fall, this time exploring the premise that there might be some secret or key to happiness. Is it simply a matter of chemical re-engineering? 

in the zone

Happy birthday William James. I've just learned that you have a "zone"...

Brains are surprisingly good at inventing reasons for being angry, even if the original reason has gone away and the only real remaining cause is the adrenaline in the bloodstream. It can bephysically impossible to let go of anger until your body has settled down. The rate at which your body returns to its baseline non-angry state varies from person to person. Being in this state of reinforced physical anger is what we call the William James zone, and how long it takes you to get out of that zone is your “William James threshold.” The philosopher William James predicted this effect long before the science of biology was able to confirm it, which is why we named this effect after him... The Usual Error Project

Good call. James has other, better zones too: the state of delight, the feeling of effort, the "sentiment of rationality" (what he also called the "sufficiency of the present moment"), the directed control of attention. The importance of knowing what zone you're in, and where you want to go, is among the great unguarded secrets of life.

Another "secret" is: don't waste any occasion for a party. I'm lighting a candle for (in A.N. Whitehead's words) "that adorable genius, William James." Remember...

And I'm lighting another, today, for my wife.

"my advice to students"

"If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep."  

William James, "The Gospel of Relaxation" (in Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals)

And to myself:

"Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care."

And: don't feel guilty for watching Ken Burns' "Tenth Inning" again tonight.

meliorism

Some optimists think we live in the best of all possible worlds. Some pessimists fear they may be right. Subjectivists wallow in their interior dramas. The sensible alternative? Meliorism, "a better promise as to this world's outcome"...

the vital question

just imagine

Interesting reflections on the philosophical uses of imagination, from Oxford don Timothy Williamson last week in The Stone. Like Williamson, and unlike some of my colleagues, I have great respect for the novelistic imagination as a vehicle for ideas and critical thinking. 


In New Hampshire, for instance, I mentioned Rebecca Goldstein's novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, about an "atheist with a soul" who strikes me as a Jamesian who's read his "Will to Believe." What so impresses me about that essay, and about James in general, is his vast well of sympathy for beliefs not necessarily his own. That's the power of the philosophic mind attuned to possibilities, only a fraction of which will ever be actualized or validated in our own personal experience.


Williamson, though, says something near the end of his essay I think a Jamesian could quarrel with:

Today, if someone claims that science is by nature a human activity, we can refute them by imaginatively appreciating the possibility of extra-terrestrial scientists.

Umm, no. We can extend and deepen their claim, not refute it, by noting that human activities bear the potential to open us up imaginatively to worlds we've barely begun to dream of.


How did Emily Dickinson put it? "The brain is wider than the sky..."

 

deep reading

It's a bit ironic to find Nick Carr's The Shallows, which complains-- among other things-- about a Rhodes Scholar (& philosophy major!) from Florida who never reads entire books but relies instead on the far more "efficient" surface reading facilitated by Google Books...in Google Books.

But wherever you find it, in whatever medium or format, this deserves to be read deeply end to end. Carr has read his William James on "attention."

shipwreck

Thinking about train-wrecks this morning, and the Great Train-Wreck at Dutchman's Curve in 1918-- a line of reflection oddly triggered by the comparatively-trivial derailment in France of Lance Armstrong, puts me in mind of a memorable James quote.

The world may be saved, on condition that its parts shall do their best. But shipwreck in detail, or even on the whole, is among the open possibilities.

Drive safely. Or fly. Or, you could walk.

hyperthymia, hypomania

They are real conditions, sometimes indistinguishable from the outside but experienced very differently within. Hyperthymia may be what William James had in mind when he discussed the "once-born" in Varieties of Religious Experience, with their child-like cheerful openness, acceptance, and affirmation of existence . Hypomania is symptomatic of bi-polar disorder. Happy forever after is storybook. Is real happiness something else? Guess it depends on what kind of an ogre your nature and nurture have made you.


Richard Powers draws the distinction in Generosity:

"odd and pixeled"

I logged on to a live chat with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik yesterday afternoon, discussing his piece in the new issue "What Did Jesus Do?" It's a smart review of the spate of new books on Jesus, including Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted. (Ehrman will be our department's first Lyceum Lecture guest early next year, stay tuned.)

Reminded me of the "biotech & ethics" Friday chats we did a couple years back: rapid-fire, a bit choppy, but fun and challenging and quickly over.

Here was my little exchange. (The excisions marked by [...] indicate moments when all those other unseen chatters rushed in to interrupt with their own agendas. You obviously couldn't do this in the flesh, it would be too much like a presidential press conference.)

3:35

[Comment From Osopher] 

Thanks for clarifying the end of the essay. But it still bothers me that you evoke a "mystery" surrounding this man, rightly credited by Jefferson with moments of moral sublimity but also documented by Bart Ehrman and others as having been almost uniformly misunderstood. So my question: what do you see as the unsolved mystery about Jesus of Nazareth?

3:36

Adam Gopnik: By "unsolved mystery" I meant only that there are aspects of the Jesus myth that are just never going to be susceptible to rational judgment, and that faith, as everyone says, remains a leap -- foolish or necessary -- but a leap past reason. [...]

3:38

[Comment From Osopher] 

So the mystery might be more about us: why do so many find reason so uncongenial?

3:39

Adam Gopnik: Because our lives are bounded by the certainty of death, I suppose, and what reason can give us seems, to some -- to so many -- unsatisfying. I'm with Darwin on this one -- enough in life to give anyone meaning, if we make it hard enough -- but I understand the opposite feeling. Much the best account of this, I think-- this double feeling --is in William James's "Varieties Of Religious Experience" [...]

3:42

[Comment From Osopher] 

Totally agree about Darwin and James. Thanks for the chat and for the review, I've got to go and pick up the kids now.

3:43

Adam Gopnik: Pleasure sharing views; even in this odd and pixeled forum.

And I do totally agree: many of us don't feel a need for Jesus to furnish our lives with meaning, though we admire his message-- which was not exclusively his, of course-- of hope and charity and love and forgiveness etc.  But like William James and Adam Gopnik I must also acknowledge the "double feeling" of so many others for whom sweet reason seems not to be enough.

It is indeed a pleasure sharing views. But I don't think I'll be joining your "mafia family" (an avatar-driven online game, I presume? ), Adam. Thanks for the invite, but I already feel a little guilty for the time I stole to join you online yesterday. But only a little.

walking and spirituality

Nietzsche said the best thoughts come while walking. That's my single point of unequivocal agreement with him.

In Turin and elsewhere Nietzsche often wrote in his head while out walking, believing that 'a philosopher [is] a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without...Nietzsche in Turin

 Andre Comte-Sponville is drawn to Nietzsche's walking side too, in his Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Walkers are affirmers and accepters, participants in "the innocence of becoming," lovers of fate and what is. Amor fati, not because the universe and reality are uniformly good but simply because "nothing else exists." Take it or leave it? "Wise men take it." This is Nietzsche's cosmic optimism.


Spinoza was another who took it all, but he disagreed with Nietzsche's revaluation program. We're part and parcel of all that is, and our values are too. We should not deny them, much less overturn them. This is where Spinoza diverges from Nietzsche, and of course Spinoza is right. This is acceptance. It has nothing to do with optimism. "Nothing?" Now that's going a bit far. "Acceptance" has at least as much to do with optimism as living with purpose and sanity have to do with it.

William James was a walker too, and-- as we were saying in class yesterday-- he rejected the cosmic pessimism of Henry Adams. But he also preferred not to call himself an optimist. Wise meliorists "take" some parts and resist others.  That's not "seeing the bright side of everything," it's just seeing and bringing brightness where we can. 


That's the spirit that can open us up to the world. It's the spirit of walking.