Happy 2015

William James once resolved that his first act of free will would be to believe in, and act on, his own free will. That's a good way to start a new year. John Horgan thinks so too.

At this time of year, I like to hearten others making New Year’s resolutions by defending free will, which has been attacked by various scientific pundits (who are just misguided, not stupid or evil). After all, how can you believe in resolutions unless you believe in free will? ...in his 2003 book Freedom Evolves, Dennett lays out a sensible, down to earth view of free will. He notes, first, that free will is “not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world.” Free will is simply our ability to perceive, mull over and act upon choices; in fact, choice, or even freedom, are reasonable synonyms for free will.

Dennett calls free will “an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs,” which humanity acquired recently as a consequence of language and culture. Free will is a variable rather than binary property, which can wax and wane in both individuals and societies; the more choices we can perceive and act upon, the more free will we have. Dennett’s most subtle, profound point is that free will is both an “objective phenomenon” and dependent on our belief in and perception of it, “like language, music, money and other products of society.” (continues) 

My xmas list

Older Daughter, the film major, came up with an inspired Christmas present request this year: she asks each family member for their favorite movie, on DVD, along with an explanation. It's a challenging assignment. I've narrowed my candidate list to five (Groundhog Day just missed the cut):

5. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967). "Yes," wrote Roger Ebert, "there are serious faults... but they are overcome by the virtues of this delightfully old-fashioned film." I saw it when I was ten, at a matinee, with my mother. I think we both cried, tears of sadness and of joy. It opened my young eyes to the stupidity of racism, warned me of the hypocrisy of untested liberalism, and perhaps saddled me with the unsustainably romantic notion that love conquers all - "as long as there's the two of us" etc. etc. I love the hilarious scene at the ice-cream stand, though the cool kid's disrespectful "stupid old man"  now has an unwelcome resonance for me that it lacked back when I couldn't imagine ever possibly being one. Tracy and Hepburn are magnificent, and the theme's romantic message remains sound (or at least unshakable): "you've got to give a little, take a little, let your poor heart break a little... that's the glory of love."

4. Sophie's Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982). Great novel by William Styron, great early performance by Meryl Streep. “Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"

And the answer: "Where was man?” 

3. Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979). I don't know much about cinematography but I know what I like, and I really like the old-timey look of this picture, and the Gershwin soundtrack, and I love the List scene:

"Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. uh... Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... um... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh... the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face..."

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Arthur C. Clarke's story famously infuriated premier attendees including Rock Hudson ("Can anybody tell me what the hell this is about?!") and mystified me too, near the end. But this was the year before Neil Armstrong's "one small step," and I really thought there'd be Martians (from Earth) by now. This movie captured and amplified my generation's dreams of cosmic exploration. The recently-released Interstellar has been called this generation's 2001, but that's silly. Oh, the echoes are there alright. But in 1968 the idea of space as our beckoning "final frontier" had real credibility. Or so we thought. “Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.” More groping, please. Open the pod bay door, Hal.

1. Life of Brian (Monty Python, 1979). It's not the most profound picture ever, nor possibly the funniest, but I saw it in Columbia MO with some of my fellow philosophy major pals. We were the right audience. It taught us the importance of philosophizing with a proper portion of serious nonsense. We're all individuals, we're all different. Except for those who are not. Blessed are the cheesemakers (but don't take that literally, silly fundamentalists). Above all, "always look on the bright side." Darned good life wisdom, if you ask me.

If life seems jolly rotten

There's something you've forgotten

And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing

When you're feeling in the dumps

Don't be silly chumps

Just purse your lips and whistle

- that's the thing.

And...always look on the bright

side of life...

According to The New Yorker, it is the most requested song at British funerals, edging out “My Way.”

Richard Ford-"I'm here"

Heading out shortly to see Richard Ford at the Parnassus-co-sponsored event at the Nashville public library downtown. Here he was recently in Washington.

He just drove down from a similar event in St. Louis. Tomorrow night he'll be at Square Books in Oxford MS. Authors complain about author tours, but I'm excited about this one. I last saw Ford at the old Davis-Kidd in Nashville in June '96, when he inscribed a congratulatory response to my announcement that I'd heeded the wisdom of The Sportswriter: "In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five..."

               

UPDATE, 8:30 pm-

               

This grace note followed my admission that shortly after meeting him in '96 I'd gone and got myself right back into academia, where I've been ever since. Nice man.

Feels like closing a circuit. Or, as he says this new book is all about, "bearing witness." One of the attendees last night asked if Ford thought happiness is "relevant." Yes, but... there are satisfactions in a long and constructive life that exceed mere happiness. I think that's also what his books are about.

But beware this and every other explanation. "Explaining is where we all get into trouble." Don't I know it.

Know Thy Self - Really

"Most people wonder at some point in their lives how well they know themselves. Self-knowledge seems a good thing to have, but hard to attain. To know yourself would be to know such things as your deepest thoughts, desires and emotions, your character traits, your values, what makes you happy and why you think and do the things you think and do. These are all examples of what might be called “substantial” self-knowledge, and there was a time when it would have been safe to assume that philosophy had plenty to say about the sources, extent and importance of self-knowledge in this sense.

 

Not any more. With few exceptions, philosophers of self-knowledge nowadays have other concerns. Here’s an example of the sort of thing philosophers worry about: suppose you are wearing socks and believe you are wearing socks. How do you know that that’s what you believe? Notice that the question isn’t: “How do you know you are wearing socks?” but rather “How do you know you believe you are wearing socks?” Knowledge of such beliefs is seen as a form of self-knowledge. Other popular examples of self-knowledge in the philosophical literature include knowing that you are in pain and knowing that you are thinking that water is wet. For many philosophers the challenge is explain how these types of self-knowledge are possible..." Quassim Cassam in The Stone

Professor Cassam is right, too many epistemologists have effectively renounced the classic historical quarry of their discipline, self-knowledge. But it's false to insinuate that the majority of us, on the front lines of large public teaching institutions like mine, have stopped posing the Big Questions. Far from it. William James long ago skewered the "gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young PhDs, boring one another at conferences with their talk of Erkenntnistheorie" etc. etc. Most of my peers, and I, don't bother with those conferences. We know ourselves better than that.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/know-thy-self-really/?comments#permid=13533078

Philosophy Comics

Or, how I distract myself from grading:

Good people

Author and bookseller Ann Patchett has a nice Almanac quote on her birthday, in reply to critics who call her Pollyanna:  "I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people."  Good for her. The jerks get too much attention.

Ann's first published novel came after several rejections, a bad case of writer's block, and a stint waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday's in Nashville. "Everybody believed that they were special, that they weren't really a waiter, that they were the one who was getting out. ... I had to come to terms with the fact that I was just like everybody else, a girl with a dream and a plate of hot fajitas. You get out not so much because you're special but because you've got enough steel in your soul to crawl up."

Her biblio-perseverance reminds me of my reaction at the multiplex the other night, watching Matthew McConaughey in "Interstellar" trying literally to reach his daughter through the bookcase. I've been trying to do that my entire adult life. Nice metaphor. Great medium. Good people.

Scheffler's Afterlife, naturalized

Samuel Scheffler, mentioned in David's CoPhi presentation yesterday, wrote a short piece for the Times philosophy blog.

I believe in life after death.

No, I don’t think that I will live on as a conscious being after my earthly demise. I’m firmly convinced that death marks the unqualified and irreversible end of our lives.

My belief in life after death is more mundane. What I believe is that other people will continue to live after I myself have died. You probably make the same assumption in your own case. Although we know that humanity won’t exist forever, most of us take it for granted that the human race will survive, at least for a while, after we ourselves are gone.

Because we take this belief for granted, we don’t think much about its significance. Yet I think that this belief plays an extremely important role in our lives, quietly but critically shaping our values, commitments and sense of what is worth doing. Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones. (Continues here)

Scheffler's book, echoing John Dewey's "continuous human community," is Death and the Afterlife. I'm considering it for the next offering of PHIL 3310, Atheism & Philosophy. Here's Scheffler's Philosophy Bites podcast interview.

Marx for dogs

The Marx we're not reading for class said:

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” 

(You could look it up on the Internet.)

Edison

The almanac celebrates Thomas Edison today, and his indefatigable perseverence.

When asked how he persisted despite 10,000 failures, Edison reportedly answered; "I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."

He was a Popperian falsificationist before his time. 

And a freethinker, as Jennifer Hecht has documented in Doubt: A History and here:

In 1910 Thomas Edison was asked by the New York Times if he thought it possible to communicate with the dead. “No,” he responded, “all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it though. Personally, I cannot see any use of a future life.”

A public figure in 1910, she notes, could still speak in public of a "rationalist, naturalist understanding of humanity and the universe." When's the last time you heard someone of Edison's stature (but who would that be, now?) say anything like this? 

Hecht blames the Cold War and its aftermath. That's a big part of it. So is the stultifying tendency of tradition, almost every tradition, to discourage intellectual honesty. But the tradition of doubt itself stands as a shining exception. You should read the book, it's good.

And read her latest, a heroic response to the epidemic of suicide called Stay. It too is a testament to perseverence.

Peripatetic words and wisdom

I've jotted so many walking quotes in so many notebooks for so long, the next step clearly is to gather them. Or to begin, at least. 

"Walking has the best value as gymnastics of the mind... no pursuit has more breath of immortality to it... 'Tis the best of humanity that goes out to walk." Emerson

“I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements... If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.. I have met but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks-who had a genius so to speak for sauntering." Thoreau

"Solvitur Ambulando. It is solved by walking." Diogenes

"My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." Montaigne

“Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.”  John Muir

“It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” Anatole France

“I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” Kierkegaard



“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Nietzsche

“Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.” Annie Dillard

On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.” Bill Bryson

==

"Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom... Home is everything you can walk to." 

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it..."

"Walking articulates both physical and mental freedom..."

“Home is everything you can walk to...

"When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”

“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”  

"I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.” Rebecca Solnit

==

"Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space... writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.” 

"Walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it." Geoff Nicholson

"Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas..." Rousseau, America on Foot

When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him the writer's study she replied "here is his library, but his study is out of doors." America on Foot

"Walk and be happy, walk and be healthy. The best way to lengthen our days is to walk steadily and with a purpose."

(to be continued)