This is where I came in.
Well, not exactly. But it was in reading Boethius that I was first drawn to a life of reflection and inquiry. (You notice I'm careful not to say philosophy.)
The Consolation of Philosophy came into my adolescent misery like rain falling on a parched desert. Religion had only deepened my chronic sadness. Then came the voice of Dame Philosophy to Boethius in his cell on death row telling him that all, even death, was transient. She reminded him of his successes in which he took satisfaction, pointed out that these were as nothing, gone with the turning of the heavens.
As Boethius dried his tears, a flash of realization went through me. It was possible that someday things would be different, that wanting things to be right in my life was as pointless as complaining that they were wrong. I wanted to be one of those people, like Boethius, who could see this and be comforted by it even the midst of real suffering, should I ever actually experience any.
It hasn't worked out that way. I still lack perspective and patience. I blow up at people over trivial things. I don't make the effort to deepen my understanding or share my ideas with others. And most of my troubles are of my own making. Indeed, I've largely dodged the bullets that strike most people down. I've managed to stumble through life by shirking my responsibilities.
But there are people whose pain is so great as to set the universe on fire. The increase in their numbers threatens to sweep us all away in a torrent of tears. And this is just the public torment. Wars. Disease. Poverty. In many ways inner misery is are worse. Madness. Grief. Fear.
Recently a friend of mine, a former student, had a family tragedy that tripped her back into a despair she thought she had left behind. Paralysis. Suicidal thoughts. Hospitalization. Soul-numbing medications that threatened to destroy her capacity to work. I could only wait, get occasional reports from her father, also a friend. I could feel her pain through his. She was getting help, he told me, the very best. All I could feel was useless. What did I have to offer? My concern. My presence should the opportunity arise.
Actually my friend is fortunate. She will recover, is already making progress. She has a family that loves her and a career she loves. But what happened to her, the palpability of her suffering, brought home to me something that gets lost behind the multiplying images of the wounded and the starving and the enraged that flash across my TV screen..
What do I have to offer any of them? Certainly my efforts to resist war or alleviate hunger would be nice. But what else? Many, perhaps most, don't need my help. They get comfort from their faith and their community. What would it benefit anyone to be advised that this too shall pass? That they would fell better if they weren't so attached to that leg or that child or that village that they have lost?
Yet that seems to be the main way in which philosophy consoles. As Charlie Brown used to say in the Peanuts comic strip, "In five hundred years nobody'll know the difference."
We all gain some perspective with age. Perhaps this is because we've been down most paths often enough to know which lead somewhere and which don't. Whether this process is more extensive or thorough in those who habitually ask fundamental questions or engage in methodical self-examination is harder to determine.
My guess is that any benefits that do accrue from these speculative labors come largely from the expanded narrative that results from life of study and writing. But I suspect that almost any earnest endeavor from medicine to auto repair will do the same.
It is important how you think about things. A big part of recovery from depression, after the drugs kick in, is to reprogram how your mind works. Squelch those inner conversations about how you're never going to amount to anything because nobody gave a shit about you when you were little. Even if true that kind of talk plays havoc with your serotonin levels. This is because most thinking with the emotions, just as most serotonin is in the gut.
If the cure for suffering is to be freed of attachments, that is also the cure for joy. To be alive is to feel. It's the story we tell with our feelings that makes the difference.
boethius
fortune
suffering
serotonin
philosophy
Well, not exactly. But it was in reading Boethius that I was first drawn to a life of reflection and inquiry. (You notice I'm careful not to say philosophy.)
The Consolation of Philosophy came into my adolescent misery like rain falling on a parched desert. Religion had only deepened my chronic sadness. Then came the voice of Dame Philosophy to Boethius in his cell on death row telling him that all, even death, was transient. She reminded him of his successes in which he took satisfaction, pointed out that these were as nothing, gone with the turning of the heavens.
As Boethius dried his tears, a flash of realization went through me. It was possible that someday things would be different, that wanting things to be right in my life was as pointless as complaining that they were wrong. I wanted to be one of those people, like Boethius, who could see this and be comforted by it even the midst of real suffering, should I ever actually experience any.
It hasn't worked out that way. I still lack perspective and patience. I blow up at people over trivial things. I don't make the effort to deepen my understanding or share my ideas with others. And most of my troubles are of my own making. Indeed, I've largely dodged the bullets that strike most people down. I've managed to stumble through life by shirking my responsibilities.
But there are people whose pain is so great as to set the universe on fire. The increase in their numbers threatens to sweep us all away in a torrent of tears. And this is just the public torment. Wars. Disease. Poverty. In many ways inner misery is are worse. Madness. Grief. Fear.
Recently a friend of mine, a former student, had a family tragedy that tripped her back into a despair she thought she had left behind. Paralysis. Suicidal thoughts. Hospitalization. Soul-numbing medications that threatened to destroy her capacity to work. I could only wait, get occasional reports from her father, also a friend. I could feel her pain through his. She was getting help, he told me, the very best. All I could feel was useless. What did I have to offer? My concern. My presence should the opportunity arise.
Actually my friend is fortunate. She will recover, is already making progress. She has a family that loves her and a career she loves. But what happened to her, the palpability of her suffering, brought home to me something that gets lost behind the multiplying images of the wounded and the starving and the enraged that flash across my TV screen..
What do I have to offer any of them? Certainly my efforts to resist war or alleviate hunger would be nice. But what else? Many, perhaps most, don't need my help. They get comfort from their faith and their community. What would it benefit anyone to be advised that this too shall pass? That they would fell better if they weren't so attached to that leg or that child or that village that they have lost?
Yet that seems to be the main way in which philosophy consoles. As Charlie Brown used to say in the Peanuts comic strip, "In five hundred years nobody'll know the difference."
We all gain some perspective with age. Perhaps this is because we've been down most paths often enough to know which lead somewhere and which don't. Whether this process is more extensive or thorough in those who habitually ask fundamental questions or engage in methodical self-examination is harder to determine.
My guess is that any benefits that do accrue from these speculative labors come largely from the expanded narrative that results from life of study and writing. But I suspect that almost any earnest endeavor from medicine to auto repair will do the same.
It is important how you think about things. A big part of recovery from depression, after the drugs kick in, is to reprogram how your mind works. Squelch those inner conversations about how you're never going to amount to anything because nobody gave a shit about you when you were little. Even if true that kind of talk plays havoc with your serotonin levels. This is because most thinking with the emotions, just as most serotonin is in the gut.
If the cure for suffering is to be freed of attachments, that is also the cure for joy. To be alive is to feel. It's the story we tell with our feelings that makes the difference.
boethius
fortune
suffering
serotonin
philosophy
I've been bloghopping a little lately, looking at sites that focus on philosophy (sic).
The term philosophy, by the way, is one I dislike and try to avoid. But it is necessary to use it as a tag, both in order to find blogs that may be of interest and so that this time capsule may someday be opened.
It is commentary enough that Technorati has no stand-alone tag for philosophy, but links the topic with religion. Similarly the metaphysics bag has come to be largely filled with spiritual goodies, while ontology now refers to the automation of knowledge. None of this is undesirable. And the postmodernists may well feel happily prescient.
Anyway, what I found was both daunting and illuminating. Daunting because there's some tough cookies out there in Blogland. Power lifters who have read the great thinkers and keep up with the latest stuff (watch me try later to use this against them). Illuminating because it sheds a little light into that cave of shadows in which my mind is trapped.
Ever since the days of the uber-sophist Socrates we've been skirmishing along the boundary between Opinion and Truth. Science, instead of restoring peace, simply added to the arsenal of data with which we cudgel each other. Being dissatisfied with mere facts is the hobgobblin of philosophic minds.
All of which is preface. What struck me most in my casual walkabout was the degree to which the various practioners of meta-theory/hyper-knowledge spend most of their time arguing with arguments. This is probably not their fault. For this is the way of the academy, the treadmill to degree and tenure. (Beware here of that trick in which latecomers discredit the conversation because they can't break in on it.)
No harm in this really. It improves blood flow to the brain, exerts a civilizing influence, enriches the culture. Much like music. But as Comrade Marx said, "It bakes no bread." (Whoops! Where did that come from?)
Another, but less remembered, denizen of the nineteenth century, Paulsen, put it about that "the true philosopher (sic) goes after the thing itself." For a long time I took it that he meant (as he probably did) the thing-in-itself. But I favor now the idea that he could as easily mean that the true object of speculative inquiry (the term I prefer) is the limits of actual existence. No discovery here. Sounds like science (which it is) and existentialism (which it isn't).
Don't get it? Don't buy it? Actually, I'd rather be in trouble at this point. For one thing, I'm in over my head. For another, I'm doing exactly the thing I like least--striving for a definition from which all else flows. I need to do what I think needs to be done and let the work create its own category and method.
What is it that forces us into perpetual oscillation between truth and opinion? Is it our fault for wanting absolutes in a relative universe? Can we not be content with the grain of sand that contains the universe? We ought to be since the physicists are continually filling in the details of the universe that contains the universe. Can there be anything beyond this worth knowing?
The short answer is probably the one on most people's minds: How are we going to survive as a species? (Granting, of course, that for some people this actually means: How can I prevent my life style from slipping to the level of the majority of people on the planet.)
Part of the answer is factual. But a lot of it lies in that branch of morality known as policy. This leads us back to the blurry realm of opinion, and (curiously) to the vain quest for foundational discourse, especially the sort based on an ever deeper reading of the texts.
Full disclosure requires that I identify myself as a recovering neo-scholastic. I so wanted there to be real substances underlying the myriad of forms. My discovery of these, I thought, would stop the noisy debate and require everyone to listen to me. Consequently I favored the hard-core logicians and epistemologists, the theorists of language, and above all miners for a Heart of Being.
I give them their due. But honestly I can't keep up. I'm more interested now in work that is less technical but more rooted in deep thought and broad culture.
The few that make the cut are ones like Buber and Santayana, perhaps Unamuno, Whitehead and Dewey. Not because I agree with them, but because I want to be them. They have wrestled with and mastered the conundrum posers, but only to leave them behind. They speak with the authority that comes from thoroughly processed experience. What saves them from ending on the scrap heap of Opinion is not their answers but their questions.
It is from such a vantage that one might best address our actual situation. That seems the proper goal for speculation in this world at this time. It is not longer legitimate to inquire whether we exist, but only how we can.
buber
santayana
unamuno
whitehead
dewey
scholasticism
epistemology
ontology
metaphysics
marx
paulsen
philosophy
The term philosophy, by the way, is one I dislike and try to avoid. But it is necessary to use it as a tag, both in order to find blogs that may be of interest and so that this time capsule may someday be opened.
It is commentary enough that Technorati has no stand-alone tag for philosophy, but links the topic with religion. Similarly the metaphysics bag has come to be largely filled with spiritual goodies, while ontology now refers to the automation of knowledge. None of this is undesirable. And the postmodernists may well feel happily prescient.
Anyway, what I found was both daunting and illuminating. Daunting because there's some tough cookies out there in Blogland. Power lifters who have read the great thinkers and keep up with the latest stuff (watch me try later to use this against them). Illuminating because it sheds a little light into that cave of shadows in which my mind is trapped.
Ever since the days of the uber-sophist Socrates we've been skirmishing along the boundary between Opinion and Truth. Science, instead of restoring peace, simply added to the arsenal of data with which we cudgel each other. Being dissatisfied with mere facts is the hobgobblin of philosophic minds.
All of which is preface. What struck me most in my casual walkabout was the degree to which the various practioners of meta-theory/hyper-knowledge spend most of their time arguing with arguments. This is probably not their fault. For this is the way of the academy, the treadmill to degree and tenure. (Beware here of that trick in which latecomers discredit the conversation because they can't break in on it.)
No harm in this really. It improves blood flow to the brain, exerts a civilizing influence, enriches the culture. Much like music. But as Comrade Marx said, "It bakes no bread." (Whoops! Where did that come from?)
Another, but less remembered, denizen of the nineteenth century, Paulsen, put it about that "the true philosopher (sic) goes after the thing itself." For a long time I took it that he meant (as he probably did) the thing-in-itself. But I favor now the idea that he could as easily mean that the true object of speculative inquiry (the term I prefer) is the limits of actual existence. No discovery here. Sounds like science (which it is) and existentialism (which it isn't).
Don't get it? Don't buy it? Actually, I'd rather be in trouble at this point. For one thing, I'm in over my head. For another, I'm doing exactly the thing I like least--striving for a definition from which all else flows. I need to do what I think needs to be done and let the work create its own category and method.
What is it that forces us into perpetual oscillation between truth and opinion? Is it our fault for wanting absolutes in a relative universe? Can we not be content with the grain of sand that contains the universe? We ought to be since the physicists are continually filling in the details of the universe that contains the universe. Can there be anything beyond this worth knowing?
The short answer is probably the one on most people's minds: How are we going to survive as a species? (Granting, of course, that for some people this actually means: How can I prevent my life style from slipping to the level of the majority of people on the planet.)
Part of the answer is factual. But a lot of it lies in that branch of morality known as policy. This leads us back to the blurry realm of opinion, and (curiously) to the vain quest for foundational discourse, especially the sort based on an ever deeper reading of the texts.
Full disclosure requires that I identify myself as a recovering neo-scholastic. I so wanted there to be real substances underlying the myriad of forms. My discovery of these, I thought, would stop the noisy debate and require everyone to listen to me. Consequently I favored the hard-core logicians and epistemologists, the theorists of language, and above all miners for a Heart of Being.
I give them their due. But honestly I can't keep up. I'm more interested now in work that is less technical but more rooted in deep thought and broad culture.
The few that make the cut are ones like Buber and Santayana, perhaps Unamuno, Whitehead and Dewey. Not because I agree with them, but because I want to be them. They have wrestled with and mastered the conundrum posers, but only to leave them behind. They speak with the authority that comes from thoroughly processed experience. What saves them from ending on the scrap heap of Opinion is not their answers but their questions.
It is from such a vantage that one might best address our actual situation. That seems the proper goal for speculation in this world at this time. It is not longer legitimate to inquire whether we exist, but only how we can.
buber
santayana
unamuno
whitehead
dewey
scholasticism
epistemology
ontology
metaphysics
marx
paulsen
philosophy
I called my friend Judy recently. We haven’t seen each other in easily twenty years. But every few months we get on the phone to compare notes about the state of the world. She was upset straight away. She’d been reading an article about one of Cheney’s advisors. The bile rose in her throat.
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
