Exam Review, Part 1

Here are the questions (Part I) thru mid-November that the December 3 exam will be drawn from, Part II coming soon.

Ancient Greece via AI, “whispers of philosophers”

Cool tool. But I don't know any philosophers who whisper.

"They say true AGI will need to move us emotionally. Yet here I am, touched watching this AI-generated glimpse into ancient Greece circa 375 BC by cinAIma films. The bustling agoras, whispers of philosophers (watch with sound!), the echoing footsteps on marble are all brought to life. 

It's pretty remarkable how technology can bridge 2,400 years and in all honesty there's something profoundly human about using future's tools to understand the past."

https://www.threads.net/@marilynika/post/DCkE1PiSzAi?xmt=AQGzUwvOsYJFq3xMFFxPX32ZE5m036gIUvsIUmmZUeXBPQ

e

transcendence

"I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks," Ceridwen Dovey writes.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/DCh1842TZm2?xmt=AQGzbmuBjgz87aRhO-azErkzmYSPESo6rN9VxAgCUwtNmw

Questions NOV 21

SSHM ch5. Rec: Setiya 5 

We need to pick up our pace. 10" for each presentation, please (and put anything you wish you'd had more time for in your final report blog post).

• SSHM ch5 Truth and Consequences #H1 Makayla, #H2 Bryant Kelly, #H3 John Owens
• Setiya 5 Injustice - #H1 Thad Whitfield, #H2 Maria Lassiter 
• QE XII Do we need God? #H1 Christian Mikolon, #H2 Liam 
• WJ, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (1899) - in BNA, on reserve - H2 Gino Palilla, #H3Andrew Brooks
• Setiya 2 Loneliness #H1 John Pardue
• QE X Why does art matter? #H1 Zoe, #H2 Annlee Head,
• QE XI Is this the end of the world as we know it? #H1 John Wise

1. What "vectors of meaning" saved James's life?

2. Embracing the pragmatic theory of truth is a commitment to what?

3. As a professional academic philosopher, Kaag has trouble remembering what?

4. James's hallway (corridor) metaphor, treating pragmatism primarily as a method in philosophy, reminds Kaag of what?

5. What's the difference between truth and facts, for WJ?

6. Embracing free will is the first step in what?

7. What is Binnenleben?

8. Where does "zest" come from, according to WJ, and what is it?

9. For James pragmatism was a protest against what proposition about salvation?

==

SSHM ch6; WJ "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"; "A Pluralistic Mystic" [see below]

1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?

2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?

3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?

4. What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?

5. What would we lose, if we were without feeling?

6. When does a life become "genuinely significant"?

7. "To miss ___ ___ is to miss all."

8. "Life is always worth living" if you have responsive sensibilities like ____'s.

9. What is distinctive about B.P. Blood's version of mysticism?

10. What's WJ's last word in philosophy?

LH 

1. Why did Glaucon say we pretend to care about justice? Does KS agree? Do you?
2. What does KS say about Maya? Do you think living well and being happy are the same?
3. What was Simone Weil's self-sacrifice? Is her life and death illustrative of what it truly means to care about injustice?
4. For Weil, reading is a metaphor for what?
5. What do Weil and Iris Murdoch say we need (and not need) in order to appreciate and care about human suffering and injustice?
6. What was Plato's ambition, and what 20th century American philospher shared it?
7. What does ideology distort?
8. What is KS's advice to those who feel overwhelmed by the injustice of the world?
9. What was Marx's eleventh thesis?
10. Why does KS call Theodor Adorno a cautionary tale?
11. What is "the tyranny of the ameliorative"?

Discussion Questions:

• Can personal struggles, whether with ideas and philosophies or with more tangible life challenges, contribute to a meaningful life and even save it?
• Should truth "mean" something to us, in the existentialist sense of meaning?
• Do you value the experiences in your life that you cannot put into words? Can you give an example? What can you say about it?
• Are you more like tough-minded Hume or tender-minded Leibniz? 132
• Is our world a "mid-world" in Emerson's sense? 133
• What is the "life-and-death significance of the pragmatic method of testing ideas against experience"? 138
• Do you agree that free will is melioristic, where determinism is not? 144
• Have you ever had a Gertrude Stein moment, during an exam? Could her response ever work for you in such a situation, do you think? 152
• How does "zest" makes us all both the same and different? 156
• Is "Hands off" good advice? 158
• Have professors displaced true teachers? 161
• Is "man is the measure" a humanist proposition? 163-5

• What do you hope to create in your life that will outlast it?
• Do you consider it a mark of education to "dally" with suicide?
• Do you agree that maybe is the right answer to "Is life worth living?"
• Could you resign yourself to a hopeless life? Would that life be worth living?
• Do you believe in an "unseen order"? Must you, to be religious?
• Are you willing to "go further than secular skeptics" with respect to religious experience? 181
• What sorts of experiences give you a feeling of eagerness, zest, reality, importance, etc.?
• Have you had an experience you'd describe as "mystical"?
• Do you ever "tap into the sublime"? 182
• Have you ever had an unbidden moment of "perfect exhilaration"?

==

Truth and consequences

LISTEN (11.18.21). Today's poem ("...I begin to wonder about people—I wonder/if they also wonder about how strange it is that we/are here on the earth...") reminds me of this:

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others —above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received and am still receiving.” Living Philosophies (via Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure)

Teachers are here for the sake of those others we call students, which makes it so gratifying to hear that one of them has mentioned to a colleague that I've made a memorable impression. We can't all be Einstein, but we can try to contribute in some small way to others' happiness while pursuing our own... (continues)
==
Eagerness

LISTEN (11.23.21). We conclude Sick Souls, Healthy Minds today in Happiness, with John Kaag's concluding chapter "Wonder and Hope"--a far cry from the "Determinism and Despair" we began with. We also glance at James's own favorite essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and at his last, "A Pluralistic Mystic."

Is there a greater use of life than to spend it on something that will outlast it? Surely that depends on what the lasting legacy turns out to be. James spent himself defending experience, sometimes "against philosophy" but always against resignation and despair... (continues)

==

VI "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth"

When Clerk Maxwell was a child it is written that he had a mania for having everything explained to him, and that when people put him off with vague verbal accounts of any phenomenon he would interrupt them impatiently by saying, "Yes; but I want you to tell me the particular go of it!" Had his question been about truth, only a pragmatist could have told him the particular go of it. I believe that our contemporary pragmatists, especially Messrs. Schiller and Dewey, have given the only tenable account of this subject. It is a very ticklish subject, sending subtle rootlets into all kinds of crannies, and hard to treat in the sketchy way that alone befits a public lecture. But the Schiller-Dewey view of truth has been so ferociously attacked by rationalistic philosophers, and so abominably misunderstood, that here, if anywhere, is the point where a clear and simple statement should be made.

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the eyes of many of you... (continues)
==
The Gospel of Relaxation

William James

I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and show their practical applications to mental hygiene,—to the hygiene of our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.

The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not so much feel fear as call the situation fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be t..he calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not... (continues)

==
THE LESSONS OF THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
by Ed Craig

The Gospel of Relaxation is an essay by William James. It is, in written form, a commencement address he gave to the 1896 graduating class of Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. James, an M.D. (who never practiced as such), was a professor at Harvard, a psychologist, a philosopher, and a popular lecturer at a time when public lectures were in vogue. Think Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. He was, in fact, the father of American psychology, and became America’s most eminent philosopher. In 1890, James published his masterwork, ten years in the making, Principles of Psychology. It is volume 53 of The Great Books of the Western World. In 1892 he published an abbreviated form of Principles as Psychology: Briefer Course. After publishing these books, James was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to Cambridge teachers. Their purpose was to provide some guidance to the proponents of scientific methods of teaching. There were sixteen lectures, later collected as Talks to Teachers. Additionally, in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's colleges, he gave three. These are included as essays in his 1899 volume titled Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. The first of these addresses to students, delivered to the ladies of Boston Normal, was The Gospel of Relaxation. The Gospel is best seen as a guide to inner peace. It provides psychological and philosophical wisdom on the value of equanimity and how to find it. James gives us lessons, based on physiology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, that we can apply to ourselves, and live a better life. James states his purpose in the first sentence of the essay. He proposes to show the practical application of certain psychological principles to mental hygiene, the conditions or practices conducive to maintaining mental health. (825)i It is to be a self-help lecture. (continues)

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Ao604sECdB1UqR5jed3RRDe9fvGL?e=vDgpNZ
==

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

William James

OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"—that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.

The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:—
(continues)
==

A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC

Not for the ignoble vulgar do I write this article, but only for those dialectic-mystic souls who have an irresistible taste, acquired or native, for higher flights of metaphysics. I have always held the opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality whom he may discover in his explorations. Now for years my own taste, literary as well as philosophic, has been exquisitely titillated by a writer the name of whom I think must be unknown to the readers of this article; so I no longer continue silent about the merits of Benjamin Paul Blood.

Mr. Blood inhabits a city otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central Railroad. What his regular or bread-winning occupation may be I know not, but it can’t have made him super-wealthy. He is an author only when the fit strikes him, and for short spurts at a time; shy, moreover, to the point of publishing his compositions only as private tracts, or in letters to such far-from-reverberant organs of publicity as the Gazette or the Recorder of his native Amsterdam, or the Utica Herald or the Albany Times. Odd places for such subtile efforts to appear in, but creditable to American editors in these degenerate days! Once, indeed, the lamented W. T. Harris of the old “Journal of Speculative Philosophy” got wind of these epistles, and the result was a revision of some of them for that review (Philosophic Reveries, 1889). Also a couple of poems were reprinted from their leaflets by the editor of Scribner’s Magazine (“The Lion of the Nile,” 1888, and| “Nemesis,” 1899). But apart from these three dashes before the footlights, Mr. Blood has kept behind the curtain all his days.[2]

The author’s maiden adventure was the Anesthetic Revelation, a pamphlet printed privately at Amsterdam in 1874. I forget how it fell into my hands, but it fascinated me so “weirdly” that I am conscious of its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since. It gives the essence of Blood’s philosophy, and shows most of the features of his talent–albeit one finds in it little humor and no verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision, sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by anaesthetics–of all things in the world–and unlike anything one ever heard before. The practically unanimous tradition of “regular” mysticism has been unquestionably monistic; and inasmuch as it is the characteristic of mystics to speak, not as the scribes, but as men who have “been there” and seen with their own eyes, I think that this sovereign manner must have made some other pluralistic-minded students hesitate, as I confess that it has often given pause to me. One cannot criticise the vision of a mystic–one can but pass it by, or else accept it as having some amount of evidential weight. I felt unable to do either with a good conscience until I met with Mr. Blood. His mysticism, which may, if one likes, be understood as monistic in this earlier utterance, develops in the later ones a sort of “left-wing” voice of defiance, and breaks into what to my ear has a radically pluralistic sound. I confess that the existence of this novel brand of mysticism has made my cowering mood depart. I feel now as if my own pluralism were not without the kind of support which mystical corroboration may confer. Morrison can no longer claim to be the only beneficiary of whatever right mysticism may possess to lend prestige.

This is my philosophic, as distinguished from my literary, interest, in introducing Mr. Blood to this more fashionable audience: his philosophy, however mystical, is in the last resort not dissimilar from my own... (continues)
...
“There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild–game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true–ever not quite.”

“Ever not quite!”–this seems to wring the very last panting word out of rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says “hands off,” and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat absolutely original and novel. “We are the first that ever burst into this silent sea.” Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The “inexplicable,” the “mystery,” as what the intellect, with its claim to reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the resolution of which Blood’s revelation would eliminate from the sphere of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic insight, according to our author. Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!”

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Thank a librarian.

https://www.threads.net/@librarian.space/post/DCcgx4HTduQ?xmt=AQGz2t2H_A2afbyaxGEBjw4sSSo0diupZ07Bg7FnsASSvA

Questions NOV 19

SSHM ch4. Rec: Setiya 4

• SSHM ch4 Consciousness and Transcendence #H1 Hunter Dickson, #H3 Hunter Clouthier
• Setiya 4 Failure #H1 Faith Carbonari,  H02 Erick Martinez, #H3 Aerika VanDerSlik
• QE X Why does art matter? #H1 Zoe,  #H2 Annlee Head, #H3 Jairo
• QE XI Is this the end of the world as we know it? #H1 John Wise,#H2 Maheswari Ramesh
• [...]

 1. Tragedies that befell him in his 40s led to James's quest for ___.

2. What experience led James to "the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness" of existence?

3. What did James think is sacrificed when we study the mind in objective analytic terms?

4. What did Thoreau say at the end of Walden?

5. His experiments with nitrous oxide gave James what warning?

6. What did James say about his house in Chocorua?



(below)

7. What does James mean by "continuous," when he says consciousness is continuous?

8. What metaphors most naturally describe consciousness?

9. We all split the universe into what two great halves?

LH

1. What artist was described by a critic as having failed to learn from his failures?
2. Who were the Levellers and Diggers?
3. The chaos of contingency in life is a reminder that what?
4. What did the Strawsons (father and son) disagree about?
5. What does KS regret about his academic career?
6. What are telic and atelic activities? What happens when we focus too much on the former?
7. What was Aristotle's insight?
8. How does KS's interpretation of Groundhog Day differ from Buddhist interpretations?
9. What 'ism plays a critical role in the origins of failure?
10. What liberates Phil Connors?

FL

1. What are Unicorns (in the tech-finance sense)?

2. How does Nick Paumgarten define magical thinking?

3. What's been a "paramount fetish on the right for years"?

4. What did Trump understand "better than almost everybody"?

5. How did the Internet enable and empower Trump and Fantasyland?

6. What is "the most disturbing power of contradiction"?

7. What good news does Andersen hope is true?

Discussion Questions

• What does "transcendence" mean to you?
• Do you think you could remain hopeful and happy after losing a child?
• Will we ever fully understand the origins and nature of consciousness?
• Does your internal life feel continuous to you, or "chopped into bits"?
• What does being "woke" mean to you?
• Does the thought that "this too shall pass" console or comfort you? 104
• Have you read Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind? COMMENTS? 115
• Was Leonard Cohen right about "the crack in everything"? 116
• Do you agree with Kaag about Wittgenstein? 124

Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, undmer like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results. PP I, ch 4
==
Habit, by Wm James (Internet Archive)...
==Principles of Psychology, ch. IV-
HABIT.

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that one engaged in studying the objective manifestations of mind is bound at the very outset to define clearly just what its limits are.

The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, however, the habits are more variable than this. Even instincts vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are modified in the same individual, as we shall later see, to suit the exigencies of the case. The habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change (on the principles of the atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; but those of a compound mass of matter can change, because they are in the last instance due to the structure of the compound, and either outward forces or inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn that structure into something different from what it was. That is, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain[Pg 105] its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields... (continues)

....Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,[Pg 122] the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first[Pg 123] is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:


"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress."

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: "Ach! you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote,[152] says that the collapse of barbarian[Pg 124] nations when Europeans come among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed.

The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.


"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work."[153]

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last quoted remarks:


"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-making."

[Pg 125]

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J. S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted[Pg 126] enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way.[154] Let the expression be the least thing in the world—speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers—but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has[Pg 127] daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.
==
Maria Popova:
William James on the Psychology of Habit
“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.”

“We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Perhaps most fascinating in Michael Lewis’s altogether fantastic recent Vanity Fair profile of Barack Obama is, indeed, the President’s relationship with habit — particularly his optimization of everyday behaviors to such a degree that they require as little cognitive load as possible, allowing him to better focus on the important decisions, the stuff of excellence.

I found this interesting not merely out of solipsism, as it somehow validated my having had the same breakfast day in and day out for nearly a decade (steel-cut oats, fat-free Greek yogurt, whey protein powder, seasonal fruit), but also because it isn’t a novel idea at all. In fact, the same tenets Obama applies to the architecture of his daily life are those pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James wrote about in 1887, when he penned Habit (public library; public domain) — a short treatise on how our behavioral patterns shape who we are and what we often refer to as character and personality... (continues)
==
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.

We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as respects them than if we had taken them for granted at the start.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordance with what was said on p. 186, for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains 'or 'it blows,' we should be[Pg 225] stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on...

I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the consciousness went out altogether to come into existence again at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the quality, or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before. The proposition that within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first. And first of all a word about time-gaps of which the consciousness may not be itself aware.

On page 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, and that they might be more numerous than is usually supposed. If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feel them as interruptions. In the unconsciousness produced by nitrous oxide and other anæsthetics, in that of epilepsy and fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life may[Pg 238] meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space of the opposite margins of the 'blind spot' meet and merge over that objective interruption to the sensitiveness of the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be for the onlooking psychologist, is for itself unbroken. It feels unbroken; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselves are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no intrusive alien substance between. To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see. So much for the gaps that are unfelt.

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from sleep, we usually know that we have been unconscious, and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. The judgment here is certainly an inference from sensible signs, and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.[225] The result of it, however, is that the consciousness is, for itself, not what it was in the former case, but interrupted and discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. But in the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts being inwardly connected and belonging together because they are parts of a common whole, the consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one. What now is the common whole? The natural name for it is myself, I, or me.

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may[Pg 239] have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last states. He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past feelings appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life...

the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that[Pg 289] black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not. And among the noticed parts we select in much the same way for accentuation and preference or subordination and dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same; names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world;[Pg 290] for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place (continues)
==
Habit

LISTEN (11.11.21). Today in Happiness our focus is Habit, a chapter in James's Principles of Psychology and an anchor of the happy life.

James wrote Principles better to understand the origin of consciousness, but habit's great gift is its harnessing of the power of unconscious autonomous activity, thus freeing the conscious mind for other pursuits. Turn over as much of life's necessary and repetitive little tasks to unconscious habit as you can, James advises, and watch your mind and spirit soar.

John Kaag says James wanted to be somebody, to make his mark in the world, and that "makes being happy rather difficult." But James was always going to find happiness a challenge, ambitions or no. He knew intuitively that we are, as Aristotle said, the product of our habitual acts... (continues)
==
Consciousness and transcendence

LISTEN (11.16.21.) Today in Happiness we consider John Kaag's fourth chapter in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. "Consciousness and Transcendence" are big topics which I've considered before. I think Peter Ackroyd was onto something when he proposed to define transcendence in hyphenated fashion": trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death. The Plato Papers

This particular dance of transcendence should not be confused with Johnnny Depp's in that film...

Consciousness is complicated... (continues)

Questions NOV 14

NOV 14 

• SSHM ch3 Psychology and the Healthy Mind #H1 kayla lee, #H2 Nick Luse, #H3 Hadleigh Flowers
• Setiya 3 Grief. #H1 Alayna Frazier, #H3 Roman
• Question Everything (QE) IX What is it like to be a woman? (on reserve in lib'y) #H1 Mai Gibbons, #H2 Elloise Layus, #H3 Brooke Hale
• WGU -p.192. #H3 Evan Burrel
• 
  
• Setiya 2 Loneliness #H1 John Pardue

With just a handful of classes remaining, it's important that we all present on our scheduled dates.

Oops. Several of you somehow got issued invitations to the wrong blogsite. If you get a second invitation, this time to join this site, that's why. Please open again.

1. James wrote Principles of Psychology to answer what question?

2. What did Aristotle say about habit?

3. What realization would make young people give more heed to their conduct?

4. James complained in 1884 that what devoured his time?

5. James thought everybody should do what each day?

6. How is habit "the enormous fly-wheel of society"?

7. There is "no more miserable human being" than ...

8. There is "no more contemptible type of human character" than ...

LH

1. What are three kinds of grief? Have you experienced any of them?
2. What's the closest KS has come to grief?
3. What "five neat steps" of grief does KS say there is no evidence for?
4. What stoic attitude did Epictetus say would prevent you from being grievously upset at the death of a loved one? What does KS say about that?
5. What does KS say should be our goal with respect to grief?
6. The fact that someone is not alive, says Julian Barnes, does not mean what?
7. What does KS call Epicurus's attitude towards death?
8. If we did not grieve, we would not ____.
9. How do the Dahomey of Western Africa celebrate the life of the deceased? 
10. What do conventions of mourning give us?

Discussion Questions:

• Do you want to "be somebody"? What does that mean? Does it make happiness harder to achieve?
• Does adult life make it harder to identify your "real" self? 70
• Is it good that "habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society"? 77
• Which comes first, happiness or laughter 87
• Is it bad to entertain emotions you don't act on? Why?
• Is habit, on balance, good for society?
• Are there any small habits you'd like to gain or lose? What's stopping you?
• COMMENT?: Are there any sequences of mental action you want or need to frequently repeat (or stop repeating)?

Oops

Several of you somehow got issued invitations to the wrong blogsite. If you get a second invitation, this time to join this site, that's why. Please open again.

“Landslide”

Popular vote margin shrinks to 1.4%. 50.1% of voters voted against him. Not a landslide.

https://www.threads.net/@kurtbandersen/post/DCRlMX1OTpG?xmt=AQGz6x0M_v6OK8a42hbgJ-vcx10qDY-O0uFMAPgUs0b5mw

Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy | Open Culture

Clearly, we have sinned.

1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/bertrand-russells-10-commandments-for-living-in-a-healthy-democracy.html

Samantha Harvey’s ‘beautiful and ambitious’ Orbital wins Booker prize | Books | The Guardian

"Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/12/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-booker-prize-2024

==

...Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space.

“To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech. nyt

"“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning – The Marginalian

"To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy," Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. "Everything else… is child's play; we must first of all answer the question." 

Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living. 

That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/05/17/yes-to-life-in-spite-of-everything-viktor-frankl/

Alayna Frazier Final Report

 Philosophy Final

Grief

    For my presentation, I will be talking about the concept of grief from the book Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya. Setiya writes that there are three forms of grief: relational grief, “grief at the harm that befalls someone who dies,” and “grief at the sheer loss of life.”

        The first type of grief relational grief is grief due to the loss of a relationship. Setiya talks about feeling this grief over the loss of his first relationship when he was 15 with a girl named Jules. After 6 months, Jules had seemed to grow bored of him and ended up breaking up with him. To make it worse, she gave him no reason as to why she broke up with him. I experienced a similar situation less than a year ago when my high school boyfriend broke up with me over text just a week before our third anniversary. Like Jules, he seemed to grow tired of me slowly over the last 2 years of the relationship, eventually ending it with very little reasoning. Setiya writes that romantic grief revolves around the death of a relationship rather than the person. You could say that with relational grief you are also grieving all of the time and effort that went into a relationship that has gone to waste. Though with relational grief, no one has died, it is still a valid form of grief. When we care about someone deeply, and they are suddenly gone it feels like you’ve lost of yourself. I believe with relational grief, we are also grieving that part of ourselves that has been taken.

    The second form of grief is “grief at the harm that befalls someone who dies,” is centered around the deceased’s experience. Setiya writes that both ancient Greek and Roman schools agree that it makes no sense to grieve for the dead because “death does no harm.” Epicurus argued that death causes no pain to the person who is dying because when we die, we simply lose consciousness and never regain it. Setiya argues that when we die we lose the privilege of living. What we lose is all the experiences, relationships, moments that we could have if we were still alive. He argues that what we lose is life itself, especially when the deceased died young.

    The third form of grief is “grief at the sheer loss of life.” Setiya writes about how for different cultures, there are different traditions for how we grieve. How we grieve in the West ties back to ancient Rome. Setiya cites historian David Konstan on the ancient Roman laws surrounding the mourning of the dead. You can mourn parents and children over the age of 6 for one year. You can mourn children under 6 for a month. Husbands can be mourned for ten months. Close relatives can be mourned for 8 months. We still see these rules, though not stated explicitly, in our culture. I think these laws are still an outline for our societal norm of what is considered an “appropriate” amount of grieving time.

    Over time, we have become more private in our mourning process. Setiya writes that in the West, we used to have conventions for dying at home, surrounded by loved ones. The nineteenth century was when death become more private. This change took place around World War One when so many people were dying outside of the home, like in the hospital or in combat, that death surrounded by doctors and nurses became our new norm.

    I researched and compared death customs in early America versus modern Americans. Puritans had silent, somber funerals, but had very different wakes. Puritan wakes were actually communal events involving feasts and liquor. Not what you’d expect from the Puritans, huh? Now funerals and wakes are considered more private events for friends and family to reunite and ponder over the life that the deceased lived.  

    The COVID pandemic impacted every part of our lives, and we still feel that impact. Setiya writes about how the pandemic disrupted already fragile death and mourning rituals. One sentence that really stuck with me was “there is a great mass of suspended grief,” which I feel is true. Even now, nearly 5 years after the pandemic, we face consequences of it every day. Some of those lasting effects may be good, like how almost every business has curbside pickup, and people are more likely to social distance or stay home when sick. But we still have negative effects like the virus itself sticking around and continuing to infect people and disrupt lives. I feel like most of us would agree that the pandemic doesn’t feel like it was 5 years ago, which I think is part of the suspended grief Setiya was talking about. I think that it will take probably decades for our generation to fully process the trauma that COVID caused, especially because it impacted us during crucial social developmental years.

    Setiya ends the chapter with the sentences, “If life is a story, grief reminds us, then it does not have a happy ending. Perhaps it’s not a story after all.”

 

    Discussion Questions:

    How do you feel about the Roman laws surrounding mourning periods?

    Do you think COVID has a lasting effect on our generation, and if so do you believe it left a positive or negative impact?

    Do you agree with Setiya that relational grief, or the loss of a relationship, is a valid form of grief?