- Philosophy as Conversation, Nigel Warburton, Aeon
- The Monk and the Philosopher (Brainpickings)
- Become a Better Listener. Your Family Will Thank You. Effective communication skills are more important than ever in our close-quarters existence. nyt 10.19.20... BUT,
- William James's Springs of Delight: The Return to Life (Read the first few excerpted pages)
- William James, The Essence of Humanism (Look for his reference to "the philosophy of 'co'")
- William James, On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings (Note James's reported conversation with the Carolina loggers)
- Richard Rorty, Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy (see below #)
- The Fire of Life, Richard Rorty, Poetry Magazine (see below **)
- David Whyte, Up@dawn blog posts... On the conversational nature of reality (On Being)... A lyrical bridge between past, present, and future (TED) TRANSCRIPT below @
- William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, in The Will to Believe and other essays (Note the discussion of The Rock) (MPML below)
- Richard Rorty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- William James, who said "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'..." ("The Essence of Humanism," 1905)
- Richard Rorty, who called philosophy "the conversation of mankind" and said “The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that."
- David Whyte, the philosopher/poet who speaks and writes eloquently of "the conversational nature of reality."
- Had you previously heard of Richard Rorty, "one of the most influential thinkers of the second part of the 20th century"? Or of John Dewey? Or William James? Do public intellectuals and philosophers get enough attention in America? (Jean-Francois Revel in France, for instance, was a celebrity.) Is America un-philosophical? (One of our past MTSU visiting speakers in our Lyceum series, Carlin Romano, says no. See his America the Philosophical...)
- If Rorty's name rings a bell but you can't quite recall why, maybe you heard him referenced in 2016 when many thought he'd been prescient about that year's presidential election in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country...? (see below *RR)
- If you listened to the Rorty interview above, what impressions did you form of him and his ideas?
- Based on what you know of Pragmatism, would you consider yourself a Pragmatist?
- "Rorty firmly believed we should let 'democratic politics be what sets the goals of philosophy, rather than philosophy setting the goals of politics.'” In that light, what should be philosophy's goals right now?
- Does it "kill truth" to say, with Rorty, that truth is conversational in the sense that it is “what your contemporaries let you get away with”?
- "I grew up knowing that all decent people were... socialists." How different an upbringing was that from yours?
- "To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power." True?
- Rorty "spent most of his life 'looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for'..." Eventually he seems to have decided that it's mostly good for contributing to the ongoing human conversation about what the past means to our present and future. Is that good enough?
- Rorty thought philosophers should continue the “conversation of the West, rather than […] insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.” Does that strike you as reasonable or radical? Or...?
- Rorty outlined a new culture in which philosophers stopped “worrying about truth,” “contributing to knowledge,” or “getting things right,” and started working in a more conversational manner. Do you think this "conversational turn" should exclude "worrying about truth" etc.? Isn't that also an important part of the conversation of (western) civilization?
- Rorty wanted "to transform philosophy into a looser activity where progress would be measured in relation not to nonhuman realities (such as truth, God, or foundational human nature) but rather to the historical contingencies that formed our present. These, as he explained, could be the family we grew up with, the society around us, or the language we feel most comfortable in." Why do you think so many critics thought that sounded like relativism or nihilism?
- What does it mean to you to say that "contingencies determine us"? Do you ever wonder, for instances, who you'd be if you'd grown up in different circumstances, in a different place, etc.? Do such reflections make you more curious about others' lives and philosophies, more tolerant of diversity, etc.? Do you think about alternative possible lives you might have lived?
- "...truth ought to become simply what a free community can agree on as true" -- but in our time, free communities have a hard time even agreeing on what the basic facts are. Does a conversational approach to philosophy seem likely to you to improve that situation (on the perhaps-dubious assumption that philosophical conversation might influence the wider culture in some way)?
- Can we reasonably hope to "live up to one another" in Rorty's sense of the expression?
- Are you an "ironist" in Rorty's sense?
- "The fact that he always responded to his critics is an indication that he wanted philosophy to be a conversation." On the other hand, Mark Twain said never argue with a fool etc. When in your opinion is a conversation not conducive to mutual understanding and goodwill?
- Are you surprised to hear a philosopher say "neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation" [terminal cancer]? Do you think this says more about philosophy or about Richard Rorty?
- Do you find the two poems Rorty was "cheered" by philosophical in any way? If so, why do you imagine he evidently did not?
- Do you have any favorite poems you'd consider philosophical?
- Do you regularly read poetry (or regularly encounter it, as for instance via The Writers Almanac)? What does it do for you?
- Rorty regrets not spending more time in his life with poetry, but "not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose." Do you think poetry can express truths that are otherwise inexpressible? Or if not truths, then feelings or attitudes?
- Are we "more fully human when [our] memories are amply stocked with verses"? Should poetry memorization and recitation be restored to elementary and secondary education?
- Any thoughts on David Whyte's "What to Remember When Waking"?
- Whyte: Why are you unhappy? -"Because 98.98% of everything you do is for yourself, but there isn't one." COMMENT?
- Whyte cites Wallace Stevens: "Sometimes the truth depends on a walk around a lake." What do you think that means?
- “We live best as appreciators of horizons, whether we reach them or not”--COMMENT?
- From Whyte's 2016 On Being conversation:
"I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid-40s or 50s — “Oh, I am actually going to die. It’s not someone else I’m going to become.” But another step of maturity is actually realizing the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go [laughs] — that you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up and make way for something else, which you’ve actually beaten a trail for. And it could be your son, your daughter, could be people you’ve taught or mentored; it could be — the more generous you are, the more that circle extends into our society and those who go after us." COMMENT?
- One of the things the Irish say is that “The thing about the past is, it’s not the past.” [laughs] It’s right here, in this room, in this conversation." COMMENT?
- "I began to realize that the only places where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you...But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level." Is conversation essentially just that, the point of contact between oneself and the world (including other selves)? Is what we call reality just that point of contact? And is the prevalence of un-reality (falsehood, dishonesty) in the world due to a lack of contact in that sense?
- "Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation." What do you think it means to converse, in this context?
- "...the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being and that you’ll pass from this place. And will you actually turn up? Will you actually have the conversation?" Same question.
00:17
the present perspective on the future
00:19
and the future, mature perspective on the future --
00:24
I'd like to try and bring all those three tenses together
00:28
in one identity tonight.
00:31
And you could say that the poet, in many ways,
00:34
looks at what I call "the conversational nature of reality."
00:39
And you ask yourself:
00:40
What is the conversational nature of reality?
00:43
The conversational nature of reality is the fact
00:46
that whatever you desire of the world --
00:50
whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or a love relationship,
00:54
whatever you desire of your children,
00:56
whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you,
00:59
or your world --
01:01
will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen.
01:06
But equally,
01:08
whatever the world desires of us --
01:10
whatever our partner, our child, our colleague,
01:14
our industry,
01:15
our future demands of us,
01:18
will also not happen.
01:20
And what actually happens
01:21
is this frontier between what you think is you
01:26
and what you think is not you.
01:28
And this frontier of actual meeting
01:31
between what we call a self and what we call the world
01:34
is the only place, actually, where things are real... (transcript continues)
- Any thoughts of a philosophical nature regarding the election, American democracy, etc., in view of the course theme? [And did you know that I'm teaching "Democracy in America" next semester for MALA?]
- Do you have a stereotypical notion of what a philosopher at work looks like? Wittgenstein's year in Norway? Or maybe Rodin's "Thinker"? Does it seem a likely strategy for generating ideas and insights?
- Have you heard of the Peripatetics, and their preferred method of thinking and philosophizing? What do you think of it? Have you tried it? When you need to think intently about something, how do you go about it? Does it help to talk to someone about your ideas, and listen to their critique?
- Have you (like Boethius) ever engaged in an internal conversation with yourself, facilitated by an imaginary interlocutor?
- In his famous "Meditations" Descartes asked how he knew he had a body, that he wasn't dreaming, that other people were real, etc. If you take communication and conversation seriously, can you seriously entertain such questions?
- Rousseau wrote "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"... Do you prefer to walk (run, hike, bike etc.) alone or with company?
- Do you think the Socratic/dialectical method is a better than lecturing, to encourage learning and dialogue? Do you agree that "for philosophical communication, conversation [is] king"?
- Have you read Plato, Hume, Berkeley, Kierkegaard, or any other philosophers who preferred the dialogue format to convey their ideas? Did you enjoy it?
- Have you ever seen Steve Allen's "Meeting of Minds"?
- "Enthusiasm expressed through the voice can be contagious and inspirational." Would you rather read philosophy, watch or hear it, or both? Have you encountered philosophy on YouTube, or heard it in audio format? Do you know the School of Life?
- "Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions"-Do you enjoy that sort of conversation?
- Do you agree with J.S. Mill on the importance of having your ideas challenged by others?
- “You first need to have an ego in order to be aware that it doesn’t exist.” Is this a contradiction, or does it express something meaningful and important? Is ego and self-assertion generally an obstacle to effective communication and conversation?
- COMMENT? "it’s important not to think that once the imposture of the ego is unmasked you find yourself in a state of inner nothingness, to the point that the destruction of the personality renders you incapable of acting or communicating. You don’t become an empty container. It’s quite the opposite..."
- Do you think one can be a good Buddhist AND a good scientist?
- The exchange between the monk (Ricard) and philosopher (Revel) is described as "a masterpiece of the art of conversation at its most elevated and ennobling"... Is this more or less surprising, in view of the fact that the principals in this conversation were father and son?
It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Mr. Rorty, an American pragmatist philosopher, died in 2007. Were he still alive, he’d likely be deluged with phone calls from strangers, begging him to pick their stocks... (continues)
==
WHEN RICHARD RORTY (1931–2007) passed away 10 years ago, public intellectuals such as Martha Nussbaum, Stanley Fish, and Gianni Vattimo, as well as newspapers from around the world, praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of the second part of the 20th century. There has not been another American philosopher since John Dewey who managed to transform so many philosophical problems and fascinate so many readers as Richard Rorty.
Although Rorty was a committed academic who taught in a number of distinguished universities (Princeton, the University of Virginia, Stanford), and was awarded several institutional prizes (the Meister Eckhart Prize, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and honorary doctorates from several universities), he always remained an independent thinker capable of critiquing not only these establishments, but also his own nation when necessary. For example, when he heard the news about 9/11, his first concern was that George W. Bush and the Republican Party would use this “the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire,” to “keep us in a state of perpetual war from now on — under the guise of the War on Terrorism.”
Although Rorty’s polemical tone in his books and articles might suggest that he had a robust temperament, he was the opposite: gentle, shy, withdrawn, and sensitive. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who was his colleague at Stanford, recalls how
to listen to Richard Rorty in a discussion or especially in a lecture was — regardless of the extent to which one agreed with him — always a rhetorical pleasure and an intellectual event. But to walk with him across campus could turn into a minor pain. For in personal conversation, Rorty often seemed uninterested or even clumsy, no matter how unmistakably clear his feelings and strong opinions resonated through his words. Rorty found an ideal solution for this on the birthdays of his wife, Mary, whom he loved with the enthusiasm of a young student: disguised as a waiter with a green apron, he could attend to his guests, without having to talk about anything more concrete than the selection of wines and cocktails.
As is demonstrated by the many volumes and conferences dedicated to his thought since he passed away, including the establishment of the Richard Rorty Society, the American thinker is already remembered today as a model philosopher for the 21st century. He was someone who could rise above contemporary quarrels — not only that of philosophy versus science but also debates within philosophy (realism versus antirealism, for instance) and religion (atheism versus orthodoxy) — for the well-being of democracy. Rorty firmly believed we should let “democratic politics be what sets the goals of philosophy, rather than philosophy setting the goals of politics.”
Although Rorty always presented himself as a proud American philosopher, most of his US colleagues saw him as the personification of the European intellectual, not for his praising of classics from the continent, but rather for suggesting the abandonment of analytic philosophy for a more pluralistic, historical, and political approach. Analytic philosophy, which for the most part relies on formal logic in measuring and solving problems, conquered the American academy to the extent that anyone interested in Dewey, Hannah Arendt, or Jacques Derrida was regarded as a subversive. When Rorty served as the president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association he criticized the fact that approaches other than analytic philosophy (such as poststructuralism, critical theory, and hermeneutic philosophy) were often ignored in mainstream departments. This is what he meant when he encouraged his fellow American philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor and “let a hundred flowers bloom.”
Rorty declared not only the end of the domination of analytic philosophy but also the use of truth in political, ethical, and philosophical deliberations. For Rorty, truth is not something objectively present but only “what your contemporaries let you get away with.” In line with other pragmatists and hermeneutic philosophers Rorty believed “there is no wholesale, epistemological way to direct, or criticize, or underwrite, the course of inquiry,” but only “conversational ones” bound to our own contingent historicity. It should not come as a surprise that in 2003 BBC Four ran a documentary provocatively titled Richard Rorty: The Man Who Killed Truth. Despite Rorty’s international success, his philosophy was regarded as a betrayal by most of his colleagues, and in the 1980s he left the philosophy department and began teaching in English departments.
In order to understand Rorty’s social and philosophical commitment to a more democratic and pluralistic world, it is necessary to recall two key features in his life: his family’s social commitment and his philosophical education. Rorty’s parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were both renowned writers and activists in the New York intellectual scene of the 1930s. “Having broken with the American Communist Party in 1932, my parents,” Rorty recalled, “had been classified by the Daily Worker as ‘Trotskyites,’ and they more or less accepted the description.” James, who served in France during World War I, collaborated with the philosopher Sidney Hook and wrote several books on the Depression and the advertising industry. He also wrote poems. Winifred was a schoolteacher with early feminist convictions whose father was the legendary Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Young Richard was raised to think of his grandfather as “a sort of social hero.” As Rorty recalls in an autobiographical article of 1992:
I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists. I also knew that Stalin had ordered not only Trotsky’s assassination but also Kirov’s, Ehrlich’s, Alter’s and Carlo Tresca’s. (Tresca, gunned down on the streets of New York, had been a family friend). I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome. […] On the subway, I would read the documents I was carrying [drafts of press releases from the Workers’ Defense League]. They told me a lot about what factory owners did to union organizers, plantation owners to sharecroppers, and the white locomotive engineers’ union to the coloured firemen (whose jobs white men wanted, now that diesel engines were replacing coal-fired steam engines). So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.
A lot was expected of Rorty both intellectually and socially even at an early age. This is probably why he was sent at the age of 15 to the Hutchins College at the University of Chicago, which had recently begun accepting high school students to educate them in the great books of the Western tradition. However, there was a problem at Hutchins: the pragmatism of John Dewey, who was a hero to Rorty’s family, was considered vulgar, relativistic, and self-refuting. “As they pointed out over and over again,” Rorty recalls,
Dewey had no absolutes. To say, as Dewey did, that “growth itself is the only moral end,” left one without a criterion for growth, and thus with no way to refute Hitler’s suggestion that Germany had “grown” under his rule. To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power.
The Hutchins program, as Neil Gross recalls in his biography of Rorty,
was too out of sync with the rest of the American university system for other schools to know what to do with someone who had graduated at age eighteen after only three years of coursework. Richard decided to stay on at Chicago, and the experiences he underwent during his next three years there would prove formative for his later thought.
Important thinkers such as Rudolf Carnap, Allen Tate, and Charles Hartshorne were among the faculty at the University of Chicago, which offered Rorty a solid philosophical education. After he completed his master’s thesis (on Whitehead’s metaphysics) under the guidance of Hartshorne, he went on to Yale, where in 1956 he defended a doctoral dissertation under the metaphysician Paul Weiss.
And yet, if Rorty is a model philosopher for the 21st century, it is not because of his family background, liberal education, or successful career. Rather, it is because he spent most of his life “looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.” The difference between philosophers who know the answer to this question and the ones who do not is that, for the latter, “intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past.” As Rorty explained in the acclaimed Page-Barbour lectures, now published as Philosophy as Poetry (2016), the past can only be surpassed if we acknowledge that “human beings do not have a nature to be understood, but rather a history to be reinterpreted.”
When Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published in 1979, it became one of the best-selling philosophical works of all time. It has been translated into 17 languages and has been discussed throughout the academy. It has even entered popular culture. Although it is a 400-page reinterpretation of the concept of representation, which leading philosophical scholars have explored for centuries, it still managed to overcome the boundaries of academic interest. The aim of the book, as Rorty explained in the introduction, was “to undermine the reader’s confidence in ‘the mind’ as something about which one should have a ‘philosophical’ view, in ‘knowledge’ as something about which there ought be a ‘theory’ and which has ‘foundations,’ and in ‘philosophy’ as it has been conceived since Kant.” In this way the only moral concern of philosophers should be to continue the “conversation of the West, rather than […] insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.”
It should not come as a surprise that most of Rorty’s books after 1979 (Consequences of Pragmatism [1982], Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [1989], et cetera) were composed of essays that either developed these theses further or responded to objections and criticisms of them. These criticisms came not only from his analytic colleagues but also from pragmatist thinkers such as Susan Haack, who found that his interpretation of classic American pragmatism led him to abandon the very attempt to learn more about the nature and conditions of inquiry. This is probably why, over the years, several critical collections of essays (such as Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics [1995] and A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History [2000]) were published with his responses included. “Among contemporary philosophers,” Habermas said, “I know of none who equaled Rorty in confronting his colleagues — and not only them — over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations.” What is so interesting about these new insights and formulations is not how he managed to justify his position so much as how he outlined a new culture in which philosophers stopped “worrying about truth,” “contributing to knowledge,” or “getting things right,” and started working in a more conversational manner.
While these suggestions might seem the work of a relativist, skeptic, or even nihilist philosopher, Rorty was none of these. He was a pragmatist interested in fusing together different modes of thought, such as those of John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, in order to transform philosophy into a looser activity where progress would be measured in relation not to nonhuman realities (such as truth, God, or foundational human nature) but rather to the historical contingencies that formed our present. These, as he explained, could be the family we grew up with, the society around us, or the language we feel most comfortable in.
This transformation seemed necessary to Rorty principally because of our too reverent use of the term “rationality.” We “rationally” claim superiority for certain philosophies, political systems, or religions, but this presupposes an argument from premises that are apparently acceptable to all human beings regardless of their cultural, national, or historical location. As we well know, these contingencies determine us, but they also differ. It is impossible to unify them. This is why Rorty argues that he does
not see that we do anything called “appealing to truth.” We appeal to the statements of the tortured, the records in the archives, the monuments of the past, the slides under the microscope, the images in the lens of the telescope, and so on, but not to “truth.” Insistence on the existence or the importance of truth seems to me empty, at least by comparison to insistence on the need of freedom.
Rorty did not believe that this transformation — or, as his enemies prefer to call it, “subversion” — of philosophy’s traditional goals would solve all our problems. But it might allow us to get a better sense of everyone’s limitations, diversities, and uniqueness, and therefore increase our concern for society and the freedom of all. In this spirit he genially suggested that “if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself.” In other words, truth ought to become simply what a free community can agree on as true, not what foundationally makes the community true. In this way our moral duty would not be toward “rational reasons” but rather toward our fellow citizens. This idea is not really a “subversion” if we recall that the notion of “responsibility” existed in Athens even before Plato invented what we now call “reason.” If we agree that democracy is a system in which we are allowed, from time to time, to change the governors, laws, and rules of the game, then Rorty’s suggestion that it could also begin to set the goals of philosophy might help different philosophical positions receive the recognition they merit.
As we can foresee, it is only to analytic philosophers that Rorty might have seemed subversive, certainly not to those who acknowledge the necessity of recognizing the political and intellectual differences that constitute us as a species. This is probably why Rorty identified allies in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy and Gianni Vattimo’s weak thought. The former was central to the fusing together of different philosophical traditions, and the latter indicated how we might overcome metaphysics in such a way as to avoid replacing it with another version of it. As Rorty explained at Gadamer’s 100th-birthday celebration in Heidelberg:
In a future Gadamerian culture, human beings would wish only to live up to one another, in the sense in which Galileo lived up to Aristotle, Blake to Milton, Dalton to Lucretius and Nietzsche to Socrates. The relationship between predecessor and successor would be conceived, as Gianni Vattimo has emphasized, not as the power-laden relation of ‘overcoming’ (Ãœberwindung) but as the gentler relation of turning to new ‘purposes’ (Verwindung).
The concept of irony has not only allowed Rorty to outline his antifoundationalist philosophy but also to articulate a different attitude toward political and religious beliefs. Irony for Rorty has nothing to do with passiveness, irresponsibility, and the cruel denigration of the beliefs, values, and vocabularies of others. The ironist instead is someone “who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond reach of time and chance.” Instead, these beliefs and desires must refer to a larger “we” that has abandoned the narrow, cruel, and exclusivist versions of our inherited “we.” In this condition the ironist’s “sense of human solidarity is based on a sense of a common danger, not on a common possession or a shared power.”
As we can see, irony echoes the power we have to redescribe, the power we have to interpret differently our past and future. The question of how best to interpret past and future conceptions of politics and religion is at the center of both Achieving Our Country (1998) and The Future of Religion (2005). In the former Rorty reinterprets the role of the left in the Unites States, and in the latter he suggests replacing atheism with anticlericalism when dealing with the church. In many ways these books retrace similar steps to those he made in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, because they recall how irrelevant philosophy has become to the ethical, political, and religious concerns of the conversation of humankind. “I think the hermeneutical or Gadamerian attitude is in the intellectual world what democracy is in the political world. The two can be viewed as alternative appropriations of the Christian message that love is the only law.”
Conversation — together with irony, contingency, and solidarity — is the most important concept for understanding the political and religious consequences of Rorty’s philosophy. This is evident not only in the central place this concept has throughout his books but also in how he practiced philosophy. The fact that he always responded to his critics is an indication that he wanted philosophy to be a conversation. In one of his last essays he suggests dropping the term “continental” and instead “contrast[ing] analytic philosophy with conversational philosophy.” If Rorty prefers conversational philosophers to analytic ones it’s not only because they are “taking part in a conversation rather than […] practicing a quasi-scientific discipline” but also because they have replaced the slogan “let’s get it right!” with “let’s try something different.” The future lies in this difference.
¤
Charles Darwin also looked back with regret at not having devoted more time to poetry (and music). Don't let it happen to you. A good place to start, if you don't already appreciate it, is the daily poem on The Writer's Almanac podcast... jpo
"Hasn't anything you've read been of any use?" my son persisted. "Yes," I found myself blurting out, "poetry." "Which poems?" he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine":
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
and Landor's "On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday":
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.
Though various bits of verse have meant a great deal to me at particular moments in my life, I have never been able to write any myself (except for scribbling sonnets during dull faculty meetings — a form of doodling). Nor do I keep up with the work of contemporary poets. When I do read verse, it is mostly favorites from adolescence. I suspect that my ambivalent relation to poetry, in this narrower sense, is a result of Oedipal complications produced by having had a poet for a father. (See James Rorty, Children of the Sun (Macmillan, 1926).)
However that may be, I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.
...We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features. Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations, claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments; compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. 'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close
"...So in 1999, when Revel traveled to Ricard’s home in Kathmandu and the two sat down for this remarkable intellectual encounter, it was the philosophical rather than the religion dimensions of Buddhism that took center stage as the father and son contemplated such immutable human concerns as free will, the meaning of life, the value of scientific progress, and the pillars of the good life. As they speak, each addresses the other as much as he is confabulating with himself, which results in a masterpiece of the art of conversation at its most elevated and ennobling — an exchange of dynamic contemplation between and within minds, driven not by the self-righteous slinging of opinions but by a deep commitment to mutual understanding and to enriching the shared pool of wisdom."
Chapter 5: The Essence of Humanism
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HUMANISM is a ferment that has 'come to stay.' It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making thin appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists often taking part against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other side.
If humanism really be the name for such a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that the whole scene of the philosophic stage will change in some degree if humanism prevails. The emphasis of things, their foreground and background distribution, their sizes and values, will not keep just the same. If such pervasive consequences be involved in humanism, it is clear that no pains which philosophers may take, first in defining it, and then in furthering, checking, or steering its progress, will be thrown away.
It suffers badly at present from incomplete definition. Its most systematic advocates, Schiller and Dewey, have published fragmentary programmes only; and its bearing on many vital philosophic problems has not been traced except by adversaries who, scenting heresies in advance, have showered blows on doctrines -- subjectivism and scepticism, for example -- that no good humanist finds it necessary to entertain. By their still greater reticences, the anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed the humanists. Much of the controversy has involved the word 'truth.' It is always good in debate to know your adversary's point of view authentically. But the critics of humanism never define exactly what the word 'truth' signifies when they use it themselves. The humanists have to guess at their view; and the result has doubtless been much beating of the air. Add to all this, great individual differences in both camps, and it becomes clear that nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage which things have reached at present, as a sharper definition by each side of its central point of view.
Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make sure of what's what and who is who. Any one can contribute such a definition, and, without it, no one knows exactly where he stands. If I offer my own provisional definition of humanism now and here, others may improve it, some adversary may be led to define his own creed more sharply by the contrast, and a certain quickening of the crystallization of general opinion may result.
I
The essential service of humanism., as I conceive the situation, is to have seen that tho, one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing. Since this formula also expresses the main contention of transcendental idealism, it needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous. It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to denying theism and pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny either; everything would depend on the exegesis; and if the formula ever became canonical, it would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters. I myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically. If there be a God, he is no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the experiencer of widest actual conscious span. Read thus, humanism is for me a religion susceptible of reasoned defence, tho I am well aware how many minds there are to whom it can appeal religiously only when it has been monistically translated. Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of -- it being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co,' in which conjunctions do the work. But my primary reason for advocating it is its matchless intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only of the standing 'problems' that monism engenders ('problem of evil, ' 'problem of freedom,' and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes as well. It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all...
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:—
Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes—an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied. "Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle, and success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.
"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his topcoat was good enough for us.
"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them,—for the cabin was usually locked,—or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some specimens! . . . But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,—a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.
"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt.
. . . "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,—the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,—seeking for that bird and bearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.
. . . "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.
"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. . . . It has so little bond with externals . . . that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. . . . In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. . . . In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall." (1)
These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce:—
"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desire . . . So, dimly and by instinct bast thou lived with thy neighbor, and bast known him not, being blind. Thou bast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty." (2)
This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.
This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.—It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made." (3)
Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance, a 'lonely cheer.'
"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning." (4)
"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" just what this bidden presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the bills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the, reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying authority:—
"Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e'er I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; nearThe solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields."Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives." (5)
As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a certain hill-top he says:—
"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight. . . . With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument . . . The great sun, burning with light, the strong earth,—dear earth,—the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed. . . . The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away. . . . Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I reclined there!" (6)
Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?
Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.
Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but circulations—things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels:—
Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations,
than you might suppose.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high.
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, neither time or place-distance avails not.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thickstemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls-I saw them high in the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening;
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-bouses by the docks;
On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high . . . . into the night,
Casting their flicker of black . . . . into the clefts of streets.
These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.(7)
And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life's heavensent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:—
"Dear Pete,—It is splendid here this forenoon—bright and cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two squares from where I live. Shall I tell you about [My life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama-shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else-in fact a perfect stream of people—men too dressed in high style, and plenty of foreigners—and then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes." (8)
Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,—Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?
When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn, about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does not thus 'soar away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. "Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.
To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'(9)
But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is Tolstoï. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words. . . . Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoï's description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays,—his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver. . . . He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance. . . . When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."(10)
The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ali! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people. . . . when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."(11)
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beautifully described by a man who can write,—Mr. W. H. Hudson, in his volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author, "at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea.
. . . "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns. . . . Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,—no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot,—the shooting was all left behind in the valley. . . . Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb. . . . At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would. slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.
"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self,—to thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].
"I had undoubtedly gone back; and that state of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. Ile is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him."(12)
For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
1. 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
2. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162. (abridged).
3. De Sénancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
4. The Prelude, Book III.
5. The Prelude, Book IV.
6. Op. cit., Boston, Roberts, 1883, PP. 5, 6.
7. 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).
8. Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.
9. Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
10. La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
11. Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240.
12. Op. Cit., pp. 210-222 (abridged).
Summer '21 MALA course: Enlightenment Now. Consecutive snow days (and the arrival of pitchers and catchers in Arizona and Florida) have me thinking about summer.
🌨❄🌨
FYI, I'm planning to offer a MALA course called "Enlightenment Now" which technically will be an independent readings course, but it'll feel at least as "normal" as this one-we'll Zoom once a week and exchange ideas on a blogsite.
We'll read
- "What is Enlightenment?"
- The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction,
- The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters
- Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Should be fun and, ahem, enlightening. Let Janet McCormick know if you're interested.
* CRN: 85729
MALA 6010: Foundations of Liberal Arts II
Day/Time: Thursdays 6:00 - 9:00 pm (REMOTE)
Course Coordinator: Dr. Janet McCormick
Office Hours: virtual – email me any time (janet.mccormick@mtsu.edu)
Office: Jones Hall 202
Course Theme and Overview
Communication – the human connection - is the essence of human life. It is the key to personal and career success, the foundation for personal development and the first step to understanding.
Communication works for those who work at it as the quality of your communication directly impacts the quality of your life. The art of communication is the language of leadership - interdisciplinary communication is where truly great ideas emerge. To effectively communicate we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others. This course offers diverse perspectives on the significance of “communication” through the lens of the various disciplines of the Liberal Arts.
COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES
Upon completion of this course, students will:
• Gain an understanding of the foundation of Liberal Arts disciplines
• Increase content knowledge of the Liberal Arts disciplines
• Develop a greater appreciation of the interdisciplinary approach to learning
• Improve the ability to read and write critically and at an advanced level
• Recognize the methods of knowing in various disciplines
Oh! I see what you did there, Professor! Your timing is perfect! Awesome!
ReplyDeleteLooking, reading, hearing from others how important it is to truly LISTEN to each other, and try to see things from another’s perspective is what could/would/should help us be that ideal democracy! But isn’t the expectation of that ability also part of an “ideal”? The division in our country right now is a prime example of what can wrong when we won’t and don’t. But I’m not certain how simply acknowledging that will do us all any good.
It would perfect if we all just out into the woods and find our little “hut”. Maybe not for an entire year but forcing everyone to do it for at least a few months might help for them to see how selfish they have been. It might cause such deep reflection that they/we all come out a changed person. Like the near-death experiences people have and then say that they saw their “wrongs” and go out to try to correct them and make the world a better place, the transformations could be wonderful! Or would it?! I had boss tell me one time that if we all thought alike, nothing would ever get done. Instead, we’d be running around bumping into each other all the time. (Ed Bell, best boss ever!)
So what does NOT bumping into each other accomplish? If we will let it, we can grow, learn, and make the changes necessary for the world to be that “better place”. I think, though, that the “letting it” seems to be our biggest hurdle. We are so determined to have OUR way, that we lose sight of what might be better. We have forgotten what Celeste Headlee advised in her TEDTalk that we should “Enter all conversations feeling you have something to learn.”
I know that I have many areas in which I need to learn and grow. I look at that rock differently than Wordsworth. I see that “moral life” as a lump, a bump, providing me with nothing other than something to grasp and shake in a fist. I need to learn to gently hold in, and in patience massage it. Then perhaps over time I will even be able to help it mold into a new shape with the ability to have the next person who picks it up give it the feeling and life Wordsworth saw. I wonder if, in many ways, we aren’t that “unmolded” rock to ourselves, blocking our growth and learning.
Jenn-Jacques Rousseau said in his book The Social Contract: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” That’s actually the opening line. Some of those chains are put on us by others with life’s inequalities, and then others we put on ourselves. I look forward to finding the key to the lock and being released to go out into the world and be the one that makes it a better place, even if for just one other person!
Hey, Mary!
DeleteI LOVE the points you make in your post. Yes, I agree. "Letting it" is a big issue for society as a whole. Control seems to be the problem. I remember someone asking this question a few years ago: What do you value more- success or failure? Surprising myself, I chose failure because without it, I would have never really experienced success. Success is not a one-and-done things. Failure is part of what makes success possible and part of what makes success so beautiful. I think we can tend to forget that by wanting things to be "our way", but (in my experience) some of the best things that have ever happened for me came about from things NOT going my way. Wonderful post!
We have forgotten what Celeste Headlee advised in her TEDTalk that we should “Enter all conversations feeling you have something to learn.”....
DeleteAll 10 rules she listed were wonderful and should be applied to almost all of our communication activities. Taking these and putting them to use and practice will make all of us much better listeners and will increase the value of all conversations!
Thanks, Lucy! That's a "deep" question to be asked and I love your answer! You are so right! The Dalai Lama is known for saying "Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck." Sometimes we can only see how true that is in hindsight!
DeleteKarla, IKR!!!!! And "Be prepared to be amazed!"!!
DeleteMary, you write so well! Great points. And Lucy, I like the question and answer -- I have a daughter facing some difficulties right now and am going to pass this along.
Delete
ReplyDeleteThe timing of these written selections is incredibly convenient! I wish more people would chose to read and consider a lot of these ideas. We are a culture saturated with pushing our own ideas and beliefs off on one another only to be personally hurt if someone chooses to think differently. What a silly notion! There would be no progress, no creativity, no change if everyone shifted their thoughts and ideas to fit the (seemingly) status quo.
The article from Nigel Warburton reminds me a lot of Henry David Thoreau. I’m sure you all have heard at least part of this quote, ““I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...” I remember reading this as a junior in high school, and thinking to myself, “I would what the world might look at if we all had this kind of experience.”
“Positive emotions don’t disturb our mind, they reinforce it and make it more stable and more courageous.” I love this quote from the Brainpickings selection! It’s easy, especially right now in our culture, to get bogged down and sucked into the negativity and discontent, but I love how this reminds us that positivity is truly beneficial. Choosing positivity is not ignoring what’s going on around us in the world, it’s consciously deciding a mental boundary as to what you will and will not allow to occupy your thoughts, effort, and well-being.
Spinning off the idea of positivity and the enthusiasm that accompanies it, I am prompted to address the question of how I prefer philosophy to be delivered: read, watch, or listen. Honestly, I love all three. I find it particularly interesting to read a transcript first, and then watch/listen, comparing my first interpretation to the delivery of the idea from the author him/her self. There are so many valuable benefits to each option. I, personally, love visualizing and hearing a person while watching and listening for those idiosyncrasies that I would not know from a writing itself. Observing people is such a fascinating thing to me, and I believe it helps give a better insight on the person as an individual when you pick up on habits and patterns that (sometimes) the personal themselves are not even aware they do. It’s so amazing to me how we are so different yet so alike in a plethora of ways!
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DeleteLucy, I, too, like to get it all three ways! Putting the verbal and nonverbal together can help get the complete picture of what they are trying to say.
DeleteIn response to the TedTalk about Communication Tips, I was recently listening to someone sharing how they intentionally interact with new people. This person shared that she found it incredibly helpful in connecting with others by asking them, "What question do you wish people would ask you?" I find this to be interesting for a lot of reasons. She said she got people sharing insightful things such as they wished someone would ask them about what project they're working on. This is indicative of a variety of aspects about a person, and I personally love how it can help determine what is important and dear to an individual. The downside of this tactic, for me, would be how some people are not used to being asked creative questions like this, and many are used to people accepting, "I don't know" as an answer, negating the entire purpose of posing this question.
DeleteIn my personal experience, I thoroughly enjoy asking people off the wall, creative questions (which I learned through several leadership workshops). These questions include things like: If you could be any kitchen appliance what would you be and why; if you had to express your personality through a traffic sign, which sign would it be and why; and of course, if you were a restaurant which would you be and why? All of these typically evoke funny yet insightful responses to a person and their personality as well as their thought process. I also find it interesting to reverse the questioning, meaning have someone else choose what they think someone would be and compare responses.
Oskar, I am going to have to start using those questions!!! I always love reading your "sstuff"!!!
DeleteSteve Allen’s “Meeting of the Minds”
ReplyDeleteI had not ever seen or heard of “Meeting of the Minds”. I found that it was show that ran from 1977 to 1981 and aired on PBS. Steve Allen was the host to many guests that were famous historical figures. It was a round table type discussion with four guests (at least the one I watched). It was a conversational history lesson! The featured guests in Episode 3 of Season 3 were Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925), Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), and Aristotle (384-322 BC). “Meeting of the Minds” was quite entertaining and educational. Steve Allen asked poignant questions of the guests and they interacted and interjected their thoughts on many areas. Differences of ideas and opinions make the viewer think of things in a different way, maybe someone else’s’ point of view. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen felt “if you are committed to change you must work for it…you must unite, act, do.” This is so true, even today – don’t expect change to fall in your lap. He also stood for virtuous actions, which was disputed by Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s has been condemned by many for his views on how to acquire and retain power in government. He says that a virtuous man cannot rule. So, a discussion of moral virtues thus ensued. Elizabeth Barrett Browning came out and instead of talking about herself, immediately want to know what was Allen’s favorite poem of her husbands. The final guest was Aristotle – he is considered “The Philosopher” or “The Master of those who know.” He studied under Plato and they learned by considering a philosophical problem and then discussed in “heatedly and enthusiastically.” Aristotle learned that you must think clearly. A valuable lesson I learned from his discussion is that unless there is agreed upon definition of terms, an argument cannot be settled. If you have two sides arguing over the strength of coffee – there has to been some determined measurable amount that would be considered weak and the same where it is considered strong. Otherwise, a coffee could be considered by one person as strong and the same cup as weak by another tester. Tastes, opinions and experiences hinder or promote further discussions. When asked if other disciplines were studied besides Philosophy, Aristotle quickly jumped in and reminded the host that the current thought of Philosophy is different that the thought back in Aristotle’s time. Philosophy simply means “love of wisdom,” so they transcended the boundaries and studied and learned from all areas of scholarship. In a discussion about the elixir that was prescribed to Ms. Barrett Browning for helping her sleep, she stated it was opium. Yat-Sen and Allen discussed the seriousness of the drug in China and the US and that it is currently illegal. She said it was not illegal and it was even given to babies. Machiavelli jumped in and stated “It is quite unfair to make moral judgements on one age by the standard of a later time and place.” Then they continued with the troubles and book failures of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Allen stated that the news of failures and not being successful could possibly help his viewers know that not everything always works out. Aristotle noted that “the most illustrious personages of history have had at least their fair share of suffering, struggle, discouragement, unpopularity and persecution.” Diving into the personal side of a historical figure brings struggles and topics to the surface, such as the “unnatural” love of her father. Through this one conversational history lesson from Steve Allen’s “Meeting of the Minds” the viewer is taken throughs centuries of time with well know historical figures to compare and contrast topics. To uncover difficult topics and try to understand from a different point of view. To understand the difficulties of others’ lives along with the trials and tribulations of their time. You must not rush to judgement too quickly and communication is the key. You must truly listen to what the other is saying and learn.
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DeleteHey, Karla!
DeleteThe two points you mention that really spoke to me were that true change requires commitment and that philosophy is really just the "love of wisdom". I tend to be a wordy person, so simplifying these concepts and being concise is incredibly helpful, especially when sharing newfound knowledge with others. I, too, have not heard of "Meeting of the Minds", but you better believe I'm looking it up as soon as I finish this comment! Awesome post!
Karla, I love that you brought up Machiavelli's comment about "it is unfair..."! I have said the same thing to many these days and many tend to react with anger. I feel I need to use another point you discussed about "agreeing on a definition" before I try to have a conversation about the unrest in our country again!
DeleteI wanted to watch this before class tonight but haven’t yet. It sounds super interesting and based on the premise I want someone to do a reboot of the show.
DeleteCrazy that I had never heard of this show. I wonder how history will treat some of our contemporary figures in such a future show. A reboot would be cool.
DeletePhilosophy Essay 1
ReplyDeleteThe author of Philosophy as Conversation, Nigel Warburton, makes a compelling argument that Philosophy is inherently social. A person could argue that Philosophy could not exist without the human ability to verbalize thoughts and ideas. Not a modern notion as Socrates used the question and answer format to engage conversation. Western Philosophy has its origins in discussion. The examination of man's place in the cosmos and the meaning of life is dependent on the “collision of viewpoints.” To find the truth and gain wisdom requires a healthy challenge by critics. John Stuart Mills stated that self-critique is inadequate as “imagined critics are less forceful and use weaker arguments.” The modern construct of the meme is a useful tool in conveying messages. They serve as a unit of influence. A cultural gene alleged to function in the world body of ideas.
An excellent example of conversational Philosophy is the excerpted passage (Brainpickings) from the book The Monk & the Philosopher. In it, we have a dynamic father-son exchange of ideas. Their discussion is not only intergenerational but also Eastern versus Western philosophy. The positions taken are “not driven by self-righteousness but by a commitment to mutual understanding and interest to enrich their shared pool of wisdom.” Buddhism denies the existence of the self but not individual consciousness. The analogy of the ‘river runs through you’ is an excellent way to explain why we want to rid ourselves of all negativity, so all that is left is clean, calm water. The ultimate aim is to help others better themselves. The world would be a better place if more people learned from Bertrand Russel how “construction and destruction both satisfy the will to power but construction is far more difficult, and more rewarding to those who can attain it.”
In the article titled, Become a Better Listener, author Jancee Dunn describes how the Covid virus has added stress to our social relationships. The ‘lockdowns’ have caused divorce rates to skyrocket. She suggests that learning to become an active listener can reduce stressful situations and improve communications. Dunn lists three components in active listening:
Express interest - do not interrupt or judge; use backchannel clues like ‘I see you,' ‘OK’; repeat last few words to signify you understand; do not be crafting a rebuttal.
Paraphrase - repeat or reflect your understanding of what you heard using their words; resist the urge to fill any silent voids.
Ask to elaborate - ‘Can you tell me more about that’; use “I” and not “You," which can put people on defense.
Hey, Larry!
DeleteI have been itching to take the Listening course the Dr. McCormick teaches here at MTSU, so I find your last summarization to be particularly interesting. Listening is a crucial activity that not only allows for better engagement but also deeper and more meaningful relationships. I hate to hear (although I'm not surprised) that divorce rates are skyrocketing. Communication within marriage is something I love studying, and I have read so many intriguing studies. As Dunn also notices, active listening can make a huge difference. Every couple has flaws and inconsistencies in how they communicate, what they communicate, and the underlying expectations that are unsurprisingly uncommunicated. Yet, what they don't realize is that these things are able to be changed and improved upon- all it takes is effort. Karla mentions true change comes from commitment, and I think this is where most people stumble because it can seem easier to cut ties than to face the problem head-on. Dunn wrote such a great article with providing those suggestions. Wonderful post, Larry!
I also locked onto the quote about imaginary critics, Larry. It made me cringe and laugh because I’m always involved in an internal argument. Lo and behold...I usually win! The importance not only of the critique itself but also having it in real time with various forms of nonverbal feedback is super important to a true dialogue. When we listen to understand, we learn. When we listen for the break in which we can finally speak, we’re no longer trying to learn but instead indoctrinate someone else with our ideas. Even in the case in which we are instructing someone else, it should be with an open mind to learn something every time, even if we are the ‘expert’.
DeleteAlso this is Tiffany Cagle and I’m trying to get this old account name changed over but keep running into snags.
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DeleteI suddenly had two college student unexpectedly back home for 5 months this year, and we had 4 people here working/going to school online. Could have used that article then LOL. But this is all informative to me. Meanwhile, I don't know how my husband and I have made it 33 years ("celebrated" during the pandemic) but mostly because we have been committed to not let the little things made a big difference I think.
DeleteI like the way you broke that all down, Larry! Seems like good communication is what's needed in all relationships!
DeleteI Actually enrolled in your MALA 6050 class for next year. I can’t wait for it,every time we have to introduce ourselves to a new teacher for the two weeks. The instructions ask what we want to do with our MALA degree.I think I want to do something dealing with the Political Science aspect of the field. Dealing in the philosophical nature of this election is a hard question to answer. You first have to look back to when the country was in its infancy.When the constitution was first written we were a country of 13 states not with many people. You had to be a white male landowner to vote.So most of the people in our class wouldn't even be able to vote. So the electoral college was set up.The electoral college consists of two senators from each state and the number of representatives you have in the house.So this can go up and down as the census is taken every ten years. I totally think this is outdated because over half of the people that vote are not white males, they can be people of color, women, non landowners, anyone 18 or older and a legal citizen of the US. So the electoral college is all messed up. It is not a reflection of the people like it was back in the 1800’s. I believe that the election should be won on the popular vote so every vote counts, not just my vote but your,s as well. Because if I vote for one candidate and you vote for one they cancel the other out fairly. I think that it is a great way to look at democracy because by the end of election day you should know a clear winner and we won't look like a country in disarray like we do now. It is sad when you look at the news and hear that the president of the US is suing its own people to have a recount of the votes they place so he can win.When you have a free american place your vote. It is supposed to be private but what our president wants to do now in Where is this a free and anonymous election that we as american are afforded the right too.THis was a philosophy placed into the constitution as a way for us to be awarded the right to vote for someone with any kind of persecution of the federal government.When you look at a country like russia they maybe a democracy but not really you can vote for whomever you want but your candidate doesn't win unless they are the leader in charge.This election is starting to look like that. If you didn’t vote Trump you don’t count.I am not wanting to start any kind of issue but just look its crazy.”We the people” are the first word in the preamble to the constitution of the United State of America so let the voice of the people be heard if you loss you loss. Loss the electoral college and keep the popular vote.
ReplyDeleteTim, you make some excellence points. I too think the electoral college is outdated because of the size of a state like California vs. one like Wisconsin (it also was a compromise over the slavery issue that was legalized and encoded in our Constitution -- a document which wasn't perfect, but seeks to continue working toward a more perfect union). But I think it would be awfully hard to change the constitution these days too! Each student could do what Nebraska and Maine already do and divide them by congressional district.
DeleteI remember Maynor saying the Electoral College usually goes the Republicans' way...or something like that! Guess that's changed!!
DeleteI really loved the conversation between the father and son about the differences of Eastern and Western philosophy, and more importantly the concept of the self. I have studied a lot of Buddhist philosophy in my life through my academic studies, and I have found that their philosophy of the world to be striking and rather compelling. The dissociation that was posited by the Buddha almost 2,500 years ago feels very relevant in an age where we are so connected to each other, and yet are so distant at the same time. I don’t just mean with technology (as a millennial it is in my job description to defend technology). I mean that we isolate ourselves in our own lives that we cannot take the time to think about others any more than what they can do for us.
ReplyDeleteI cannot say that I myself believe that there is no such thing as self, but there is a strange comfort in the belief that you as a “self” do not exist. It helps to put all of the crap that we have been dealing with this past year into perspective. When I take the time to “remove myself” from the equation, I find that my own problems are put into a much different perspective. That is not to say that my problems don’t matter, because they certainly do and still affect me; but it helps me to realize that I am not the only one with problems. I find myself much more open to the issues that I are going on around me when I stop focusing on myself in the moment.
All of humanity is a single thing, we are all streams of consciousness that are all flowing in the same direction. Everything that happens to one person happens to us all. There are no individual hurts, because they are hurts for all of humanity. When one person suffers, we all suffer. When one person finds joy, we all find joy. Or at least we should feel that way, even if we aren’t all Buddhists. Mindfulness goes a long way, and Buddhists do not have exclusive rights to that.
This brings me to my next thought that is wrapped up in the idea that philosophy happens alone. There is something to have a place and a time of solitude in order to think about the nature of existence. I myself tend to think on big questions like that when I am going on long drives or walks, or late at night with a drink or two. However, much like with the Buddhist philosophy, we are not alone in our thoughts and so we cannot shut ourselves out from them. How can you come up with a philosophy of humanity if you never interact with it in the first place? In a way, it is similar to the idea of non-self because we cannot focus all of our attention inwardly to know what humanity is like. It does not do well to hid yourself in a cave and pretend like you know what’s going on. In order to better understand yourself, and to better understand the world you have to be a part of it.
In this time of uncertainty both with Covid-19 and the election, now more than ever we cannot shut down and focus on ourselves. Certainly, understand your limits and know when it is time to take a break because mental health is of vital importance, but we cannot completely shut down and stop moving. We are not alone and are not the center of the universe, and we have to stop pretending like we are.
I also don’t agree that there is no ‘self’, but obviously that word can have so many facets. I found it hard to set aside my own thoughts during this reading so that’s a philosophical fail.
DeleteIn my post (which hasn’t shown up yet...hope I didn’t do something wrong) I said perhaps philosophy happens in a cycle that requires solitude and then community. Maybe there’s a sort of ‘digesting’ that is better done in private?
It is no coincidence that many people who live a solitary existence go a bit mad. It is essential to be alone to reflect but it is also essential to reflect someone else.
Brent, I think the "we all feel it" is utopian! Wouldn't that be nice! Unfortunately, most people can't see the pain of others, because, IMO, they'd have to look too deeply within themselves.
DeleteThis spoke to me: "Everything that happens to one person happens to us all. There are no individual hurts, because they are hurts for all of humanity." ... If only we could all feel this way! Empathy seems to be a lost art. I haven't studied Buddhism much, so it was interesting to read about cracking the ego shell in this essay.
DeleteTrying again...so sorry if this posts twice but I cant see it.
ReplyDeleteI very much appreciate the Socratic method for learning. I do enjoy a good lecture, but the learning process is different. Conversing while learning, or at least being immersed in the content, allows my brain to make associations it would not otherwise. I was raised in an *alternative* environment (for lack of a better word) and this type of discussion was highly valued. In school and at home the Socratic method was used to discuss sandwiches to sociology. There is definitely a downside to using this method with a seven year old. I found out very quickly why Socrates wasn’t the town favorite. When used well and among those who are committed to learning from one another, this is perhaps my favorite way to learn. With that being said, I think some of this stems from a rich internal life in which one goes into the woods to consider what life is and whether or not existence exists. Perhaps these two forms work cyclically to create change or at least innovation of thought.
I frequently carry on conversations in my head, which apparently makes me like Boethius. The drawback here, of course, is that the “imagined critic is less forceful and uses weaker arguments.” The problem when having all of this debate internally is that one becomes both sides, which is not really a debate at all.
“The goal of active listening is to attend to those feelings regardless of our perceptions or evaluations of them” in the Dunn article was a great line. It made me think of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in which you learn to observe your thoughts without making judgments. It’s really hard to do for yourself and of course a different kind of difficult to practice with someone else. It requires us to put ‘self’ aside, which means we relinquish the ability to grade the other person on their ‘rightness’ for awhile.
I’ve had to try this a lot recently with my kids. Being stuck in quarantine was hard on everybody and we quickly realized that trying to judge someone else’s feelings was worthless at best and inflammatory at worst. The only way through those conversations was to open up the floor for someone to say how they felt and to respond with the ever useful, ‘thanks for sharing’. It is not helpful for me to tell a kid that she shouldn’t feel overwhelmed, angry, etc. The point is she felt that way and I could listen to it so she felt less alone. This obviously ties in to the article saying we must respond with empathy in order to practice active listening. “During a conflict, people just want to be heard,” Dunn says.
I also loved the quote, “I try to practice active listening for not just what is said, but what’s being said.” The reminder that communication is not just about words but also body language, facial cues, context and history is so important not only in close relationships. Angry people on Twitter communicate more than just the hateful tweet and it is in my best interest to understand that if I’m going to engage. Likewise, it’s best for me to consider what I’m really trying to say, and if I can’t be sure...best stay quiet.
I really like that idea of active listening holistically, not just to what is being spoken. Many times I get caught up in what's being said rather than how it is said or any other kind of nonverbal factors, especially being in lockdown and not interacting with people in person every day. And when I'm good at the nonverbal stuff I miss on what is being said.
DeleteWe all could be better empathetic listeners and making people feel validated in their feelings, and not making them feel dumb for how they feel.
Having arguments in my head is a daily occurrence, and I find that I always happen to win those arguments. I guess I also deal with the "two sides becoming one" thing (I always imagine having a Gollum/Smeagol moment with myself when that happens and I start craving fish).
Tiffany, I'm really trying to work on active listening -- especially after this class! Just had to have some difficult conversations with a 21yo daughter, whose having some issues (many of her own making that we have warned about and had to give some tough love already). But in this conversation just yesterday, where she was finally coming clean with herself and realizing the consequences, I had to actively listen so much more than normal and be careful not to judge -- to be supportive, but not necessarily fix it!
DeleteSo true! And all those points on the difference in "active" listening...that makes a big difference!
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ReplyDeleteGreat comments and practices! I often carry on a conversation with myself, especially to work through things. Your last paragraph is so true. Active listening is being aware and picking up on verbal and nonverbal communication cues to receive the correct meaning. Practicing this will make all of us better communicators.
ReplyDeleteI've tried talking to myself by I usually piss me off!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteTerrific comments, everybody. Looking forward to Thursday!
ReplyDeleteAn old adage admonishes that you should first “walk in someone else’s shoes” to understand their situation, viewpoint, etc. In reading William James’ “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” he discusses his initial perspective upon seeing settlers clearing the Carolina mountains as defiling nature and spoiling the natural beauty of the forest. Only after addressing a local driver does he realize that to these people, they not only have conquered and cultivated the land but also provided a means of support and safety for their lives and families. James, likewise, figures they wouldn’t understand his lifestyle in his urban apartment as an intellectual. Read on the eve of a contentious – and now drawn-out and somewhat controversial – U.S. presidential election, James’ story is striking in these times we find ourselves in at this point in America.
ReplyDeleteAt a time when we find the middle ground in U.S. political shrinking and more polarized to the left and to the right, there appears to be a distinct divide and dichotomy in the United States – two Americas, if you will. Just as in 2016, but falling on a different side (and with the same political party winning the popular vote but by a larger margin), there were extremely close votes in 2020 in several battleground states that led to a decisive electoral college outcome. In a post-election essay in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson analyzes that “place” is causing the most polarization (“The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race,” Nov. 7, 2020). Most of the states voting Republican are in the more rural Midwest and South. Even within all states, larger urban areas are strongly Democratic and sparsely populated areas are Republican – with inner suburbs moving more to the left side this time. Likewise, diplomas (educational level) and, thus, the types of jobs (blue vs. white collar) are a piece to the puzzle.
How then do we get these two Americas to understand each other? The more urban centers, with a more diverse group of peoples, and the largely white rural neighborhoods have way different perspectives and ideas of what America should be and how to get there. And both these areas often have economic challenges, including generational poverty – caused by different historical circumstances, but a similar source of voter angst. And, across time, people mostly have similar wants – a better life for their families. In the midst of all this are people yelling at each other on social media, amidst calculated and complex campaigns of disinformation.
Having come from a small town but now living in a diverse suburb of a major metro area (albeit on an 11-acre rural tract), I not only know people on both sides of this big divide but have family members who can barely talk anymore due to politics. And perspective is the main reason. One side feels left behind, a fear of losing economic opportunities, a threat to their way of life, and the loss of power; the other side feels like progress has been halted, that some injustices are long overdue to be addressed, and that economic inequities should be checked. We even see a pandemic broken down along these political fault lines – through a lens of freedoms vs. science. Where I grew up in, there was a half of the county called “the other side of the river” -- but shouldn’t that depend on which side you lived? (Someone even suggested naming two junior high schools “this side of the river” and “that side of the river,” but I was like “which would be which”?)
In a post-election social media post, my nephew in another state called it very much “us vs. them.” When I noted we’re all Americans, he termed it as the other party vs. “Americans” – so only his party were true Americans. We need to find common ground somewhere, anywhere. But a conversation takes two to talk. Cooperation takes two to work together. We must quit calling names and communicate. To get past where we are, we must walk in other people’s shoes. To be able to see the clearing through the trees.
Great point of view you provided here! I think most of us were surprised by how equally split this county seems to be on where we go from here politically. I hope that this can all lead to every race and class of American owning how they feel about where they're at in these times and turning that anger and frustration into determination and a will to fight, not for someone else to take their place in suffering, but to fight for a government which delivers on promises of opportunity for everyone to get on their feet and contribute.
DeleteGreat thoughts, Carol. After the last four years of political disappointment, I know that I still feel unwilling to hear opinions from the ‘other side’. I normally am open-minded but I feel like that’s been used against me. My goal is always to be fair and listen to as many points of view as possible, but this year and election cycle has all but burned me out. What I don’t know is how to want to want to listen, if that makes sense. I also don’t know how to proceed when I feel like human rights are being violated. Does that require that I listen? I’m not sure what to do when something feels not political or just a difference of opinion but instead fundamentally wrong and at odds with my beliefs on how people should be treated.
DeleteDerek, I agree I wish people would turn this toward a positive civic engagement if you will (from our earliest block) and get more involved to effect change. But I hear far too much hate and perhaps I wrongly feel animus from one side in particular. I'm very disappointed that the election result isn't being accepted and feel that's dangerous and destabilizing to democracy. I really hope we don't see a constitutional
DeleteAnd, Tiffany, I too have trouble about where you draw a line about what you're willing to accept. It also was very hard to write this so down the middle as I tried to do, but I need to learn these lessons as well. The problem is whether there are false equivalencies. I feel both in religion and in politics in America, people think they're being persecuted or having their rights taken away -- when they don't really realize what that actually looks like. And then they're not concerned with other people's religious freedom and racial/social injustices.
I don't think being open-minded can be used against you, if you just let them say what they feel they need to say. We don't always have to respond. Just smile! When they have hate in their heart just pitty them! You don't have to be mean back!
DeleteWe don’t have to respond, no. But not responding when children are separated from their parents and locked away without care, I find it distasteful not to respond. This is when being open minded does get used against a person, if they give the benefit of the doubt to someone who, in the end, doesn’t deserve it.
DeleteOn the elusive quest for common ground...
DeleteCommenting on Nashvillian Margaret Renkl's NYTimes column the other day, in which she expressed "grief" at so many votes for a candidate of low character, a "transparent racist" and "chronic liar" etc., I posted this:
I'm feeling less grief than consternation, myself.
And I'm feeling like I'll have to really push myself to do my part, as Robert Talisse advises in Overdoing Democracy (which we'll read next semester in our MALA course "Democracy in America"), to restore democratic health by seeking and finding common ground with at least a few of those lesser millions in arenas that have nothing to do with politics.
A thriving democracy needs citizens to reserve space in their social lives for collective activities that are not structured by political allegiances. To ensure the health and the future of democracy, we need to forge civic friendships by working together in social contexts in which political affiliations and party loyalties are not merely suppressed, but utterly beside the point. g'r
I caught the end of Krista Tippett's On Being yesterday on the radio, just in time to hear a seconding of this motion. Karen Murphy, advocate of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation, says we should "get to know each other... across all these divisions and categories that don’t utterly define us," finding common ground via (for instance) music. Van Morrison, maybe?
I used to listen to a lot of Van. I'll dust off the old CDs. Can't hurt. At the very least it will provide a needed distraction from the pervasive poison of polarized politics... if not from excessive alliteration.
[Que "Into the Mystic"...]
Postscript. Maybe not. "Sir Van Morrison has accused the government of "taking our freedom" in three new songs that protest against the coronavirus lockdown..." bbc
https://jposopher.blogspot.com/2020/11/into-mystic.html
We read parts of his book in the first section of MALA 6010, Professor! And you are right! Until we put the politics aside, we will continue to fail at "doing democracy well"!!
DeleteTalk with Me:
ReplyDeleteWhether you rely on social interactions for philosophical inspiration, or the solitude and isolation of a cabin in the woods, you’re eventually going to need both in order to organize and test the legitimacy of your newly formed hypothesis. For me, most of my creativity stems from being alone with my thoughts and giving myself space to develop something out of nothing, to put the words on the page or allow an image to develop in my mind. Isolation and reflection inform the process and I find the journey to be therapeutic, a head-space which I rarely encounter when social stimuli are involved. It’s the criticism from my peers which weed out the weakest inclinations and inform the appropriate direction to keep those thoughts moving forward. I could see the value in absorbing an environment, rich in its variety of thought, for new ways of seeing the world and bouncing your ideas off of as well. Bottom line, whether you’re bringing an informed idea to the table, or seeking inspiration for later contemplation, having both isolation and someone to keep your ponderings in check in a helpful tool for one’s progression in philosophical thought.
The Monk and the Philosopher:
Buddhist see the importance in dismantling illusions of the self, a self who to seeks ownership and authority of its world, a view the west focuses though the lens of enlightenment and self-interest. How could you disagree that love, compassion, and faith are more noble pursuits than desire, hate and pride? There’s got to be a sweet-spot somewhere in the middle of these competing views that embodies power without ego. Most of us will never understand our own ego, let alone control it, so I like the notion of empowerment through acknowledgment of its presence. The idea that through subtle shifts in our perspective, taking the “I” out of our daily exchange with the world around us, can expose the true richness and balance of our collective existence and help balance our priorities in the now. Whether you wake up in the morning and rush to the media or take a few minutes to check in with yourself, choosing to set positive goals for the day rather than getting overwhelmed by stress, and prioritizing love over hate, jealousy, and greed are all ways of promoting positivity and stability in our daily lives. I think it’s important to recognize that it’s a practice for most of us, a tool to help balance the eastern and western philosophies. The goal being to embody the strength of mind needed to excel while remaining a compassionate, expressive, empowering voice for yourself and those you share a space with.
Become a Better a Listener:
DeleteI like the idea of being an active listener, asking the person to elaborate, but find the paraphrasing or summarizing aspect of this approach a little harder to envision in practice. There’s no denying the logic of this step, it shows understanding, it’s the empathy part that I can see being lost in translation. Of course, I have my baggage being married to a feisty-Italian, but I see the value in both partners being heard and understood above winning an argument. Perhaps, in my own dysfunctional household, it’s best utilized as an opportunity to lighten the mood of discourse more than a serious acknowledgment of understanding, which could easily be painted as condescending. In both this article, and the TED talk we watched, the key to successful conversation and communication seems to lie in simply being a present person. You have to be capable of compassion, able to adapt, and get out of your own head until your partner has delivered their message. At that point, you can use any of the above tools to demonstrate that they’ve been heard and understood – whatever works for your dynamic, but closing your mouth and being engaged are the most important parts.
I think you just described me and how I like to "approach" thinking!
DeleteHaha, there's still a lot of opportunity to function well in the middle of a dysfunctional situation :)
DeleteMuch easier to see that from "behind the lens"!!!
DeleteSolitary Walker:
ReplyDeleteI definitely prefer to be alone when I have a big decision to make or need to work out a stressful situation. I find walking the streets, sitting in a busy café, and running in nature to be my most productive thinking spaces because I can detach from my all my roles and responsibilities. We also live in a time when external stimuli server to distract us from reality, forming the illusion of a steeper climb than actually exists once you step back and start picking off the problems. We like to say there isn’t enough time in the day but all the small amounts of time we waste on social media, television, and mindless browsing eat away large portions of our day. I certainly see more value in being around my son than being tuned into news, media, and cultural events, but there’s a lot of value in solitude as a tool to put the pieces of life’s puzzle in an order you can begin assembling.
When I’m stressed out with the world and have difficulty situations to deal with. I go for a run to clear my head. The nice cool morning air free my mind.
DeleteI used to live in Western Ireland and every day took at least one long walk for physical and mental health. Among the many things I miss about living there, this is definitely near the top. There’s interesting studies about how our brain processes stress and trauma through physical activity and I definitely feel the difference in anxiety levels when I can’t get outside to walk and think.
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DeleteI find I need both external stimuli and internal reflection. During the pandemic, I tried to walk more on my rural backroad, but I also missed being in a collaborative work environment and missed daily talks with my friends -- often on Bluetooth during drives to and from work! ... I need to look more into Buddhism after reading that essay and the posts here.
DeleteI agree! I would much prefer walking by myself to work through situations!
ReplyDeleteJust my take.....
ReplyDeleteFrom the readings and videos of the philosophical works and the poetic renderings for both weeks of this section of the course, I have concluded that I have a better understanding and acquire more joy in listening and watching the material – instead of reading on my own. I currently do not have a firm grasp of the philosophical works. When I read them, I become so caught up in each individual words and sentences that I apparently fail to grasp the overall significances and implications.
This week, when watching the TED Talk of David Whyte, A lyrical bridge between past present and future, I could sit back and listen to the poet. He explained his thinking of the conversational nature of reality; that whatever you desire and what others desire of you…will not occur exactly how you or they would like it to happen. When reciting the poem he had written for his Irish niece, Marlene McCormick of her significant journey, Whyte repeats the sentences with inflections and intonations that he intended as he was writing his poetry. I could close my eyes and absorb the meaning. When the “sun going down full moon coming up behind me…moon shadow crossing the water…I myself had to walk across the Atlantic alone.” I was imagining myself in that space and time, seeing the ocean laying out in front of me and wondering if I had the courage to take the next step.
After watching and listening to him speak and recite his poetry, I read and listened to some other poems penned by David Whyte and pictured him reciting them to me. I enjoyed them more with that image and the way he spoke. I also watched another TED Talk, Life at the Frontier: The Conversational Nature of Reality. He worked at many corporations, helping leaders “connect...with an unclaimed part of themselves.” Reality wants you to come out from behind yourself and the wall you have set up for yourself and start a conversation. Be attentive and listen. He was asked to write a poem for a celebration dinner for an airline and Whyte came up with “Working Together.” We shape ourselves to fit this world…by forming it well to the greater intangibles about us.” Whyte remembered that sometimes you get to see the “…white line passing over the curve of the wing…”He was using a conversation of the airplane’s velocity with the shape of the wing. You must have both for the proper support of the airplane. I have seen that line many times in my travels, but have never thought of it this way.
By watching and learning more from these videos and readings, I hope to pursue more works and expand my horizons and open my world to an array of thoughts and ideas. I need to take the time to understand the “conversation” of the white line over the wing and open myself up to deeper and more meaningful conversations.
"Reality wants you to come out from behind yourself and the wall you have set up for yourself and start a conversation"... And "reality" in both the poet's and the philosopher's sense just IS that point of contact and engagement, isn't it, with the world and other people? Philosophical conversation in Rorty's sense is engagement with others' ideas and metaphors (etc.) combined with a recognition that our own are "contingent"... so an appropriate humility and receptivity and willingness to listen might just teach us something, might (as you say) expand our horizons.
DeleteI like to talk to people and listen to them after i get to know them.When i first might someone I just listen and learned.
DeleteI will admit I also enjoyed the video and audio selections this week and have had trouble understanding many of the deep thoughts written by philosophers. Usually I prefer to read and interpret, rather than listen. This is my first go-round with studying philosophy academically, and even though it's enjoyable, it's been somewhat over my head, even though I might consider myself a thinker! However, it has pushed me to think in ways I haven't recently so the challenge has been good one.
DeleteI am SO with you on that Karla! As for reality, this is my favorite..."Urge to come to terms with the 'Outside', by absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out, you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe with the skull, to rival the real." James Douglas Morrison (Better known as Jim Morrison of The Doors)!!!
ReplyDeleteI do love me some Doors!
DeletePhilosophy Essay II
ReplyDeleteI had not heard of Richard Rorty before this assignment and was quite impressed with his accomplishments. I enjoyed learning about his quest to “find out what philosophy is good for.” As a pragmatist and antifoundationalist, he advocates for transforming philosophy from analytical to a conversational inquiry. I believe that academia is sufficiently large enough to contain them both. However, if he aims to make better use of philosophy, turning attention away from nonhuman inquiries towards concern for society and freedom for all could be a noble pursuit. Having not learned his definition of “freedom” in this reading, his claim “if we take care of freedom, the truth will take care of itself” is not made. As a social justice warrior, his claim that we (philosophers) “have a moral duty toward our fellow citizens” likewise needs more support. From a conversational philosophy perspective, his statement, “the past can only be surpassed if we acknowledge that human beings do not have a nature to be understood but a history to be reinterpreted” is thought-provoking.
From his essay, Pragmatism, and Romanticism, Rorty claims that, “reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.” Moral and intellectual progress will follow the creation of new ideas and technology. Consider the impact the telecommunication explosion has had on our social order. Along with the many positive outcomes are perhaps as many negative ones. Our conversations now take place over the internet, but we sacrifice face-to-face interactions. Technology can suppress our free speech with an algorithm.
Rorty’s assertion that, “cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human, and further removed from the beasts than those with poorer ones," is defensible. However, complex societies create more stress on individuals than simpler ones. There is no “free lunch.”
Having learned of his cancer, Rorty laments that he did not spend more time with poetry. He makes a compassionate case for rhyme, rhythm, and imagery combining to produce what for him only verse can do, create an impact that brings some comfort.
There is no better way to discuss the Conversational Nature of Reality than to have a virtual conversation with the author, David Whyte. This format allowed Krista Tippet to ask David to explain the meaning of some of his more profound concepts. The man, quite open to external stimuli, learned much from his two years studying nature on the Galapagos. He believes that our identities are shaped in part by the amount of attention we pay to things other than ourselves. As we “deepen intentionality and attention [we] broaden and deepen [our] own sense of presence.” Also profound is the passage “alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity” from his poem, Everything is Waiting for You. To truly understand another person and grow accordingly, we must listen carefully and not judge.
Ms. Tippett proffered that David carries a sense of sadness with him, and he is more than just aware of his mortality. Perhaps an occupational hazard? I was impressed with his notion that there is a “quality of youthfulness in every decade of life. A sense of imminent surprise and revelation, except more magnified.” Sensing our ultimate demise, we become concerned with what we will pass down and the “shape of our absence.”
My favorite line is from the poem What to Remember When Walking where he writes: “to be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.”
"He believes that our identities are shaped in part by the amount of attention we pay to things other than ourselves"... Indeed, perhaps in largest part. Whyte and Rorty, in their different styles, both attest the value of expanding one's sense of self by opening up to the world and others, and other "vocabularies" and "languages" etc.
DeleteI find it interesting, maybe poignant, that Rorty's regret at not having been more attuned to poetry in life is in part also a regret at not having forged deeper friendships. Perhaps his particular style of philosophical conversation was, "ironically," a barrier to the human "solidarity" he sought.
That is a great point professor.
DeleteLarry, really enjoyed this essay and some great thoughts, including about concerns about how technology is changing our social interactions. I know you and I were often point-counterpoint this semester, but it's been a nice discourse in expanding all our viewpoints.
Delete“...reason can only follow the paths that the imagination has first broken...no imagination, no new words.” Richard Rorty
ReplyDeleteThis make me think of science fiction. In one generation the content is outside the realm of believability, and in another it is reality. Sometimes the human brain can detect patterns of science, technology, or just ideas, and project them so far forward they outpace the known facts of the day. (Excellent real life example is Leonardo DaVinci’s flying machine) This type of imagination ‘breaks the path’ and allows vision to become reality. It’s terribly poetic and I love that this was said by a philosopher.
Early Western education included the arts because they were recognized as essential for a well-rounded society. Through the necessary events of the Scientific Revolution, however, Western education largely became focused on what can be proven. Again, necessary for all kinds of amazing discoveries, but I think we over corrected our stance. We’ve become so hung up on that which can be seen or measured, we’ve lost respect for the wisdom of that which is intangible. The importance of poetry, music, and other arts has been downplayed so that these once essential components of civilization are now mere hobbies and pastimes. If it is true that “reason can only follow the paths (of) imagination”, we’re missing out on both imagination and the reasoning that would logically follow it. Obviously imagination can take place within any field of study, but it stands to reason that if we don’t actively encourage non-linear thinking and out of the box ideas, we’ll miss out on more than playtime; we’ll miss out on all kinds of reasoning and invention that would elevate us.
“I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved” David Whyte
This is almost so philosophical I can’t unpack it! Still, it really resonated with me. It’s interesting that he says its things you didn't want to know about the world, rather than the other way round. Is he implying that the things you don't want to know are more revealing than what you do want to know? The idea of overhearing yourself say something is a bit meditative, pulling back from your primary function to an observer of your own self is rather provoking.
It never occurred to me before these readings that poets and philosophers have so much in common, or perhaps are sometimes the same person. I love and hate the two subjects of poetry and philosophy for the same reasons. They are obscure and also razor sharp, which can be delightful or devastating. I find myself alternately rolling my eyes and then underlining what Whyte says and I can’t figure out if I really like him or find him too lofty. I enjoyed hearing him in person and not just on the page, it cast a more playful air over the written words I’d already read. I found his TED talk to be accessible and enjoyable, something I might not have predicted based on the transcript alone.
It makes me wonder if other philosophers are perhaps more accessible than they’re given credit for. The written word is powerful and enduring but, we must acknowledge, not without limitations.
"The idea of overhearing yourself say something is a bit meditative"... What's that old line?--'I don't really know what I think 'til I see what I say.' J.K. Rowling said "Sometimes I know what I believe because of what I’ve written." Conversation (which writing is of course a species of) is thus a catalyst of self-discovery.
DeleteI agree, hearing Whyte's literal voice adds a lot to the printed text. Same for Rorty, in a different way.
Also, as to philosophers' accessibility...
DeleteAnalytic philosophers pride themselves on the clarity of their expression, but paradoxically tend to converse only among themselves. Rorty broke with the analytic tradition in calling for a more conversational approach that crosses traditional lines between analysts and "continentals" (and pragmatists). His heroes are Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Of those three, only Dewey is generally thought to be straightforwardly "accessible" to non-specialists (Dewey prided himself in being a "Public Philosopher"). In bringing the three of them together in his own thought and writing, Rorty was attempting to simulate a conversation that would transcend academia and shed light on our larger human history.
Your comment "Early Western education included the arts because they were recognized as essential for a well-rounded society." is so true. I do believe the world may well be ready to come back to that statement. Companies are understanding you need a liberal arts background to be well rounded and a flexible thinker.
DeleteTiffany "Beatrice," some great observations you pulled out of all this! I too struggle with poetry and now have a bit with my first real study of philosophy, and likewise never considered how much they might be so alike. The part you said about imagination is similarly thought-provoking. BTW, it's amazing to me as someone who grew up watching "The Jetsons" futuristic cartoon show that how many things have come true, especially the video telephone. Just waiting for my house to cook my food -- or flying cars -- but sometimes we're not that far off. Although I couldn't have conceived of a photo going around the world in seconds or everyone having a computer or smart phone when I was a child, I also am amazed at what my parents (born in the 1920s) had witnessed when they died in 2007 (mom at 80) and 2018 (dad at 94 1/2) -- proliferation of cars, air travel, television, space travel and moon landings, and they didn't even have electricity or running water as kids, much less computers! Now we basically have artificial intelligence.
DeleteLoneliness, walk alone, or with a company?
ReplyDeleteNowadays, there are many definitions of loneliness, but most of them have common elements, for example, insufficient social skills that lead to a feeling of being inferior, situational factors caused by the loss of someone, something; unrealistic expectations of oneself and others that cause difficulties in adaptation; dysfunctional attachment styles, resulting in low self-esteem and mistrust; specific ways of thinking about the world and struggles in solving problems. There is one more, a more subjective dimension that indicates a feeling of being overwhelmed, and an unbearable feeling of separation.
The subjective experience of solitude is an essential aspect of it as it depends on each individual's personal history. It is impossible to measure a person's suffering, nor to assess what the situation will be so arduous that the suffering person will plunge into loneliness.
Some researchers prove that isolation is contrary to human nature, which in a real-life is a significant fact. We know how to build relationships because the developmental possibility of cooperation increased our chances of survival in the past. If so, loneliness can have critical consequences in the life of the person experiencing this condition.
Solitude, influencing the emotional and cognitive aspects of our experience, can create a kind of "vicious circle" of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. When a person misinterprets invitations from the environment to join activities, they will become increasingly distrustful of other people's intentions. It is difficult to gain insight into this type of pattern, to be aware of its effects, and to work on change. On the other hand, the conviction of the "bad intentions" of the environment, pushing others away from yourself, living in harm, in turn, leads to further alienation, pessimism, and increasing distrust and isolation. Which can close the "vicious circle," deepen the pattern and eventually even lead to premature death. The state of loneliness requires facing the truth about ourselves, the truth from which we run away. That is why we use many remedies to help us escape from rejection. Such measures can be addictions, stimulants, work, additionally undertaken duties, evident actions, the function of which is the feeling of being full of time, causing fatigue so that there is no place to stop, look at yourself, and your problems. They can be turbulent relationships, crossing one's boundaries, gossip, sensation, but in the long run, it also destroys the bond, deepens the feeling of being lost, emptied, and lonely. The very need for social contacts can be so strong that people experiencing isolation will strive to create substitutes for safe relationships with animals or characters in movies or series.
The modern world, as sociologists pay attention to, is conducive to the individualization of life and increasing social isolation. This state of affairs can make you feel more lonely. Therefore, today man has the opportunity to confront his solitude - with himself. Escape from loneliness is associated with anxiety and the specific choices we make. But it is the detachment that can become the space that allows us to see ourselves as we are. Acceptance of what is, a real look at your features, goals, can be a source of inner strength. Strengths, thanks to which you can overcome fear, resistance, make a change, or open up to a new promising relationship. Also, the vigor to take responsibility for your loneliness and accept that it is in your hands to create a healthy and positive relationship with others.
In response to the above question of whether I like to walk alone or in a group, I could bring up one famous quote. Throughout my entire life, my parents have guided me with one well-known proverb by Ratan Tata, and it goes like this: "if you want to walk fast walk alone, if you want to walk far walk together." So I walk with company, so that I believe my life opportunities are endless.
Oskar Michalek
Delete"if you want to walk fast walk alone, if you want to walk far walk together"... I think Al Gore cited that proverb in "An Inconvenient Truth," to make the point that we CAN effectively address climate change if we "walk together"...
DeleteOMGosh, Oskar! I love your parents!!!! What a great thing to tell a child, over and over!!! And thus...you will go far!!!
DeleteThank you for that quote on "walk far walk together," I need to read that over and over.
DeleteExcellent essay, Oskar, about the causes and impacts of loneliness. And gonna take this proverb with me for a while - thanks for sharing. Very profound.
DeleteSocialism
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of Richard Rorty the philosopher. When reading the poem and the article about his life, it made me think, do I really enjoy philosophy? Not really but I get that we have to be thinkers and wonder what life is all about. I just don’t have the time in the day to ponder on the meaning of life and what goes on the other side of the world. I guess that is what is wrong with the world today. Everyone is go,go,go and does not stop to think about others. Being from the north it is a common thing for me to be in my own world and just be focused on what is ahead of me and if I miss something unfortunately I miss it. I know that I need to stop and “smell the roses” but I can’t and that is something I need to work on. If I did this I couldn’t help my wife out and get our afternoon jobs done for our kids. Rorty was talking about his parents growing up in New York and being part of the socialist party and it threw me off. “I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists. I also knew that Stalin had ordered not only Trotsky’s assassination but also Kirov’s, Ehrlich’s, Alter’s and Carlo Tresca’s. (Tresca, gunned down on the streets of New York, had been a family friend). I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome”. That we would think of Rorty as a philosopher and how this deal with American democracy is a complete farce. The socialist party is in no way shape or form a democracy. In socialism the wealth is supposed to be shared by all which turns out not to be true. The government takes all and distributions what it deems necessary for you to survive which is not a lot at all. The government funds everything from the wealth of the upper class as well. Dealing with the Affordable Care Act, the Republican party believes that this is a socilistic ideal. I say no, we as the USA are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have government funded health care. Because we are a free market society. Democracy at its best they would say.
Whereas in democracy you're supposed to create your own wealth and free enterprise. This is not true either in an American democracy either. If you are poor and grow up in a neighborhood that has poor schools, you're less likely to go to college or even graduate from high school versus someone who grows up in a wealthy affluent neighborhood. So to be a free thinker I don’t see it from Rorty ideas. Democracy is what you make of it just like socialism. I guess that was what he was getting at when dealing with his idea of a socialiast society. Philosophy is keeping an open mind about the world. As a socialist you can’t do that, your ideals are taken from the rich and given to the poor. Robin Hood was a socialist!
We mustn't conflate socialism with communism, at least not in the specific forms of authoritarian communism we know from 20th century history.
DeleteRorty's "socialism" is Norway's. Norway and the other Scandinavian social democracies consistently top the "Happiest Nation" rankings. Those societies are redistributive and egalitarian, but they are not corrupt. Universal health care and education are paid for by high tax rates, which the people do not generally consider to be confiscatory but rather simply the cost of creating a humane and generous society. It's a different model than ours, for sure, and one that I notice my young students increasingly drawn to.
"Philosophy is keeping an open mind about the world. As a socialist you can’t do that"... I have to disagree. Some of my best friends are open-minded socialists.
I think the example of schools illustrates how democratic socialism can actually benefit, as well as health care. I grew up in a poor county, but public schools are the reason I was not only able to get decent K-12 education, but also get a college education and have a better career than 3 of my 4 brothers. Unfortunately, a lot of society's ills outside of education -- especially related to poverty -- is one reason for those problems. Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) affect development of the brain, and poverty causes a lot of these. Some could also argue that allowing the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer, and the middle class to shrink is damaging to democracy. We use democratic socialism to pay for roads, military, police and fire, education, etc., so health care is another thing that could help with the common good -- whether it's medicare for all, or just a public option for all who don't have private insurance or choose it. My British friend for instance has described how elder care was covered for her father who suffered from Alzheimer's.
DeleteI should have added, but the cost of assisted living for my in-laws has been exorbitant, and my fahter-in-law will likely run out of money to pay for it, even after liquidating their assets.
DeleteDo you think the Socratic/dialectical method is a better than lecturing, to encourage learning and dialogue? Do you agree that "for philosophical communication, conversation [is] king"?
ReplyDeleteI completely subscribe to the dialectical method and do believe that conversation is king. It does more than encourage active listening, it requires it. It is tough to zone out AND be engaged in the discussion. As a child, I got lectured more than once, and all I could think was how ready I was for it to be over. And my mom could see that look on my face, which didn't help. :)
But now as a parent, I have seen that same look on the face of my child, but have figured out that if I approach it as a discussion, it doesn't allow him to shut down, and just pray for it to be over. The conversation allows him to understand why we are having it to begin with, rather than just tuning it all out, and thinking about everything in the world he would rather be doing. Neither of us wants to be on either end of a lecture, but allowing for that conversation helps keep him engaged and helps him understand. And at the same time, as the parent, it helps me understand his mindset when he did whatever it was that he did, or didn't do. That is important because it shows that I am actively listening to him as well, and we can shift the conversation to how better to handle the situation next time.
For me, having been on both sides of lectures and conversations, the conversation is much more effective way to communicate those things.
It is the same with my group of friends. We have all been around those people that seem to dominate conversations and interactions, and no one else can get in a word edgewise. Eventually, that isn't fun for anyone, and those interactions become fewer and fewer.
Lastly, as a manager at work, I feel that it is important to lead the meetings with my team, but to encourage their questions and those interactions. For me, it is a much more successful way to lead. I can tell them how things should be done, but if I am not open to their questions, the only way I will find out if I haven't explained something well is by them not doing it the way I imagined. And I hope that opening those lines of communication and conversation, they will come to me when they have an idea for how we can improve processes. Their engagement helps us all succeed, and it is incumbent upon me to make sure to foster their interests.
We also need to remember that communism is an economic system, not a political one, and in it's truest form, it is the only that works with a true democracy!
ReplyDeleteThat is true communism is a Economic from not a political system when it was first made. But tell North Korea that they run there country with an iron first political and economically. The leaders of country like the USSR, China, Cuba, and North Korea took the idea and made it something else. It was supposed economic system and turned it into a dictatorship.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that Marx wrote his PhD thesis on the Epicurean philosophy? The Epicureans believed in communal living on the small scale, amongst a small circle of friends -- their commune was called The Garden. If something like THAT was Marx's original template, then the monolithic Soviet state (et al) is indeed a perversion of the original vision. The state was supposed, ultmately, to "wither away"...
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeletePhilosophical Essay 2
ReplyDeleteIf I were ever to call myself a philosopher, I think Richard Rorty’s brand would be right up my ally because of my own tendency to look for the holes in the world around me. I don’t know if skepticism could be related to the idea that there is no singular truth about the world, but it seems to fit into the same realm. Context, content, or character can lead to questioning the validity of something, or someone, when you get the feeling there’s more than meets the eye. His notion about the course of inquiry not being subjected to one set of rules, but rather being conversationally bound and open to interpretation of truth and facts seems inclusive and less confined. I feel that this line of thought opens up a lot more possibilities for nonsense, in the wrong hands, and original ideas based on seeing things in ways we’re not instructed to see them, the latter being what I believe to be his point. History is written by the winners, authors of textbooks, stories from our grandparents, and this is all to say we’ve each grown up around a certain narrative of reality that’s uniquely ours. While it’s crazy to question the validity of information we know to be true, and enter a rabbit hole of unfounded conspiracy theories, there’s great knowledge in the less circulated details of where we came from and how we developed to think and interact the way we do with the world. My favorite line of his to better summarize this rant was, “Humans do not have a nature to be understood, rather a history to be reinterpreted.” Figuring out different ways of viewing our evolution, up to this point, through further questioning of our relationship with politics, religion, sex, education, and culture is something I can get behind.
I’ve always appreciated how poetry can layer messaging and convey emotions with style and grace, providing powerful commentary and imagery on life’s ups, downs, and unknowns. Whether it’s straight forward in delivery, or requires deep thought and reflection, poetry has the power to twist larger narratives into bite-sized portions, illuminate new perspectives, and strike at the roots of our human emotions. While studying in Chicago I had the chance to attend a poetry reading with Amiri Baraka. He spoke of politics, censorship, race, power, and complacency’s role in impeding personal growth and progress. We can’t define our democracy without its faults, we can’t move beyond our own limitations, and we can’t ever gain knowledge when we’re too weak to question. The poem he read, “Somebody Blew Up America”, was accompanied by a jazz saxophonist, and his style elevated the divisive prose to what felt like a soothing sting. One verse form that reading still sticks with me when I think about poetry and its power to encapsulate an emotion, “Who you know ever seen god, but everybody’s seen the devil.” I thought this poem was an appropriate callback to the notion of seeing history through a different lens, in this case 9/11 and I’m not suggesting a conspiracy or that was the poems intention; rather, I’m proposing his poem spoke to the history of our country and how we tend to frame disasters, demons, saviors, and saints in a light which does not necessarily serve the best interests of all its citizens.
On the lighter side, I found David Whyte’s poetry on the priority we assign to our existence to be quite grounding. He’s circling around the concept of reality and how we limit our own through setting goals, plans, and passing by unopened doors. Presence and reflection are keys to locked doors of houses we’ve built to define a reality we’re most comfortable with. A nostalgia for love, freedom from vulnerability, and completely lacking any footing in the now is, as David describes, where most of us are vulnerable to missing the the other half of our lives while we dream.
Derek, this was all so deep that I've got to reflect on this even further. :) Some very heavy points here.
DeleteOMGOSH! You totally got me! That line about devil...damn! Wow!
DeleteThis series of articles, TED talks, and poetry that brings to light some of my greatest frustrations within the liberal arts; something that was brought up in the article “Richard Rorty: Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy.” It is this idea that there is no end goal to poetry and philosophy. It was these sentences that both fascinated me and frustrated me to no end:
ReplyDelete“he spent most of his life ‘looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.’ The difference between philosophers who know the answer to this question and the ones who do not is that, for the latter, ‘intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past.’”
This idea of philosophy not having an end goal drives me absolutely bonkers. I know that there is no tangible way that there can be an end of philosophy, but that is a fact that is frustrating to no end. Why sit and ponder existence when there is real stuff to do?
As I’m sitting here writing this, I love the irony of my own thought processes as I am digesting all of these things. For someone who does not enjoy science and mathematics, I am drawn to identifying, working on, and solving problems. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m an Enneagram 2 (The Helper). I want to be able to fix people and things in meaningful ways that make the world a better place, so I like the “end goal” of philosophy but not philosophy in practice. Figuring out the human psyche and looking at the different ways that people think are wonderful and valuable, but not at the expense of progress. The joke in all of this is that I know it is not possible to reach the peak of humanity. There is always something more to do, more to think about, more problems to fix, more…more…more.
As far as poetry goes, I can never fully grasp it. It has nothing to do with the symbolism or imagery or double meanings or whatever else is “hidden” within a poem. If you were to give me a piece of film, I could give you a hundred different takes of what various things mean. I was watching “The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix recently (I highly recommend it though it is definitely within the horror genre), and I was able to pick on so much from 2 minutes of film and was able to figure out the DNA of it within seconds. But throw a bunch of words at me and I get so lost. I know that this has to do with the fact that I’m a visual learner, but I believe that deep down all we have are words. For thousands of years, stories were conveyed with words. Sure, we had pictures and visual representations of those stories, but they were nowhere near as frequent or meaningful as the words. If we were to go blind, deaf, and mute, we would still be able to communicate through words. Maybe not the written or the spoken word, but through words nonetheless.
It is possible that my “fear” of poetry comes from the fact that I am afraid of what words I would use to describe my life and how others would describe me. As much as I want people to feel vulnerable and open with me, I don’t want to be that in front of others because I don’t want to seem weak. It’s great and admirable when others do it, but it’s wrong when I do it. I’m afraid that everything that I’ve done up until this moment hasn’t mattered. So maybe because of that I should find greater solace in philosophy and poetry, as at the end of the day all that will be left are words.
DeleteMaybe I’m frustrated because it is beyond me, or maybe I’m frustrated because I know the truth. That maybe all we are and all we have are our words, and our words display who we are and how we think. David Whyte talked about those things that link us past, present, and future. It is our own El Camino de Santiago. It is our life’s journey. Our journey shapes our philosophy, and it shapes the words we use along the way that become our poetry. When it comes down to it, all we have is our philosophy and our poetry. I want things to be buttoned up nice and neat and tied with a bow. We can’t “fix” the future, but we can work to improve it. I just hope that I’m up to the task.
You matter and make change just by being.....present.
ReplyDeleteDamn right, I'm also better with visuals and prefer to express myself through them.... But your words about not having the right words.... well that's just ironic in and of itself because ya told a pretty darn good story.
ReplyDeleteBrent is definitely a great storyteller! Philosophy is a big giant puzzle piece but sometimes I want everything to fit together and all make sense too. Wanting to have utopia is lofty, but I'm also a realist, which then makes me a skeptic.
DeleteI had never heard of Richard Rorty before now. I thoroughly enjoy the straightforward way he challenges truth. Specifically, this quote from the Los Angeles Review of Books is what resonated with me: “truth is not something objectively present but only ‘what your contemporaries let you get away with.’ In line with other pragmatists and hermeneutic philosophers Rorty believed ‘there is no wholesale, epistemological way to direct, or criticize, or underwrite, the course of inquiry,’ but only ‘conversational ones’ bound to our own contingent historicity.” I took a course called Lying and Deception a few years back, and one major issues with ‘truth’ was that everyone perceives differently, so what I take to be the truth quite realistically will not be what another takes or accepts to be true. Much like the saying, “there are three sides to every story,” each person may recount a story and honestly believe that it is the entire truth because that is how they processed and perceived it. Even more, how we process and receive information is largely based off of our past experiences and acquired knowledge (remember, ‘contingencies determine us). Whether we like it or not (or rather, whether we admit it or not), we are limited in understanding. I’m not sure about you, but I have truly believed I knew something to be true only to be confronted with information that forced me to reevaluate my conclusion. But that’s the beauty of life! There are so many ideas that can be considered and that have unfathomable depths, if we are willing to put in the effort. As far as how this idea extends to my tolerance of diversity, I would say that (since learning about everyone’s perceived ‘truths’) I have come to have a much better tolerance for my students’ parents. I have many students who come from families who often fall into addiction, and the side I only saw (or chose to see) was how it affected my kids. I get very protective over them, and it absolutely breaks my heart to see them struggle with self-worth, social skills, and attachment issues. However, I recently had a change of heart with this. It turns out, I don’t think there is one person in this world that we wouldn’t love or hurt for if we knew the details of their life. They say there’s a reason for everything, even actions that we don’t understand (sometimes even the person choosing those actions don’t understand). If we only knew the hurt and struggles people have endured, I think we would be much more inclined to empathize and show love to others. Unfortunately, I myself have found that often, I don’t stop and consider what someone might be going through unless they speak up, but friends, this should not be this way. I have notice we are a culture that demands reasons. I’ve heard people say time and time again, ‘Well, if they would’ve told me that, I would’ve __________.” We can fill in the blank with whatever excuse, but it’s just that- an excuse. We shouldn’t have to see someone bleeding out in order to show them kindness and grace. Circling back to why Rorty spent his life studying and examining philosophy and what it is good for, I recall a poem called The Bridge Builder that my high school English teacher read to us as one of her Monday Stories. I’ve linked it below. I think it expresses similar reasoning as to why most people spend time investing into different works- for those who are to come after them, continuing the conversation, and paving the way for advancements to come.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52702/the-bridge-builder
Great poem! ... I think your post is going to inspire my essay somewhat.
DeleteCasey Lane
ReplyDeletePeople say that I MUST be liberal because I love getting every side of the story and situation prior to making a stance. I have always been this way. If I heard a rumor that I wanted to know more about then I would and will go to the person that it is about and let them know that this is being said. I never said who I heard it from but that way they at least knew that it was being said. In an argument I ask as many questions as can think of to as everyone in the situation and then establish my stance. I feel like instead of becoming offended quickly there should be more listening and tolerance.
I feel like the world is so loud it causes us to be distracted with what is most important and tend to distract ourselves with superficial things. If we could take time away from mainstream life in order to restart our minds- I believe it would be a completely different culture.
I am not down for confrontation. However- if people tip-toe around each other. But change starts with conversation and contraversity.
Your comment about being "distracted with what is most important"...just remember that what is important to you, might not be to someone else! My Mom, (one of the world's best philosophers!!!) always told me to remember that "every time you claim a right for yourself, you take one away from someone else."!!!
DeleteI am a rapid thinker.
ReplyDeleteMost of the time I can think and at rather quickly. There have been times were I have had a very tough decision and needed time to mull it over. People around me did not understand why it took me sometime to contemplate my decision.
As someone trained on the basis of facts, as both a journalist and a historian, Rorty’s suggestion that truth is what is allowed to be accepted is both interesting and concerning all at the same time. Obviously, interpretation is part of relaying facts by any communicator in any field or individual situation; however, propaganda that not only twists the truth but outright lies, deceives, and intentionally misinforms/disinforms is something that is increasingly threatening our coexistence as well as our democracy in America.
ReplyDeleteWhile Rorty may be applying this to the greater inquiries of our lives, the world, and ideas about theology, the current environment of “alternative facts” and the seeking of confirmed-bias channels on mass media, social media, and internet sites is very troubling. And that’s not to mention instigators who are just trying to foment chaos and conflict for economic, political, or malevolent purposes.
This also ties in with the good vs. evil discussed in these readings, whether this is presented in a humanist point of view or a theological one. Our contemporary society here in the U.S. seems to have gone down a rabbithole recently where everything is black/white and there are no gray areas for what’s right, wrong, truthful, incorrect, outright lies vs. partial truths, etc.
The essay above by Lucy discusses this in part. Many of us seemingly want to blame someone for every situation. But, while personal responsibility is indeed important, people in dire straits often don’t have the tools to get where they can get out of a bad place, a spiral, a hole, an intergenerational cycle.
Likewise, some of what Rorty discussed was aligning with what is best for the larger community, “a concern for society and the freedom of all.” Whether that is our family, local community, nation, or worldwide, it’s often a lot easier to judge others than to look at their perspectives and needs and try to make it better with our actions, policies, even discourse. Sometimes we do this to improve things for all or the majority, but what about those people falling through the cracks? What is their worth?
Additionally, this thought of who you would be if you were born in a different place or time is also something I think about often – and this philosophy block has me thinking about this more. My parents were born in the depression to poor families, and my father got some high school equivalency while serving in WWII and worked his way up into factory management (the ltter likely wouldn’t be possible today). Could I have survived the physical labor of their generation or the ones before? What if I were a black male raised by a single mom today? What would my views and world be like if I were born in the Middle East as a Muslim? As a Jew? Or in Africa in intense poverty, or in a society where women had no rights?
While I have pride as an American, I also realize we continue to try to “form a more perfect union” here and we don’t yet have it all right. Even for our own, much less to always stand holier than thou to the rest of the world. I often feel we think (wrongly) we are chosen people.
Ultimately, as William James says, having a moral compass works better when we have a divine thinker and believe in God. But I also say that humanity should have a moral compass about living in community period. Sometimes our ability as the only living beings on earth to think and express is also our downfall. Lots of meandering thoughts here, and philosophy has been more challenging than I expected. Now, let me get back to internally pondering David Whyte’s thoughts about our youthfulness, different decades of life, and mortality as the calendar will soon turn to my 59th birthday and I’m practically in my “60s”! Geez, I was just 18!!!!
Carol, you are so right on so many points! I so wish there were more true conversations, instead of screaming matches today! So much more could be accomplished!!! And keep pondering your "youthfulness"! I'll be turning 60 a few weeks after you hit 59!
Delete“...what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.”
ReplyDeleteWilliam James’ question got me to thinking “deep” thoughts; sometimes too deep! Then I started wondering if thinking that way is a good thing. But it is definitely not a bad thing...is it?! But we can’t stop thinking. That is impossible to do...isn’t it?! Not for those who stop learning. Thinking is about knowledge. It’s about taking in new information, accessing it, processing it, and to either believe it or not. Is it a “live or dead hypothesis”? It is all about THE CONVERSATION!!!! Whether it is one we have in our mind with ourselves, or with others, it is a necessary part of learning, and truly living.
This last “session” of MALA 6010, I think, truly brought everything together...back to the start. Dr. Oliver’s comments (both written ones on the posts and live on Zoom) did just that! From the political points of Overdoing Democracy and looking for that “common ground”, to the theatrical presentation of dead philosophers on Steve Allen’s show, all have shown what is at the forefront of the world’s “most wanted list” ...true communication. As Dr. Oliver said...both “reality and philosophy require conversation.”
So what is our “reality”? What are our “contingencies”? If you have faced death, do you feel others take too much for granted? Does it take being near death to enjoy poetry? One of the best poets, in my opinion, is one that I am certain you have all heard of, and read a lot of, perhaps without noticing. The poet I am referring to is Anonymous! He has said some of the most profound things...ever! “That man is the richest, whose pleasures are the cheapest” is a favorite of mine. And walking is one of those pleasures for me. It is when I think things through and pray. It is a time of noticing some of what I am grateful for, like the leaf's dancing in the wind or the sun making rainbows on that leaf covered in dew!
I am also grateful for the fact that I learned to read! I actually hate reading, though, in general! But, I did enjoy reading some of these somewhat “out there” thoughts of philosophers! I also loved reading others’ thoughts and interpretations of what was said, that then gave me the new thought of “hmmmm...never thought of it that way”! So even in a remote way (lol!!! get it?!?!?), we’ve had many conversations this semester that have enhanced the experience, at least for me!
So back to James’ question I spoke of at the beginning. The philosopher has settled nothing! He has only opened the mind to more questions in an attempt to explain life. Thus, perhaps, he reached his goal!
To be or not to be . . . as always, Mary, you put the period on the exclamation point!
ReplyDeleteDo you think the Socratic/dialectical method is a better than lecturing, to encourage learning and dialogue? Do you agree that "for philosophical communication, conversation [is] king"?
ReplyDeleteI do believe that conversation encourages learning better than lecturing because of the engagement. Participation requires more active listening so one can be ready to chime in with a response. As you mentioned in week 1, having the camera or mic off discourages spontaneity in dialogue. Since you mentioned that, I have been more diligent with turning my camera on for work meetings.
Because of my believe that conversational learning is better than lecturing, it is no small leap to know that I also firmly believe that conversation is king. As I mentioned in class, there is no way to separate ourselves from our past and our upbringing. We are all products of lives to this moment. We have learned from our mistakes and our failures, and those of others. We have to use what we have learned up to this point to inform our decisions.
It is said that "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," and I think that is true. That is what I mean by this conversation being king. If I broke my arm in a hang gliding accident, you can count on the fact that I would probably not go hang gliding again. And while some people will get hurt and do it again anyway, they would be foolish to forget the lesson they learned the hard way.
None of this is to say that there is no original thought. This is to say that those original thoughts are created by our experiences. And those experiences inform not only the decisions we make, but how we make them. Perhaps the hang glider decides not to go again for fear of getting hurt again. Or perhaps he does go again, but wears more equipment, or goes to a different location to ensure softer landing (crashing) areas.
No man is an island, this is true. But that does not only mean that our lives don't intertwine with those around us, but also with those lessons we learned in the past, and the voices from which we learned them.
Thank you all for your comments, both here and in our Zoom sessions. I enjoyed meeting you all, and look forward to seeing some of you in "Democracy in America" on Tuesday nights. I've set up a dedicated blogsite for that course, let me know if you'd like a sneak-peek.
ReplyDeleteHappy holidays, and Happy 2021!
Well. of course!! Sneak-peeks are always fun!!
DeleteThe Democracy in America site is at demmala.blogspot.com --
DeleteKelly Bond
ReplyDeleteQ: Does the Coronavirus Pandemic make it more difficult for individuals to participate in active listening
A: Jancee Dunn’s piece on becoming a better listener is the article that resonated the most as a wife, mother, employee, and student. Encountering many people throughout the day during a pandemic makes active listening more difficult based on the individual’s placement within social circles. Throughout the pandemic, employment stresses staying 6-8 feet apart for less than 10 minutes, not spending time outside of work with coworkers, and contact tracing. The pandemic has put a damper on authentic active listening, which requires the listener to absorb, understand, and respond with empathy before reciprocating communication. People are now being approached with caution and treated as if they are sick without a diagnosis. The caution raises everyone’s anxiety that is involved in the process of communication. According to Dunn, making it a higher possibility that statements will be rushed past without validating what has been said invites invalidation and anger. The invalidation can cause problems because humans crave connections with others, and the pandemic is placing a wedge between connections between two communicating individuals. The individuals with higher risk have built a foundation with communication and need to upkeep that foundation.
In firsthand experiences working with autistic and developmentally delayed children, A personal goal is to work harder due to the imposed ‘distancing’ to mitigate any situation where the child would become emotionally heightened due to situational, environmental, or any other discomfort. Learning to adapt and interpret more on body language to make sure that coworkers were approachable and having a good day can sometimes be misleading. At home, it is easier since immediate family is in ‘my bubble.’ The elementary school family members could vocalize that they had a difficult day or did terrible on a test. We could talk about it, allowing her feelings to be validated and knowing that there is a next time. The same premise exists for the adults in the house; if there is clutter or someone had a difficult day, we will express and validate it. The struggle at home lies within the balance of school, karate, and making sure that everything is complete. The struggle can involve technology, school, keeping up with long-distance family members, and technology-based scheduling. There must be a balance. It is not easy to do this as adult learners (my husband and I are getting both our graduate degrees), but we try to be intentional and unplug while being present in the moment with a game night or a movie night.
We all have the best of intentions when it comes to communication. However, in the end, the pandemic is making it more challenging to communicate with our peers actively. To combat this problem, we should be more intentional with our listening and communication. It is a personal problem as well. Effective communication takes work, and in times of an unprecedented pandemic, people will have to work a little bit harder to keep those connections alive and well. The work will be beneficial, and the connections will be stronger when this pandemic is over.
Thanks for going first this semester, Kelly. I agree, physical distancing adds a layer of distraction to attentive listening. But it can also serve as a spur to attend more purposively. It's a reminder that we've always had to burst our own "bubbles," to really listen and engage with other minds.
DeleteKelly,
DeleteI really enjoyed the question that you decided to analyze! Just like you, I also found the article by Jancee Dunn to also be interestig, and it spoke the most to me as well. Through my personal observations, I found it rather difficult to listen especially since the start of the pandemic. I agree that issues have arisen to the forefront about active listening during the pandemic. Yet, I do believe this is the perfect time to work on those listening skills. One of the connections that I made with this second block is related to our first block with Professor Hejny. One of the articles she assigned us deals with silence. Linked with listening is the act of silence. Not at all times does something have to be said.
Great post :)
I think that listening with intention is important. During the pandemic I have honed my skills of watching how people move more related to what they say or do not say with their words. The action of looking around can in a way say, "look at me" as if the action of seeing if anyone is looking is saying, "Iam going to make a statement with my actions." I may have not noticed this type of action if not for the requirement of social distancing. I also find myself putting my hand cupped to my ear more often now with the masks making it more of a requirement to listen with intention just to decipher what comes through the mask. Thank you for posting.
DeleteDo you think the Socratic/dialectical method is a better than lecturing, to encourage learning and dialogue? Do you agree that "for philosophical communication, conversation [is] king"?
ReplyDeleteThere is the idea in culture that great thinkers are loners that are able to create and understand great thoughts and ideas all on their own. But as Warburton’s article illustrates, even great thinkers need the help of others to refine and push forward their thoughts. Machiavelli, Descartes, Wittgenstein and others attempted to do their philosophical work alone, but ultimately ended up reaching out to others. Philosophical communication is an intimidating idea for people like me who do not think of themselves as great thinkers, and maybe that’s because I have bought into the idea that it is done on one’s own. But if philosophical communication is indeed created out of dialogue, then it is open to anyone to be a part of the conversation.
I tend to think that all of learning is better served by dialogue rather than lecture, so it makes sense that philosophy is not exempt. Even though it may seem more intellectual to lecture and tell people what and how to think, it does not promote learning. By entering into dialogue, more learning can occur as ideas are discussed and seen from varying points of view. The teacher is no longer the only person with the all the answers, and the students have an opportunity to open new thoughts and ideas to the class. As a student like me that has a hard time understanding philosophical communication, hearing not only the professor’s insights, but also other classmates provide more opportunities to understand the concepts shared. Two people can talk about the same concept, but one may say it in a way that brings better understanding. If we just rely on one voice to bring full understanding, it will most likely miss the mark.
Dialogue, as we read in this week’s readings, requires both talking and listening. To engage in philosophical communication, we need to listen to other’s ideas for understanding not just for an opportunity to respond or argue. When we really listen, it encourages people to share. If people feel like their ideas or thoughts are not going to be dismissed or laughed at, they will be more willing to share. When there is disagreement in relationships or in the classroom, dialogue is the only way to truly work through it. When we dismiss someone’s idea or opinion as “wrong” without hearing why they think they way they do, we can miss out on a learning experience. We will never agree with another person one hundred percent of the time, but we can learn to listen to their way of thinking about and understanding an idea. And we hope that someone will respect us in the same way and allow us to explain our thought process when we say something they disagree with. It is a common courtesy that is getting harder to find in our society, when it seems that people only want to argue why they are right and don’t have interest in hearing another perspective. True conversation in philosophy and all areas of life is invaluable for learning and for relationship with others.
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DeleteYou're right, the stereotypical notion in our culture of the philosophical guru or sage, sometimes depicted atop a summit or on a pedestal (like The Thinker), is highly misleading. The best philosophy is a product of dialogue, usually involving other thinkers but minimally different aspects of one's own persona and reflecting different streams of personal experience. The best philosophy is, in other words, Co-Philosophy. I'll talk about that Thursday.
DeleteI have completed much of my coursework alone or through online content so lectures and YouTube channels are great at conveying information but if I want to find meaning I have to look deeper or find a person to ask. I had a difficult time with doing balanced equations in chemistry until I was able to go through the concept with a mentor. There really is no other way to approach this kind of problem though because there is usually only one right answer. In that way it is a bit like going to a guru. Thank you for the insight you shared.
DeleteI have to say that I’ve never had homework move me to tears except in the agony or misery of the assignment itself, but not in the beauty or poignancy of the actual words until now. If I had sat down to write this before hearing especially David Whyte’s words, I might have been tempted to try to say things I thought painted myself as an astute commentator. Trying to look clever, thoughtful or raising intriguing questions and posting interesting thoughts. That certainly requires much less vulnerability which Whyte talks about in the podcast interview:
ReplyDelete“One of the vulnerabilities of being visible is that when you’re visible, you can be seen; and when you can be seen, you can be touched; and when you can be touched, you can be hurt.”
As someone who has gone through their life trying to figure out how to avoid being hurt and found some of the most profound heartbreaks along the way, this really resonated with me as well as the concept of showing up. “All of us have these elaborate ways of looking as if we’re showing up and not showing up,” Whyte says.
So, I decided to “show up” in my reflection as best as I could, knowing that the path might change mid writing and the vulnerability to a class full of people I hardly know and a professor I’ve never even met before would be uncomfortable. In the end, I found the experience of these assignments too powerful not to be fully present with them.
One thing that I was utterly delighted by was the strong connection I saw in both Rory and Whyte’s work between this “conversational philosophy” and poetry. References to some to some of my favorite Romantic poets and then discovering, and experiencing, Whyte’s work were a delight. Not that I claim to be any good at it but I have found poetry to be a way to work through or explore difficult things in my own life. In my own writing, I often am talking to myself like in a mirror, which Whyte also talks about, and which I think ties back into our readings from last week as well with the Socratic method.
I thought it was so interesting in The Fire of Life that Rorty found solace not in religion or philosophy at the end of his life but in poetry. Not that he felt that they held more truth but because they were more human. He said in his conclusion of that article, “Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human.” I think it was the vulnerability of poetry that made them richer to him. Whyte talked about this concept of language being large enough. When being approached to work in corporate America, and asking why they would want a poet and philosopher, the answer he received was: “The language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we’ve already entered. And in your work, I’ve just heard the language that’s large enough for it.”
I believe one of the chief responsibilities of poets is to broadcast the language large enough to have even the most difficult conversations. I think a recent and beautiful example of this was at the 2021 inauguration of President Biden when Amanda Gorman, the Youth Poet Laureate, recited her poem. It was challenging, inspiring and grand. Whether you agreed with the election and the results or not, she did an amazing job of opening the conversation on America’s past, present and future.
Whyte said about poetry, “I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved.”
David Whyte really is quite good with words, isn't he? And that's the point of noting a philosophy-poetry axis or continuum: philosophers, in the western tradition at least, are committed to using discursive language to try and express fundamental truths and insights into reality, morality, and the human prospect. But honest philosophers must also acknowledge the limits of language as a tool for the straightforward conveyance of such insight, and must look to the poet to point at what can't quite be said but can nonetheless be evoked and awakened by masters of the art. Whyte is one of those. Rorty was not, but he knew the value of poetry as a humanizing discipline. A larger language enlarges us. Amanda Gorman is the latest proof.
DeleteSteve Allen's - Meeting of the Minds
ReplyDeleteI had not heard of Steve Allen’s Meeting of the Minds show, but I am familiar with him as a jazz musician, by an album Allen did with Jack Kerouac, and as a talk show host with the Tonight Show and on his own. I think I first became familiar with Steve Allen through Lenny Bruce and the infamous banned appearance of the late comedian. Steve Allen has always been sort of vaguely “cool” in my mind whenever his name comes up, as a forward thinker and envelope pusher because of the Lenny Bruce connection. The Meeting of the Minds show was fascinating! I have not watched part two yet, but I wanted to post before my thoughts were muddled by the second. In a Lenny Bruce/Steve Allen sort of connection vein, as George Carlin bridging his role into the next generation, I couldn’t help but think of this show being an inspiration for the (much lighter, and don’t kill me for going more pop culture than sci-fi with this on the TV spectrum, Dr. Oliver – but Bill and Ted’s time traveling universe).
I love the premise of an imagined talk show of where you get the history and sense of the characters playing out in a fantasy of “Name dead people you’d like to invite to dinner.” I was familiar with all the historical figures in this episode other than Sun Yat-sen, but I’m curious to learn more, especially as I thought he was the most humble and loved his rational, clinician’s approach to attempting to bring out truth at the table, despite the devilish, egomaniacal Machiavelli dismissing his “Sunday school ideals.” Introducing the characters into the group one by one was a clever way of emphasizing their unique perspective and status in historical context before personalities were lost in discussion with one another. Aristotle enters with the applause of a world champion, carrying himself with humor and enough confidence in himself to be assured, but not quite Machiavellian. Elizabeth Barrett Browning graces the table with whimsy and romanticism. Adorned with a dog, she’s the lone guest to try and connect with their host Steve Allen personally, albeit through the familiar subject of her husband’s work.
After an intercultural discussion on the history of illegal substances, the conversation turns to a true talk show format, with a deep dive into Ms. Browning’s personal struggles from the unique deduction strategies of the other guests. Mr. Yat-sen begins to poke holes with a fact-based, gentle approach, sensitive to Ms. Browning’s personal welfare. Aristotle, the father of conversation at the table, bridging Yat-sen’s scientific method to discerning Ms. Browning’s troubles, is the first to broach an outright diagnosis, unrealized by Ms. Browning, that her father was abusive. Steve Allen opens the conversation through the third wall of TV by claiming he wants his viewers to understand the tragedies of artists, recognizing that “it’s the final verdict of history that people tend to remember.” Bringing the men together, Aristotle puts forth that “people must agree on the terms they are discussing for them to agree or disagree,” as they push Ms. Browning into an upsetting realization that she has suffered Munchausen Syndrome by proxy at the will of her father, and possible Stockholm Syndrome. Leave it to your philosopher friends to reason the truth out! To be continued…
Meeting of Minds was so good! I've often suggested to students that they imagine themselves into conversations with a panel of the philosophers we've studied, the exercise of thinking what you'd say and what you suppose they might respond is a great way of projecting oneself into another's life-world. For me, a dinner party with William James, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, and George Eliot would be a marvelous meeting of minds and personalities, such fun to dream of.
DeleteI'm bummed that I couldn't find episode 4 online!
DeleteIf you ever find it, please let me know.
DeleteNatalia Jiron
ReplyDeleteThe article that I was able to identify with the most was “Become a Better Listener. Your Family Will Thank You” by Jancee Dunn. Much of my interest towards this article has to do with what I studied during my undergrad career: organizational communication. I also had the opportunity to take a class, listening, with Professor McCormick. After reading the article, I started to think about the different ways that listening is correlated or has affected the workplace environment due to the coronavirus.
To provide some background, I work at Chick-fil-a currently. Within my job, the pandemic has affected the way team members interact with guests throughout our drive due to our dining room being closed. Many of our team members take guests orders on iPads. This is where they have to practice active listening. Many factors play a part in where active listening can be difficult for us. This can include face masks wore by guests or the social distancing aspect. Personally, I was accustomed to reading a guests lips in order to translate an order better. With a mask, a team member loses that ability and relies solely on listening. Yet, this can be a positive aspect rather than negative. The article states how the “lockdown may be the perfect time to sharpen your listening skills” (Dunn, 2020).
Personally, actively listening within the workplace has strengthened my listening skills in personal relationships. The article has also given strong points that I have been able to use at work and in personal relationships. One of the main points in the section Reflect Back states how we should “resist the urge to fill any silence” (Dunn, 2020). This made me reflect back to our first block for this class. One of the articles that we read stated how silence is an aspect that is linked towards listening and communicating. Often at times, this quality is overlooked, and many do not think about it. I, myself, did not take much thought to silence until reading about it in our articles. While at work or listening to a friend, silence has provided an intake for details and even being able to sympathize with someone’s feelings. Silence allows us to further practice active listening. Something does not always have to be said all the time.
Overall, it can be difficult to communicate and practice active listening throughout the pandemic. Yet, this can allow people to develop skills that are often overlooked. This article has allowed me to practice active listening within personal relationship and in the workplace. It has also further allowed me to come up with ways to become a better listener. For example, have you ever thought about the position you are in when in a conversation with someone? At work, when taking a guests order, we show a partial profile towards them. This allows us to better listen to them, and we do not repeatedly have to ask the guest to repeat themselves. Although it may be difficult to actively listen during the pandemic, there is opportunity to grow within this area.
We're not comfortable with silence in this culture, are we? I remember a past co-worker, long ago, who always took a beat to compose his thoughts before speaking or responding in conversation. It was really only a second or so longer than the average gap in a "normal" conversation, but it was long enough to feel a bit awkward. And yet, he always had something thoughtful to say. Less than half of most conversations consist of truly thoughtful exchanges, in my experience. So yes, we need to learn to value silence more.
DeleteThese are my thoughts in reflection of the following quote “it’s important not to think that once the imposture of the ego is unmasked you find yourself in a state of inner nothingness, to the point that the destruction of personality renders you incapable of acting or communicating. You don’t become an empty container. It’s quite the opposite…”
ReplyDeleteThis is a case of knowing thyself. Once you know who you are, what motivates your thinking and behavior you can understand yourself and see beyond yourself to see others. Letting go of your ego doesn’t mean you become nothing but means that you are moved beyond your own needs, wants and subconscious motivations. You have to know yourself in order to set your ego aside, and setting yourself aside doesn’t make you empty,h it makes you open to receive their needs and wants without being concerns with this means for you. This also to me is a process you work on achieving but the goal changes as you grow. It is one thing to know who you are, but we are effect by those around us and the life we experience. So, this process is ongoing, knowing yourself is a constant process of relearning who you are, what have you take from your inactions with others? How have you been changed by others? By your life experiences? What have you learned? What assumptions about life are you carry around? You must examine these things as you grow, in order to set them aside. And to truly help other you must set yourself and all your assumption, resentment, hurt, pain, etc. aside and let kindness, and love grow in that space. But you also cannot just push all yourself away without know yourself first become then you become empty and disconnect from your experiences, without really seeing what those experiences are and how those experiences have shaped you. There is an aspect of self-forgiveness and self-love that goes along with letting go of your ego and if you skip that step, you’re not so much set aside you ego as you are burying or hiding from it. If you know ego, see if for what it is, then you can recognize it when it tries to come back and cloud your judgement of other people’s lives. Knowing who you are gives you the clarity to see past who you are and see the other person clearly. And in seeing the other person, we can be open to listen and helping without judgement or assumption that we know what is best or we know…and we can allow ourselves to know them and know their experiences and see their lives. Then it can become about them and not about you trying to find completeness in helping others. The focus is a richer understanding of others not so you can relate but so you can feel and experience their needs and help them in their needs. It is the essence of empathy and kindness. But trying to do that without know yourself first, loving yourself and seeing yourself clearly, will leaving you looking for yourself in others instead of knowing that yourself is next to you strengthen you to be open to others.
George Harrison was only 20-something when he wrote "I Me Mine," wise beyond his years to know that, as you say, "letting go of your ego doesn’t mean you become nothing but means that you are moved beyond your own needs, wants and subconscious motivations." Our culture generally, and this moment specifically, do not particularly value that insight. But wouldn't we be so much better off if more people understood it?
DeleteJohn Stuart Mill states in his book On Liberty that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.” I believe this quote showcases the necessity for dissent and disagreement in any form of communication and in any discipline; disagreement might appear as hostility, but can also present itself in an extremely open-minded and fruitful discussion of differences that might not be immediately apparent to both sides. I believe Mill is also acutely aware of the ability communication has to be mere “chatter” if there is no definitive opinion or side, or if that communication lacks “critical judgement.”
ReplyDeleteI can say confidently that communication with critical judgement is not something that I would enjoy typically. My first instinct as a communicator, and a human, is to steer clear of conflict in any way possible. It is difficult to relay your message when you are aware of the judgement that is coming your way, but perhaps it is more detrimental to growth to avoid those conversations all together. Although these types of conversations make me feel uncomfortable, I believe Mill’s point is that if there is not a factor of critical judgment, how can that conversation produce critically informative realizations? Also, sometimes the phrase “critical judgement” sounds intense and intimidating, not to mention a little scary, but the type of communication Mill is discussing is not using “critical judgment” to provide an ego boost to the speaker; this type of judgment, in order to be effective, must transcend the ego and open itself to hidden messages intertwined with the speaker’s critical analysis.
Ego and self-assertion most definitely provide obstacles in not only a philosophical sense, but also a communal sense. If you are only concerned with the problems or pride that consume you, you have given yourself over to your ego. Philosophy at its core is about helping all those around you, and giving up the idea of “I,” and instead replacing it with “we.” When we take the “I” out of any communication we are more likely to relate to those around us; we are more likely to discover thoughts and feelings we were ignorant to previously; we are likely to ask more pointed and pertinent questions to better understand the individual we are communicating with. Although some say that “ego doesn’t exist,” I believe it does until you can rid yourself of it and think more communally. To simply say that ego does not exist takes away the journey of discovering what feeds your ego, and how you as an individual can grow out of giving into that type of temptation.
Personally, I find it very difficult to discuss politics with those who have opposing views to mine: quite plainly, this is my ego rearing its ugly head. I am very firm in most of my beliefs, and struggle to find a common ground with the opposite side of the aisle when it comes to certain subjects. I think this is a perfect example of recognizing the innate ego most human beings have. It is difficult to shed the habitual nature of feeding my ego, but “conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions.” When we act without critical judgment and cannot receive critical judgment, we are hearing, but we are not listening; we are rambling, but not receiving. It is of the utmost importance to find a way to shed, or at least work around, our ego.
Work-arounds, right. Only Saints and Bodhisattvas shake off ego. It is indeed hard to discuss politics and religion and other passion-filled subjects with those who reject our perspective, and impossible with those who won't listen and are convinced that we're idiots for disputing them. But Mill was right, we all need to hear other views and need to become comfortable defending our own before skeptical listeners... We need to be able to do so without fearing that we'll provoke hostility to such a degree that we risk creating true "enemies" -- so I'd amend Mill's statement. We don't need enemies, we need interlocutors and (in the best sense) antagonists and provocateurs. We can have our egos, so long as we still have open heads and hearts.
DeleteThese are just my thoughts...
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to the philosophical readings, I tend to have a challenging time deciphering the information. The concepts do not seem to hit home with me as much, and I find myself trying to look up what the words mean and place meaning in each story. The constant looking up and attempts to decipher does not allow me to understand and enjoy the readings entirely. When I listened to some pieces by David Whyte, I understood the references, and it even felt like he was taking thoughts that I have had and stringing them together so eloquently.
Viewing the TED Talk featuring David Whyte, A lyrical bridge between past, present, and future, was pivotal for connecting with the material and understanding what Whyte is conveying. He began reciting the poem entitled ‘Finisterre’ that he had written for his Irish niece, Marlene McCormack, and her journey. Whyte was naming the ritualistic things that his niece had to complete to walk into her future. Some of the rituals included burning letters that deal with past trauma, which can keep you rooted in the past if not overcome and leaving an item that assisted in the journey. McCormack chose to leave her shoes. While he was speaking, it made me go deep in thought about my courage, if I could do what his niece did, after a long journey to signify walking into an unknown future laid out for me. After graduating with my undergraduate degree at 25, I had a tough time. The information about illusions spoke volumes to me about life in the manner of my past, present, and future. I thought that I knew my destiny and would run out of college into a job and never know a struggle or a heartbreak. It turns out I got familiar with each but always thought of the heartbreak not as a vulnerability but as a piece of ‘humble pie.’ Seeing heartbreak and openness in this light helped me understand it more and view it as positive and part of the process. I also stumbled on the stream of consciousness that everyone has an internal anchor, looking to reflect on the outside. The comparison of humans to vessels was intriguing to me as an anchor represents stability and prevents drifting into unknown currents leaving a ship feeling secure. The words that he uses to describe things make the topics seem ornate, but everyone can find a piece of themselves within the information. I also noticed that he works with companies to help leaders connect and get out from behind the walls they have created by being attentive and listening. Whyte mentioned the airplane regarding a conversation by the shape and velocity of the wing. I have been on an airplane before and prefer to sit by the window, but it never dawned on me that it is a form of conversation. That conversation is all working parts within something more significant, connections. The TED Talk caused me to look up other videos and articles, which I am confident that in the future, I will be pursuing more works, whether video, interview, or writing by David Whyte.
Everything can be part of the human conversation, and the conversation goes on forever. That's a great revelation, isn't it?
DeleteWe're vessels, but as Plutarch said we're also wicks, or kindling. "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." So, find the right spark --philosophically and otherwise. Not everything will light your fire, but something will. Sounds like David Whyte did it for you.
I very much enjoyed the second week of reading for this class, as it has a lot to do with poetry and its philosophical value. Poetry to me has always been an excellent and precise way of relaying my feelings, and reading poetry can be extremely therapeutic. I found the article by Richard Rorty to be a great mixture of inspiration, sadness, and understanding. Rorty mentions that he wished he had spent more of his life focused on poetry, but “not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose.”
ReplyDeleteThis quote struck me because I believe he is right. There are few, if any, things poetry accomplishes content wise that prose has not or cannot cover. Long winded writings can perhaps uncover the same or more universal truths than a pithy, one page poem; but I believe the difference lies in the cutting out of unnecessaries, the stripping of chatter, and instead focuses on the immediate message. When we as an audience or individual wipe away the distraction of pages and pages of information, and rather hone in on a very clear and pointed message, we are more likely to focus on the importance of what truths are being revealed to us. Similarly, poetry can pull out clearer feelings and attitudes by providing only the necessary, however veiled it might be in language. Poetry, again, might not be able to provide truths, feelings, or attitudes that are distinct from prose, but poetry strives to focus more clearly on all of those aspects, free of distraction.
One poet I thoroughly enjoy and I believe has the ability to strip her poetry to beautiful truths is Mary Oliver. Much of her poetry consists of nature and the natural world’s ability to provide us with things we didn't know about ourselves. One poem in particular that has always stuck with me is “Wild Geese”:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Here, Oliver is proclaiming that everyone has a place in the world, no matter how battered, bruised, or confused they might be. She does this with just a few lines and helps us as an audience come to a universal, philosophical truth: we all have a place in the family of things.
Cousin Mary says in a few words what some philosophers would labor in vain to say in volumes. I do believe the best poets can "provide truths, feelings, or attitudes that are distinct from prose" because they're at once so succinct but also so evocative and provocative and suggestive. Words in rational subject-predicate affirmative construction go only so far. Words deployed poetically can trigger responses and insights that at least feel revelatory, and do not invite close analysis of a philosophically-reductive sort. Their truth "glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught," as Wm James said.
DeleteSome of you may have known Don Enss, a MALA student who was nearly finished with the program. I'm very sorry to report the sad news that he died yesterday morning, in his sleep. His son notified me this afternoon.
ReplyDeleteDon took every class I offer, over several years, and was a true ambassador for MALA. He may be the most inspiring Lifelong Learner I've met. (Some of you may rival him.) He was going to do his capstone project for the degree with me in the Fall.
Thanks to Associate Dean Dawn McCormack, he got to lay eyes on his expedited diploma shortly before he left us.
He was a lovely man, kind and caring and committed to doing all he could to make things better. I'm better for having known him. If you knew him, I'll bet you are too.
Don was a great communicator too, an oft-published writer of letters to the editor, and a patient listener. Let's dedicate our class session to his memory.
My last email exchange with Don:
DeleteDonald Enss
Sun, Feb 14, 1:12 PM (10 days ago)
to me
Dear Dr. Oliver,
Happy Birthday!
Don
Phil Oliver
Sun, Feb 14, 2:11 PM (10 days ago)
to Donald
Thank you, Don. You've inspired me to make the most of the years ahead.
As I was looking at the list of questions for the first group of readings, I was especially struck by the one about stereotypical notions of philosophers philosophizing and my own methods of thinking intently about things. I work at Motlow College, and about this time last year, I transitioned to working from home because of the pandemic. I work with Motlow’s honors program, and my office was part of the honors student space on the Moore County Campus, so I went from being around a variety of people (students, faculty, staff, visitors, parents, etc.) for hours and hours every day, to spending my days alone with only the company of my pets. At first, I felt quite the opposite of Wittgenstein, and the solitude and quiet were uncomfortable. I felt listless without the energy of others around me, and I couldn’t fathom spending weeks like that, let alone months. But somewhere along in 2020, I sort of settled into myself, in a way I never have before, in a way that made me actually relate to Wittgenstein. In the solitary silence I experienced constantly, I found myself “pondering what could not be said.” In that quiet, I learned things about myself, both good and not so good, that I had never before had the time to think about.
ReplyDeleteIn reflecting on the readings and looking over the list of prompts, though, I realized that I wouldn’t consider my alone time spent in self-contemplation as necessarily philosophizing. I realized that I do hold the stereotypical notions of philosophers having to be alone, mostly in some kind of wilderness, in order to do their best philosophizing. I realized that I also assume most philosophers to be dead, that I had never really considered the concept of modern philosophers at all. I realized that, in my everyday life, I most often talk about philosophy as part of the phrase “philosophical conversation.” I realized that I have some interesting distinctions in what I define as thinking intently and philosophizing, with isolation typically being necessary for the first and social interaction equally necessary for the second.
When I need to think about something intently, I go driving by myself. I’ve loved driving since I was old enough that my brother finally let me play Mario Kart, and I’ve always been that friend or family member who offers to drive everywhere. Probably my favorite thing about living in Middle Tennessee, in a valley between Shelbyville and Tullahoma (Lee Ann Drive off HWY 276 if you want to google map it!) is how many random, connected backroads there are everywhere. The landscape here is so much more varied than where I grew up in Georgia, and I’ve been known to take such scenic routes sometimes that it will take me an hour to wind around everywhichwhere, when going a highway would have taken 15 minutes for the same trip. Whether I need to think intently or to just feel intently, there’s nothing more inspiring to me than the act of driving while skirting that edge of being lost somewhere.
Conversely, when I think about philosophy, my own view is completely in line with Warburton’s when he said it “thrives on the collision of viewpoints.” Not all of my friends enjoy philosophical conversations the way that I do, but even that “collision of viewpoints” still lends itself to meaningful discussions. The only times when it doesn’t are with those in my life who shut down any conversation entirely, who simply refuse to discuss anything of a philosophical nature because they would prefer to avoid any challenge or critique to their viewpoints. But now I've come to realize that philosophy can’t live in isolation; it feeds on conversation and challenge in order to stay alive and growing.
I think the pandemic has forced many of us to spend more time being isolated in one way or another. It is such a drastic change of pace, and I agree that it forced me to learn new lessons about myself. There is definitely value in both solitude and community.
DeleteI think that Philosophy as conservation is the key. In conservation new ideas or point of view can be shared, but I also think like any good conservation being comfortable with the silence allows for time to really listen. With all the distractions in the world, sometimes sitting alone forces just to be still and clears away the distractions.
DeleteConservation AND conversation, right?
DeleteI guess people in my line of work, philosophy and the humanities, tend to be generally more comfortable with solitude than most. But I recall that when I was a "gradual" student (students who gradually realize they don't want to be students anymore-I think that's from John Irving) I resisted the suggestion that I go off into the wilderness somewhere and just stay there until I'd knocked out a draft of my dissertation. I don't mind spending hours alone, that doesn't feel lonely; but communing only with squirrels and such for days or weeks on end doesn't sound like a promising work plan either. When you spend most of your working hours conversing with yourself, a little daily human interaction in the evening seems only sane. Of course, most of my gradual school time was pre-Internet. Maybe time in the wilderness with a wifi connection would work for me now.
DeleteThis is the stage of life that I find myself in, and my forties have been littered with loss of different kinds, and coming to terms with death has been central. The feeling of invincibility has faded as well as the feeling that I have all the answers to all of life’s questions. It has been a maturing process, as it has given me perspective that we are not in control of our lives, and we are not guaranteed health or longevity. There is no sense of fairness when it comes to death, as it happens to us all whether we’re ready for it or not. Death is no respecter of persons, young, old, healthy, sick, rich, or poor, it comes for us all.
ReplyDeleteAs I think about this statement from Whyte that our death makes way for someone else, is an interesting thought. As I think about my Dad’s death and how that has left an enormous void, it has also made way for us to step into the paths that he created and try to continue them. He was an avid outdoorsman, so the imagery of him beating a trail for my family to follow is easy to imagine. There is the feeling of making sure I’m passing on to my children the values that he taught me. My son said the other day that he was interested in woodworking, which made me extremely happy, since his Grandfather was a talented woodworker. Though he has died, his lessons and legacy continue, the trails he has beaten are being extended.
I think about my life and impending death questioning what ways the people around me will be glad to let me go. What trails will they take up and continue walking on and which ones will they be glad to see come to an end? Hopefully there will be more that they will want to continue than end. Like Whyte said, “the more generous you are, the more that circle extends into our society and those who go after us.” A mature generosity is not just in things but in speech, affection, time, tolerance and gifts. Stuff that I’ve accumulated from previous generations means much less than the writings and the gifts of time and attention that were given.
The hope is that the next generation will be better than the one before. My generation has made some small strides beyond my parent’s generation in the ways that we treat minorities, for example. I see my children’s generation beginning to make larger strides toward equity and social justice. When my generation is gone, hopefully it gives air and space for the next generation to make even greater strides with less resistance. Those “taking all this oxygen up” resisting the protests, movements for more tolerant speech, and fair legislation, will pass on and leave room for growth and change.
I would say that understanding our place in the world and the limits of our importance it has to do with experience which usually comes with age but can also come with tragedy or struggle real struggle. When life takes an unexpected turn, you're force to come to terms with your effect on the world around you and you have to let go of what you thought would be, or who you thought you'd be and see beyond yourself. But in doing so you can learn to embrace new ideas, and new experience and learn from people you would have never expected.
Delete"A mature generosity is not just in things but in speech, affection, time, tolerance and gifts" -- so true! And as you say, the gift of attention. I fear that's something younger parents are inadvertently withholding from the children I see them with in public spaces (or did, before COVID), attending intensively to phone screens and not to the young, eager, and too often neglected faces beside them. It's really a great privilege to expend oxygen, while we can, on interactions with those who represent our future.
DeleteHave you (like Boethius) ever engaged in an internal conversation with yourself, facilitated by an imaginary interlocutor?
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic. I often find myself engaging with internal conversations with myself. This usually happens when I am anxious, depressed, or simply deep within my thoughts. I work the night shift at various nursing facilities across Nashville. I usually drift into deep thought as the patients sleep at night. I usually think about life, school, and my future. I do catch myself having internal conversations and arguments within myself, which either leads to positive or negative outcomes. Unlike Boethius, I’m not in prison awaiting my execution. However, I am usually anxious about my future and the time that I have left on this planet. Where I want to go to school after MTSU, where I want to live, what I will do for the remainder of my life.
Off topic, but I have been struggling with depression for nearly twenty years. A friend suggested “What Dreams May Come” by Richard Matheson. In short, it’s about a man who dies and goes to his own personal Heaven, then travels to Hell to rescue his wife who killed herself following his death. It’s not a religious book. I see a pluralist aspect of the afterlife. My takeaway of this novel is the concept of “mind or matter”. I believe that people deal with depression differently and I’ve had a couple of suicide attempts throughout my life. After reading this novel I realized that focusing on a positive future helps ease my depression. This doesn’t always help, but it works.
• Rousseau wrote "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"... Do you prefer to walk (run, hike, bike etc.) alone or with company?
My preferences vary depending on my mood. I prefer to walk or hike alone. There are times when I become so stimulated that I need to get away from life for a while. The best experience that I’ve had was in 2016/2017 when I cared for a 23-year-old nonverbal man with Autism. He was always energetic, so I had to take him out on three-mile walks three times a day. I was able to gather my thoughts and become at peace with my decisions and future. Those walks were very therapeutic because we never approached other people. At times I spoke to him about my thoughts. He didn’t answer to anything, but it was nice to speak to somebody without judgement. I documented all of my thoughts. Later, I discussed my thoughts and opinions with professors and colleagues.
Philosophy in its highest forms seems intently solitary and often damaged by the presence of others.
I believe that temporary solitary is beneficial to philosophy in terms of meditation and focus. The highest form of of philosophy is achieved by conversation and the collaboration of thoughts with those who either agree or disagree. Philosophy without conversation can be very negative because it creates conspiracy theories – which is what nearly ended American democracy on January 6, 2021.
You were a therapeutic peripatetic! What if someone called you a pair of pathetic therapeutic peripatetics? I'm sure, as a caring caregiver, you'd rightly have said So what?
DeleteI wouldn't say the conspiracy-minded have done a lot of philosophizing, with or without the company of others, not if philosophy is the earnest search for wisdom.
Posted for Marteja:
ReplyDeleteWith each reading for week 1, I found myself developing and additional layer of understanding about myself as well as others. Yet, I was left with so many questions of “why” and “what if.” These questions were derived from my personal life experiences in addition to what I’ve learned to be the experience of others. I consider myself as one of the “mute” when it comes to politics as well as other sensitive topics, despite the fact that I have a plethora of opinions that I’ve come to rather not vocalize. This is the result of conversations that I’ve had and also ones that I’ve witnessed. There have also been instances where I’ve had to correct myself in disregarding someone else’s feelings or experiences because they minimized my own (while I internally minimized theirs). For some reason, after the readings, I even considered the opinions of those other than mine further and developed a sense of understanding of the power of perception. Regardless of how I think of something or view it as wrong or right, someone else could think otherwise but what truly makes what they say wrong or morally incorrect? Or do I even give them the chance to explain their opinion before I formulate my own against them? I even found myself thinking about times were I never stopped to consider someone’s else’s thoughts or opinions and I am sure that I may have made myself seem so superior and completely disregarded their experience and placed so much judgement before understanding. From each reading I’ve learned that regardless of right or wrong, even if it seems so wrong, listening to understand is much more important than proving oneself. With doing so, both entities are able to have a conversation to were both experiences can be understood and growth can occur.
Here is a little poem that came to me while writing this essay:
I mute myself,
For your comfort.
Later, I reflect on what I should’ve said.
Maybe what I could have said, for you to understand.
An experience, of mine.
But I know you wouldn’t, unless you saw it and experienced it with my own hand.
Would you then, treat me with the same level of empathy or would you still stand strong in your belief to oppose mine?
“Telling someone something he will not understand is pointless, even if you add he will not understand it” Wittgenstein
This type of perspective represents a lot of the minds of people who would rather not discuss their point of view, have in regards to sensitive world topics or even during personal and professional disputes. This could be for a variety of instances really. One example that comes to my mind is perhaps telling someone that corn is a fruit instead of a vegetable. There reply is that they’ve known corn to be considered a vegetable their entire life so corn is definitely that. Instead of telling them the facts or explaining it further, the discussion ends rather than being continued to avoid any further discussion or “proof” because the person is convinced based off of their own experience and cannot be sueded by a different truth.
In other words, the discussion is not even brought up because the person who is aware of this “truth,” would rather not even discuss it because they know the person who believes otherwise has an opposite experience or understanding and will not accept otherwise...
Going forward, a person who yells “Black Lives Matter” and their counterpart responds, “All lives matter!” To where the person who is yelling “Black Lives Matter” responds that the “all lives matter” believer is in agreement with “black lives matter.” Yet, despite that reality, the “all lives matter” corresponding person does not understand that concept (And perhaps that we were all on the same accord after all if all lives really matter). Going into depth about a belief often will fall on shallow ears if a person is not willing to understand or change a viewpoint, in addition to that discussion being exhausting.
DeleteThe contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.
-Empson
The world is lacking in the empathy department or maybe just the United States as I am not all that familiar with the rest of the worlds reactions to what is going on in with us. Hatred is everywhere you turn and has always been around but is accessed much easier than ever before because of the internet. Yet, even with more proof amongst other things, experiences are still ignored and those who choose to, still have their eyes closed.
And even though those who lack experience and understanding are shown sympathy for the most part by those who do have that experience. (“Of course who wouldn’t think police brutality is real, it’s never been your experience for police officers to be brutal towards you or people you may know, I understand but still please understand from my experience why I do believe it is real” should perhaps be a conversation but again usually the result that conversation is more division and ultimately a lack of hope) Maybe we should all go somewhere and separate ourselves from each other so we can understand more rather than continuously finding ways to object. Or even go somewhere without internet access and reflect on why the United States is in the state of division that it is now. What could we truly find? Or would it cause more literal separation than understanding? Until than, I fear a vast majority will remain mute.
Additional Quotes that stood out to me from the other readings:
“Positive emotions don’t disturb our mind, they reinforce it and make it more stable and courageous” – Ricard
(I’ve gone over the limit but I love this quote)
Why do we shift focus from what they are saying to how we can respond?
Perhaps the current democracy or Americans would treat each other better if we took a course on active listening.
I'm definitely guilty of responding to someone out of superiority and not considering their thoughts or experiences. I look back, especially in when I was in my twenties, at how I responded to people arrogantly feeling like I was right and they were wrong. In looking back, I see the error in my thinking, and definitely in my attitude. I hope as I've aged, I've gotten more considerate, humble and broad minded, but I think it is a lifetime struggle of growth and change. I love your poem!
DeletePosted for Marteja (2):
DeleteAt the age of twenty five, I find myself thinking of death on a regular basis. The people who I talk to most, always ask me why I think the way that I do as it relates to death. I fear it, yet I use the idea of it to help me live more in the moment. In my mind, life is so precious and there is too much beauty in it to let it go to waste by constantly worrying about a future that will come sooner than later. When that future comes, I want to be able to reflect on the past with a smile rather than sadness for not living more then, when I no longer have as much time left. The poem “Garden of Proserpine” as well the poem “On his Seventy-Fifth Birthday” are essentially my views on what it means to live and how good I want it to be when it is time to die. The only way I see myself fearing death is if I forget to live. I think Rorty did not fear death at all nor was he faced with any true sadness at the thought of it. It seems as if toward the end of his life, he mainly reflects on what truly matters or what never mattered at all. At the end of his life, he talks of not thinking at all of philosophy or even his own philosophical thoughts and work, he only enjoys poetry. Maybe not even just enjoy, it seems that he develops a deeper level of understanding and sentiment toward poetry. The beauty of it and what it can be especially when the mind changes to understand it rather than analyze it for what the author may have meant instead of what a work means to the individual. That is the beauty of verse and the hidden meanings that often differ from person to person.
After the class discussion, my mind continued to reflect on the meaning of life and death. Not only that, but what it means to truly live and how it must feel to die or to know that there is not much time left. I wondered how I would feel in my final years in comparison to the way that I do now. Maybe I’ll feel happy when it rains and at peace staring out at the night sky. I wondered if the smallest things would bring me more joy than they do now. The beauty of life must be what is in the now rather than what is to come. I think that as people, my generation especially, become consumed with the future that they forget to live in the present. Worry is constant due to the pressure to be successful or our own idea of success (I Loved your discussion of this in class. A happy life is more important than a successful one but I consider a successful life one that is filled with happiness. I think that is essential the overall purpose of the readings. The true essence of life is more than just what we do or accomplish in it but if we are satisfied with the way that we lived when it is time for our lives to end.
FYI:To clarify, for anyone reading the above thread, the passage that begins "Going forward, a person who yells..." is the conclusion of Marteja's first essay which I posted for her. It isn't MY comment. But THIS is: I agree, too often we listen with "shallow ears" and are more concerned to formulate our own statement than to really try and grasp the context and intentions of someone else's. It's all part of that endemic "blindness in human beings" William James diagnosed.
DeleteAnd I also agree, we need to instruct kids in "active listening"... just as some schools now teach them the skills of "mindfulness" etc. And then we need to give them ample opportunity to practice those skills, in the classroom and everywhere else.
And this: "A happy life is more important than a successful one but I consider a successful life one that is filled with happiness." Happy people, as Aristotle said, are flourishing people, filled with what the Greeks called eudaimonia. I'm not sure our culture's standard forms of pursuing happiness, by chasing ever more conspicuous consumption for instance, conduce to flourishing OR "success"... Did I mention William James's other diagnosis, the one he shared with H.G. Wells regarding "our national disease"?
“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.”
DeleteWe are the culmination of our experiences, thoughts, and behaviors. This is, in part, how a sense of self is established. Thus, the ego emerges. If we do not understand or acknowledge the ego, we cannot do the work to untangle the attachment to self. The statement shared from The Philosopher and the Monk, “The state of the river at any given moment is the result of its history. In the same way, an individual stream of consciousness is loaded with all the traces left on it by positive and negative thoughts, as well as by actions and words arising from those thoughts,” alludes to the fact that our thought processes and inner dialogue are a direct reflection and combination of our experiences and interpretation of those experiences. It is not contradictory to assume that “You need first to have an ego in order to be aware that it doesn’t exist,” (The Philosopher and the Monk). It is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain an absence of being without establishing a sense of being. There is no frame of reference from which a sense of self can be undone. In theory, we strive to make sense of the world around us by defining our position in our environments and those foreign to us. Once we formulate an understanding of how we belong, we can begin the greater work unmasking the ego.
ReplyDeleteA strong sense of self is an indicator of success in life in Western culture. It is also often associated with being highly egotistical. The ego, in terms of self-assertion, is generally an obstacle to effective communication and conversation. It can impede the ability to listen critically and without concern for how the content affects the listener personally. Rather than listening for meaning, we tend to hear and develop a response. The response may often be a disguise from the ego to defend the self or self-preserve.
As one works to disseminate an attachment to self, there may be a concern that what is left is a nothingness. However, a discovery in the process is the altruistic nature and conscious adoption of the wellbeing of all other beings. When our thoughts and actions are in the best interest of others, a greater sense of indescribable fulfillment occurs. Positive thoughts and actions breed goodness and promote selflessness. Ricard illustrates this with a verse from the eight-century Buddhist sage Shantideva:
All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
Is there need for lengthy explanation?
Childish beings look out for themselves,
While Buddhas labor for the good of others:
See the difference that divides them!
It's so counter-intuitive to the western mind,to think that we can gratify ourselves by seeking the good of others. And, I think, it's the source of much of the partisan division that's wracked our politics and public life. Happy lives aren't ego-driven, but the disappearance of Self doesn't mean we don't still care, or can't still flourish. We seem to have a hard time getting that.
DeleteOh, and speaking of the Buddha...
Delete"As we teach children to observe physical hygiene for its health benefits, we need to teach them to cultivate emotional hygiene — to tackle destructive emotions and find peace of mind." Dalai Lama
Natalia Jiron
ReplyDeleteThoughts on Week 2
The second weeks readings were a bit more challenging for me to understand, but the Zoom class most definitely helped me understand the concepts a lot better. When it came to the topics for this week’s readings, it was a struggle to understand. I have a harder time trying to differentiate the type of concepts and vocabulary that is being used. In reading these articles and watching TED talks, I found myself researching background on the philosopher and many concepts. In my undergraduate and graduate career, I have not studied the concept of philosophy until taking this block with Professor Oliver.
In the first article, “Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy”, I had to research the meaning of pragmatism in order to understand the basis of the article (this may seem silly). One of the main ideas that stood out to me was the concept of conversation. The article states how conversation is an important idea in being able to understand the motions behind Rorty’s philosophy. In relation to this, Rorty wanted philosophy to become a conversation. Overall, he preferred the ideas of conversational philosophers over analytical philosophers. The reason can be that they are being a part of a conversation instead of practicing a specific discipline (Zabala).
After being able to read the second article, “The Fire of Life”, I believe that I developed a different understanding of poetry. The introduction that Rorty gives sends out the message of how poetry has impacted him and how he wishes he spent more time with poetry. “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose” (Rorty). In further reading the article on about David Whyte, “The Conversational Nature of Reality”, I found it rather fascinating how captivated Whyte become through poetry. He claims falling in love with poetry at a young age and feeling being “abducted” in some type of way. The experiences from Rorty and Whyte show how the positive impact that poetry can have. Whyte’s experiences in the Galapagos allowed him to return back to poetry since he felt that the language did not match along with what he had experienced. Reading through these two articles, I have been able to appreciate poetry in a different perspective especially through some of their own works.
“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose” (Rorty)--
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit tricky. Maybe poetry conveys no particular "truths" that philosophic prose misses, but the point of James's statement that something always "glimmers and twinkles" for which familiar language comes too late, and which honest philosophers have to acknowledge, is that poetry evokes a dimension of experience and humanity that improves our lives. Rorty had technical reasons for not wanting to call that dimension a source of "truth" but it's still something he found himself wanting more of, as his life wound down. He would have envied David Whyte's earlier insight that led him to "fall in love with poetry at a young age." But it's never too late for new love, is it?
Week 2 readings
ReplyDeleteSo, am I a pragmatist? I thought I was, and I still think I lean toward pragmatism but after listening to What is Pragmatism? A discussion on the BBC's "In Our Time" I’m not as certain. According to Webster, the definition of pragmatism is an American movement in philosophy marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. And as I understood the BBC discussion, one of the arguments against Pragmatism is that an idea’s truth isn’t always based on its usefulness, that it can be truth even if that truth isn’t useful. Of course, then you could argue, I suppose on what or how do we define usefulness? However, that pulls away from the basic question for am I a pragmatist? I would have to say that I yes, at heart my thoughts begin at the nature of practical thinking. Faced with a problem or situation that needs dealing with, I will think about possible solutions or ways of handling things, so the truths that I discover are related to a practical situation and trying to resolve that situation. However, in working to resolve practical matters, I also believe that we can discover truths that we did not consider before and even if they do not become used toward practical application of a situation, those thoughts should not always be discounted as untrue. Those unused truths by be relevant to a problem we have yet to think about which would make them useful in the future or help us shape and informed decisions we make about issues we haven’t thought of yet. I guess what I would caution myself against when looking for a practical application of thought is that I don’t discredit a though as true because it does not work with the issue I’m trying to resolve, essentially giving me to power to pick and choose what is true and ignoring the trues that I do not to deal with, the inconvenience truth. Of course, then you could get into a discussion about what is true. Is truth based only on its ability to solve practical matters. I don’t think so. But I do believe that the ability to see truth and apply those truths to practical matter helps form clearer thoughts about who we are and why we do things. So, dealing in the practical in order to “get things done”, is more of what motivates be that not, so yes, I would consider myself a pragmatist...I think.
This is the standard objection to pragmatism, that it incorrectly defines truth as usefulness. It's a serious objection, but I think it misses a crucial distinction between the definition of truth and the criteria by which we identify it. Pragmatists typically think we have no better criterion than usefulness, or practicality, or (as Wm James said, "what is better for us to believe"). That is, pragmatists may agree that truth is formally and officially DEFINED as something objective and independent of our estimation of usefulness... but they also insist that we have no other way of discerning what's true than in terms of what's useful. So, Jennifer, I do think you are a pragmatist. Me too.
DeleteJames on truth, in Pragmatism Lecture II ("What Pragmatism Means"):
Delete...I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also 'true' for this reason?
To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we ought to believe'; and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation.
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I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them... https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/James/James_1907/James_1907_02.html
• Rousseau wrote "Reveries of the Solitary Walker"... Do you prefer to walk (run, hike, bike etc.) alone or with company?
ReplyDeleteIf I am honest, I am not really sure I understand anything. I have found that I can be in the middle of a room full of people and block out there are conversations with my own thoughts if I I'm concentrating hard enough on a problem; I will not hear people around me. We lived not too far from my elementary school and I could walkthrough two back yards in the front yard and get to the crossing guard and then walk to school. So even though I was being watched the entire time I felt like I was walking alone. When I lived in New York I was constantly moving. I could be in the middle of a full subway car and be alone. Each person on the car was usually alone just navigating through the city public transportation. I used subway a bike I rode buses I had a motorcycle I had a car but even when you're driving a car wow you're around many other people and you have to wonder not only what you are going to do but you have to worry what they're going to do as well. And I'm alone in these kinds of situations I am thinking for the other people that I'm not actually communicating with the voice inside my head says what is that person like and how are they going to react in many different situations, so it isn't really a protagonist or whatever it's myself trying to be the other person and see what they're going to do through their eyes. The way I really appreciated being alone and contemplated was on Sunday mornings I would take the car Lisa Ann we would go to bear mountain. We would park at the lodge and hike to the top. during this time you could be on the trail with other people but you would still be alone and able to drift off into what is and what is not. I can remember I would contemplate on my breathing. The air in New York is polluted it smells and particulates and pollution and you smell industry, transportation you smell the river or the ocean. I called bear mountain the oxygen factory because I was breathing in the atmosphere above more natural environment and I think that more than anything got me closer to understanding truth of being able to think about bigger concepts or different things. I don't have to walk to do the same type of thing or ride a bike or anything other than work. As a carpenter you can develop the ability to understand the task that you have to do and then reduce the amount of motions that you have to do to accomplish the task and then you just repeat the task usually over and over until you finish the job. During this repetition stage you can think about anything. I think what in my mind Rousseau is talking about is similar to What Car loan Carl Jung would contemplate sitting on a rock.
Solitude and loneliness are two very different things, aren't they?
DeleteCarl Jung's car loan, eh?
Thanks for all your thoughts and comments, I enjoyed our session together. Hope to see you again. FYI...
ReplyDeleteComing Summer '21-MALA 6050, "Enlightenment Now"
Coming Fall '21-MALA 6010, "The Education of a Good Citizen"
Coming Fall '21-PHIL 3160, "The Philosophy of Happiness"
Let me know if you'd like more info about any of these upcoming courses.
Be well! jpo
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ReplyDeleteI do strongly believe that poetry can express truths that are otherwise inexpressible. Poetry is an opportunity to express truths in bits and pieces and as unfiltered or dramatic as the writer prefers. Poems may be written as the writer’s truth and perceived by the reader to reflect a different truth. What differentiates poetry from other types of storytelling is the structure, or architecture. A poem can have words hanging without punctuation as an act of lingering thought, or intention. Tiny or enormous truths might be expressed explicitly or inferred. I also believe that poetry expresses feelings or attitudes which are truths of their own to the writer.
ReplyDeleteWhen Rorty shared that he regrets not spending more time in his life with poetry, I suppose he meant not only reading but reflecting upon poetry. Poetry, not unlike philosophy, is a style intended for reflection and pause. It resonates only after the context has marinated and is contemplated.
A poem that I revisit often and consider philosophical is “The Guest House” by Rumi.
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
I consider this poem in the context of people in my life but most often with the thoughts I entertain. The poem is a mindfulness practice, a meditation, and a reminder. In a more explicit sense, the poem encourages us to welcome all who seek us. Less obvious is the fleeting nature of life, the impermanence of joy, darkness, and the human body.
Another poem I find philosophical is by Mary Oliver…
Someone I loved once gave me a
box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that
this, too, was a gift.
Humans are inherently attuned to self-preservation. We seek people with whom we identify and with which we feel a sense of belonging. We search for reason and explanation. When we get hurt, we learn to avoid the things that hurt us. Sometimes, perhaps often, we are more focused on avoiding the things that hurt us than seeing the gift that suffering provides. In the aforementioned poem by Mary Oliver, we are reminded to contemplate the gift we have received when we have experienced some kind of suffering. More broadly, we might contemplate suffering and the necessity of its existence.