- Conclude Midterm Report Presentations
- Something from Why Grow Up (WGU) thru p.165. #5 Nadia B. #6 Jessica Law #7 Alex P
- John Kaag, Sick Souls Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (SSHM), Prologue. #5 Hoang T. #6 Emmanuel J. #7 Jonathan D.
- Fantasyland (FL) 40 When the GOP Went Off the Rails
- William James (WJ), Is Life Worth Living? (1897) - in Be Not Afraid: in the Words of William James (BNA, on reserve) #5 Sophia E. #6 Aubree J. #7 Lorelei
WGU -p.165
1. Kant's definition of maturity is what?
- What are some other signs of being grown-up, besides the ability to think for yourself? 123
- Are you good at accepting compromise? Are the adults in your life? 124
- Have you "sifted through your parents' choices about everything"? 125
- Do you "love the world enough to assume responsibility for it?" 126
- Has your educational experience so far broken or furthered your "urge to explore the world"? Do you still "desire to learn"? 127
- Should corporations like Coca-Cola be allowed to have "pouring rights" in public schools? 132
- "You must take your education into your own hands as soon as possible." Did you? How? 140
- Should the age of legal maturity be raised to match the age of brain maturity? 140
- "Minds need at least as much exercise as bodies..." 141 Do you get enough of both forms of exercise? Too much of one or the other? Do you subscribe to Mens sana in corpore sano?
- Do you love books and reading? 143
- Do you agree with Mark Twain?: "A person who won't read has no advantage over a person who can't."
- Are you willing to go a month without internet? Or even a day? 148
- Were Augustine and Rousseau right about travel? 150-51
- Does group travel "preclude real encounters" with a place? 158
- Do you hope to live and work one day in another culture for at least a year? Do you think it will contribute to your maturity? 162-3
2. What is distinctive about "our age" that makes James particularly relevant?
3. What happened on Feb. 6, 2014 that prompted Kaag to write this book?
(See "Is Life Worth Living...)
5. Human history is "one long commentary on" what?
6. A "wider world... unseen by us" may exist, just as our world does for ___.
7. The "deepest thing in our nature," which deals with possibilities rather than finished facts, is a "dumb region of the heart" called (in German) ___.
For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn’t mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.
John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as “Hiking With Nietzsche” and “American Philosophy: A Love Story,” that blend philosophy and memoir... (nyt, continues)
Discussion questions:
- Have you ever felt "pulled in too many directions"? 2 How did you respond?
- Do you approach philosophy as a "detached intellectual exercise," an "existential life preserver," or something else?
- Where would you place yourself on the spectrum between "sick soul" and "healthy-minded"? Does that change, over time?
- Can belief that life is worth living become self-fulfilling?
- Do you know any "sick souls"? 3 Or "healthy minds"? 4 Are they the same person?
- Do you agree that believing life to be worth living "will help create the fact"? 5
- Do you like WJ's answer to the question "Is life worth living?" 9
- Is suicide always "the wrong way to exit life"? 10
- Have you ever visited the Harvard campus? What were your impressions?
- Is "maybe" a good answer to the eponymous question of James's essay below?
- Do you like Whitman's poetic expression of "the joy of living"?
- Have you ever been as happy as Rousseau at Annecy?
- Do you agree that nature cannot embody the ultimate "divine" spirit of the universe? What if you remove (or re-define) "divine"? 489
- Do you agree that "sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life..."? 491
- Does the "purely naturalistic basis" suffice to make life worth living? 494
- Does life feel like a "real fight" to you? 502
*IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? (see the Library of America's terrific William James : Writings 1878-1899... vol.2 is William James : Writings 1902-1910).
When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the liver" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer which I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare's prologues,—
"I come no more to make you laugh; things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"—
must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly; and I know not what such an association as yours intends, nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of existence, and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together, and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find... (continues)
- Why does anyone give Alex Jones any credibility at all?
- Why do people like Ayn Rand's message that selfishness is a virtue?
- Was Mencken right about the Scopes Trial? 375
Kieran Setiya's Five Questions podcast... Five questions for Setiya in TPM...
Map of William James's Cambridge...
- Do you feel more resentful or grateful to have been "thrown" into the world? 11
- Do you agree with Jennifer Michael Hecht? “None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht
- Does Calvinism "set out an impossible task"? 13
- Do you agree with WJ's father about "the point of life"?
- Can there be a constructive, non-violent "moral equivalent of war"? 21
- Do you agree with James about "our national disease"? 22
- Would it be bad if all your wishes "were fulfilled as soon as they arose"? 23
- Was "Mark" right about the three parts of a person? 26
- If there's no "soul" is determinism true? 28
- If humans are animals, do we have no soul? 31
- Were Nietzsche and Buber right about suicide? 34-5
- Are you one of the lucky "once-born"? Does that make you "blind and shallow"? 40
- If we possess free will, would it be wrong to insist on a coercive demonstration that we do? DD 566
- Do you believe you regularly experience opportunities to really choose between alternative futures? Could you decide, for instance, to take an alternate route home from school today? 573
- Are some regrets appropriate and unavoidable? 577
- Does determinism define our universe as one in which it is impossible to close the gap between how things are and how they ought to be? 578
- Which is better, pessimism or subjectivism? 584f.
- Does life lose zest and excitement, if things were foredoomed and settled long ago? 594
LISTEN (11.4.21). The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration.
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
by John Kaag (author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche)
In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, "James's entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life"--and that's why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is a compelling introduction to James's life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology--and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous--can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.
Kaag tells how James's experiences as one of what he called the "sick-souled," those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of "healthy-mindedness"--an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James's pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James.
Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you'll ever read. g'r
==
By William James
A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which everyone has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground--not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free will imply. At our very side almost, in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here --we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delbœuf how completely changed and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied corollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the freewill side of the question all hope of a coercive demonstrations,-- a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two. I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me; for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not, they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality, for example--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is free will. If this be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if anyone pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all...
...determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated, nothing else can be in their place; and the universe is just what it was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world. It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part. From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and treacheries, the reluctances and the regrets, all good together?
...
The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us... (continues)
