“Riches, one may say, are like sea-water; the more you drink the thirstier you become; and the same is true of fame.”
— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) February 23, 2021
- Arthur Schopenhauer pic.twitter.com/KFpJxZqb9I
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Kant, looking for love and doing his duty
Shinrin yoku
LISTEN. Today in Happiness we consider Buddhist and Stoic prescriptions for the "existential illness" that finds us deluded, grasping, and erroneously attaching to the impermanent world's chintzy shiny baubles. Both traditions propose therapies.
Our campus counseling center sent out a flyer yesterday, advertising its services "free of charge" to the campus community. Freer still for many of us, and more effective, might simply be a walk in the woods or down the street. Or on a sandwalk... (continues)
Monday, September 27, 2021
Enraging
From The New York Times: When Medical Ethics Collide With Basic Fairness
Too many people remain stubbornly stuck to the steady diet of lies they’ve been fed for months.
...It’s enraging to think of the dreadful job Tennessee governor Bill Lee is doing, even now, to encourage his voters to wear their masks and take their vaccines. It’s enraging to think of how the Tennessee General Assembly will not, even now, expand Medicaid to help keep rural hospitals open and prevent the overcrowding of city hospitals.
And it’s enraging to think of the people who won’t take an “experimental” vaccine but have no problem accepting experimental antibodies to treat an infection they might have avoided altogether. And it’s beyond enraging to know that when they get to the hospital, they will immediately jump to the front of the line.
I know it’s the right thing for hospitals to do. But no matter how ethical it might be, it will never feel fair.
Margaret Renkl, nyt
Counseling
FYI-
The MTSU Center for Counseling and Psychological Services currently has available counseling appointments for Fall 2021 semester. We are providing both in person and distance counseling services. Our hours of operation are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 1 to 7 pm.CCPS is a training clinic affiliated with the MTSU Professional Counseling graduate program. Students in the program provide services to the community while being supervised by licensed mental health professionals. Our services are free of charge to MTSU faculty, staff, and students. For those not affiliated with MTSU, our fee is $10.00 per session.
Two important considerations:
1. CCPS records all counseling sessions for training purposes. These recordings will be confidential and not seen by anyone other than the counselor and supervisor.
2. Services provided are limited, so waiting lists may be generated when appointment times are no longer available.
We have two (2) options for counseling this semester:
Long-term counseling (8 to 10 sessions) for those who feel problems or concerns may need more sessions to see improvement.
Short-term counseling (3 sessions, possibly 4) for those who feel problems or concerns can be addressed in a shorter timeframe. These sessions will begin late October and run through November 2021.
When you are requesting your appointment, please be sure to specify your preferred session option.
We are offering three ways to schedule an appointment:
1. Call 615-898-2271
2. Email ccps@mtsu.edu
3. Submit an online form at https://www.mtsu.edu/ccps/services.php.
Our Center is located just off campus in the Miller Education Center at 503 East Bell Street, Building B, Suite 1800 in Murfreesboro. (Click on link for map https://goo.gl/maps/aewCmNjwcZq.)
For more information about CCPS, please visit www.mtsu.edu/ccps/. Feel free to share this resource with anyone interested in counseling services.
Dr. Robin Lee, Director
MTSU Center for Counseling and Psychological Services
Register!
This week is National Voter Registration Week. Please take the time to check your voter registration to confirm if and where you’re officially registered: Tennessee Voter Lookup. If you’re not already registered, please register at mtsu.edu/vote. If you need to change or update your voting county, please re-register in the county where you are currently living so you can easily vote in person in 2022.
QR codes to check yourself and register/re-register are posted throughout campus all week long. Use the QR codes to register or re-register. To use the Tennessee online system, you need a Tennessee driver’s license from any TN county, which does not need to reflect your current address.
On Tuesday 9/28 on campus, go to the two voter registration tables, on Peck lawn and Honors lawn, 9:00-3:00 and we’ll assist you! On Saturday 10/2 on campus, go to the voter registration table at the tailgate party at Walnut Grove, 3:00-6:00 and we’ll assist you! You can register in Tennessee if you currently live here even with an out-of-state DL if you have a U.S. passport, but you’ll need to register on a paper form and we’ll help you with that at any of the in-person registration tables.
Get registered during National Voter Registration Week! mtsu.edu/vote
American Democracy Project
National Voter Registration Day, Sept. 28, 2021
Green spirituality
In Japan this is called Forest Bathing. Thankfully our author has kept his head.
Yesterday I visited this green chapel and kept my head pic.twitter.com/M59GiZiUD9
— Nigel Warburton 🧡 #RejoinEU (@philosophybites) September 27, 2021
How you play the game
One more clinches the wildcard, but more importantly the streak has already clinched Grantland Rice's point about living: winning (as Nuke LaLoosh learned) is more fun than losing, but winning and losing matters less than playing the right way. Playing with confidence and style and mutual support and a spirit of fair play will look great on the last scorecard, whether you get to fly the W or not.
But my team does, today. Again. Hey Chicago, what do you say? I say I want to play life the way Harrision Bader plays centerfield... (continues)
Saturday, September 25, 2021
Charles Mills
This has been a sad week for those of us who read, study and care about political philosophy. That’s because Charles W. Mills, a U.K.-born and Jamaica-raised philosopher whose life’s work was the interrogation and critique of the foundations of liberalism, died on Monday.
Throughout his long and fruitful career, Mills worked to show how, despite its pretenses to universalism, liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has historically been strongly biased toward the material interests of white people and white polities to the detriment of nonwhite peoples and nonwhite polities. Put another way, Mills sought to answer the question posed by the great English literary critic and poet Samuel Johnson on the eve of the American Revolution, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Mills’s most famous work, “The Racial Contract,” published in 1997, is both an addition to and critique of the social contract tradition within Western political theory. It is an addition in that Mills, following the classic contractarians — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant — attempts to use the conceit of a social contract to “explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.”
Mills shows how those classic contractarian theories were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak. “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he announces at the very start of the book. And the “racial contract,” he explains, “establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom.” (continues)
Throughout his long and fruitful career, Mills worked to show how, despite its pretenses to universalism, liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has historically been strongly biased toward the material interests of white people and white polities to the detriment of nonwhite peoples and nonwhite polities. Put another way, Mills sought to answer the question posed by the great English literary critic and poet Samuel Johnson on the eve of the American Revolution, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
Mills’s most famous work, “The Racial Contract,” published in 1997, is both an addition to and critique of the social contract tradition within Western political theory. It is an addition in that Mills, following the classic contractarians — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant — attempts to use the conceit of a social contract to “explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.”
Mills shows how those classic contractarian theories were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak. “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he announces at the very start of the book. And the “racial contract,” he explains, “establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom.” (continues)
Voice and spirit
Which comes first,voice (and body,larynx etc. to speak it) or spirit? I think Faulkner may have it backwards.
The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things...The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” I agree, but in reverse: we have a voice that births a spirit that MAY possibly endure.
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 25, 2021
Light and dark
This reminds me of a question we considered in Happiness class on Thursday: What do we think about Nabokov's "common sense" view of our predicament, our "cradle above the abyss," our "brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"? And also of "the truest vision of life I know, that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark"...
…the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light…—Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 24, 2021
"But where is everybody?"—Enrico Fermihttps://t.co/ZByk8FjQTz
Streak
Flying the W, enjoying it while it lasts...
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team…” Right, Roger Angell. But, https://t.co/0WMF06HgwS
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 25, 2021
Friday, September 24, 2021
Conversations
"Reading good books is like having conversations with the finest minds of the past.""Reading good books is like having conversations with the finest minds of the past.”
— Ethics in Bricks (@EthicsInBricks) September 24, 2021
- René Descartes pic.twitter.com/R6pqss8qeg
- René Descartes https://t.co/R6pqss8qeg
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1441387341600395264?s=02)
Gull happiness
Was having a low day and then a slab of sunlight appeared beside me and I looked out and saw two seagulls on a roof and they flew off and disappeared into the sky and for a moment I felt intense gratitude to be alive on this unique planet. Hope you have a little moment of wonder. Matt Haig
“Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.”—William James (1842-1910), in a letter to friend Thomas Ward, 1868
James wrote this a couple of years before confiding to his diary that he'd "just about touched bottom" but had discovered a way of thinking about free will that might rescue his spirits. And it did. Recalling the gulls didn't hurt either.
Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old
In Athens with his daughter, Thomas Chatterton Williams could finally pay homage in person to the classical education his own father gave him.
When my father was a small boy in Galveston, Texas, with no siblings to play with or anything like a helicopter parent regimenting his time, he roamed the inscrutable world of adults all around him. On one such sortie, rummaging behind his neighbor's property, he found a neglected box of books, the names of which he recalls to this day with awe and precision. The first and most important was Will Durant's 1926 classic, "The Story of Philosophy." In its pages, he was immediately drawn to an image of Socrates, whose features reminded him of his grandmother's pig. Far from repulsed, he lingered on the image, longing to comprehend why this funny-looking man who never wrote a word was revered throughout the ages...
nyt
When my father was a small boy in Galveston, Texas, with no siblings to play with or anything like a helicopter parent regimenting his time, he roamed the inscrutable world of adults all around him. On one such sortie, rummaging behind his neighbor's property, he found a neglected box of books, the names of which he recalls to this day with awe and precision. The first and most important was Will Durant's 1926 classic, "The Story of Philosophy." In its pages, he was immediately drawn to an image of Socrates, whose features reminded him of his grandmother's pig. Far from repulsed, he lingered on the image, longing to comprehend why this funny-looking man who never wrote a word was revered throughout the ages...
nyt
Thursday, September 23, 2021
Questions Sep 27/28
Berkeley, Voltaire & Leibniz, Hume, & Rousseau, LH 15-18;FL 27-28.
Study Questions
1. What English poet declared that "whatever is, is right"?2. What German philosopher, with his "Principle of Sufficient Reason," agreed with the poet?
3. What French champion of free speech and religious toleration wrote a satirical novel/play ridiculing the idea that everything is awesome?
4. What 1755 catastrophe deeply influenced Voltaire's philosophy?
5. What did Voltaire mean by "cultivating our garden"?
6. Was Voltaire an atheist?
7. (T/F) Hume thought the human eye so flawless in its patterned intricacy that, like Paley's watch, it constitutes powerful evidence of intelligent design.
8. (T/F) Hume's view was that it's occasionally more plausible to believe that a miracle (the unexplained suspension of a law of nature) has happened, than not.
9. Rousseau said we're born free but everywhere are in ____, but can liberate ourselves by submitting to what is best for the whole community, aka the _______.
10. Who pretended to slap and body-slam the head of the WWF on stage before entering politics?
11. At what annual event do adults go to the desert and dress up as unicorns, birds, mermaids, geishas etc.?
12. What are the "two underlying Fantasyland features?"
13. Who was a hideous and tragic victim of "Kids 'R' Us Syndrome?
14. Andersen links widespread "images of fantastical sexuality" with what normalization?
BONUS QUESTIONS on Berkeley (& Locke):
- How did Samuel Johnson "refute" Berkeley's theory?
- What made Berkeley an idealist, and an immaterialist?
- In what way did Berkeley claim to be more consistent than Locke?
- What was Berkeley's Latin slogan?
- What obvious difficulty does Berkeley's theory face?
DQ
- Is it reasonable to expect the sun to rise tomorrow, or "to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my finger?" Is it objectionable?
- "The skeptic continues to reason and believe, even though he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason." 671 Does he then have a rational basis for his assertion?
- Comment: "Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous." 672
- "The growth of unreason... is a natural sequel to Hume's destruction of empiricism." 673 Did Hume destroy empiricism, or just show that it leads to skepticism? Does skepticism lead to unreason?
- Has civilization improved humanity? What do you think of Voltaire's reply to Rousseau? 688
- What do you think of Russell's comments on Rousseau's belief in God (692) and his "sentimental illogicality" (694)?
- What do you think of Rousseau's "noble savage"? 693
- What do you think of Russell's critique of the claim that the general will is always right? 699
- By enforcing laws that compel us to pay taxes and support social services (unless we're rich enough to take advantage of tax loopholes, apparently), doesn't the modern state effectively accept Rousseau's version of the social contract?
- If "whatever is, is right," is political reform or personal growth and change ever an appropriate aspiration? Does anyone ever really act as if they believe that this is the best of all possible worlds? What would you change about the world or your life, if you could?
- Even if there's a logical explanation for everything, does it follow that there's a justification?
- What's your reaction to the claim that nature is full of design without a designer (as reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in "grandeur") or what?
- Comment, in light of Boswell's last interview with Hume (see "Supremely happy"), on the cliche that "There are no atheists in foxholes."
- Comment: [We have insufficient experience of universes, to generalize an opinion as to their probable origins.]
- Can freedom be forced? Would we be more free or less, if the law didn't compel us to pay our taxes and behave lawfully? How would you feel, as a law-abiding citizen, if your neighbor could get away with lawlessness?
- Do you think we should attempt to balance personal freedom with the public interest? Are taxes and other civic obligations (including voting) examples of an attempt to do that? Can anyone ever be compelled to be free? Can an individual be truly free while others remain "chained"? Would life in a "state of nature" be a form of freedom worth having? Is anti-government libertarianism a step forward or back, progress or regress? If Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
- Have you encountered or directly experienced an event you would consider a "miracle" in Hume's sense of the term? Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Is it a miracle that you and I are alive? Do we need a better word for these events?
- If you agree that "Panglossian" (Leibnizian) optimism is ridiculous, what form of optimism isn't? Are you an optimist? Why?
- Do you like Deism? Is it more defensible, against charges of divine indifference, than mainstream theism?
- Was Voltaire's play an example of "cultivating your garden"? What other examples can you think of?
- Why do you think people who survive earthquakes, floods, tornadoes etc. so frequently praise god for sparing them, even or especially when their neighbors are not so fortunate? What does this say about human nature and religion focused on personal salvation?
The Almanac recognizes Sam Johnson's sidekick James Boswell, who was also Voltaire's friend. A good segue for us:
It's the birthday of James Boswell (books by this author), born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1740). He is best known as the author of Life of Johnson (1791), a biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, which is considered by many people to be the greatest biography ever written in English. As a young man, Boswell's father wanted him to settle down and take care of the family's ancestral estate in rural Scotland. Boswell wanted adventure, excitement, and intrigue, so he ran away to London and became a Catholic. He began keeping a journal in London, and instead of describing his thoughts and feelings about things, he wrote down scenes from his life as though they were fiction. He described his friends as though they were characters and recorded long stretches of dialogue.
As a young man, Boswell was the life of the party, and everyone who met him liked him. The French writer Voltaire invited him to stay at his house after talking to him for only half an hour. David Hume asked him to stay at his bedside when he died. He hung out with the philosopher Rousseau, and Rousseau's mistress liked him so much that she had an affair with Boswell. He was even friends with the pope. And then on May 16, 1763, he met the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson in the back room of a bookstore. Johnson was a notoriously unfriendly man, but Boswell had long admired him and tried hard to impress him. The next time they met, Johnson said to Boswell, "Give me your hand. I have taken a liking to you." Johnson was 30 years older than Boswell and he was the most renowned literary scholar in England. Boswell was undistinguished compared to Johnson's other friends, but Boswell never tried to compete with Johnson's intellect. Their relationship was like an interview that went on for years. Boswell would just ask questions and listen to Johnson talk, and then he would go home and write it all down in his journal. The two men eventually became great friends. They talked about everything from philosophy and religion to trees and turnips. Boswell knew early on that he would write Johnson's biography, but he didn't start until after Johnson's death. The work was slow going. He watched as several others published books about Johnson, and he worried that no one would care about his book when he finished it. He had to fight with his editor to keep the odd details, like the things Johnson had said to his cat and what kind of underwear he thought women should wear. He felt that these were the details that revealed who Johnson really was. When the book finally came out, it was a huge best-seller. No one had ever written such a personal biography that so completely captured a life, and no one has done so since.==
It's possible that he, like Yogi Berra, didn't say everything he said. Abe Lincoln warned us not to believe everything we read on the Internet. But these lines attributed to Voltaire are good:
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716)
...La Monadologie (Monadology) (1714) is a highly condensed outline of Leibniz's metaphsics. Complete individual substances, or monads, are dimensionless points which contain all of their properties—past, present, and future—and, indeed, the entire world. The true propositions that express their natures follow inexorably from the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.
The same themes are presented more popularly in the Discours de Metaphysique (Discourse on Metaphysics) (1686). There Leibniz emphasized the role of a benevolent deity in creating this, the best of all possible worlds, where everything exists in a perfect, pre-established harmony with everything else. Since space and time are merely relations, all of science is a study of phenomenal objects. According to Leibniz, human knowledge involves the discovery within our own minds of all that is a part of our world, and although we cannot make it otherwise, we ought to be grateful for our own inclusion in it.
And the meliorist just wants to make it better.
William James, in Pragmatism:
An old post-
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Voltaire & Leibniz
Brains, John Campbell was saying in his Berkeley interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss).
Russell raises the basic objection to Leibniz's "fantastical" scheme of windowless monads: if they (we) never really interact, how do they (we) know about each other? It might just be a bizarre collective dream, after all. And the "best possible world" claim is just not persuasive, though many will want to believe it.
People wish to think the universe good, and will be lenient to bad arguments proving that it is so, while bad arguments proving that it is bad are closely scanned. In fact, of course, the world is partly good and partly bad, and no ' problem of evil' Voltaire’s countryman Diderot offered a sharp rejoinder to those who said nonbelievers couldn’t be trusted. “An honest person is honest without threats…” [Voltaire @dawn...Leibniz@dawn... Spinoza Leibniz slides... Voltaire_Leibniz_ James]
"Whatever is, is right." I don't care which Pope* said that, it's crazy. No way to think and live.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
*An Essay on Man
Everything happens from a cause, sure, but not "for a reason" if that's code for "for the best."
Irremediably, irredeemably bad things happen. Regret is an appropriate first response. Of course we should try to prevent recurrences of the worst (by our lights) that happens.
Voltaire's Candide may be the most devastating parody ever penned. A "logical explanation for everything" leaves the world much as it found it, less than perfect and easy to improve. Feeding the hungry, curing the sick, educating the ignorant, saving the earth, etc., are obvious improvements to begin with. "All is well," Miss Blue? (An obscure reference to a sweet-hearted cleaning lady I used to hear on the radio when I was young, who ruined that phrase for me.) I don't think so.
But the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did nothing to block Voltaire's "Pangloss" from continuing to insist that everything is the result of a pre-established harmony. What must it be like, to live in a bubble of denial so insulated from reality as to permit a learned person to believe that?
After tornadoes, earthquakes, and other fatal natural disasters, people interviewed on television frequently thank god for sparing them. Hardly a reasonable response, even if a lifetime of indoctrination and insulation makes it "understandable." But to say it in the hearing of survivors whose loved ones weren't spared? Unspeakably insensitive. If "acts of god" (as the insurance companies put it) take life randomly, and you happened to be one of the random survivors, is gratitude really the humane response?
Candide's statement that "we must cultivate our garden" is a metaphor for not just talking about abstract philosophical questions but instead doing something for our species while we have the opportunity. It's a plea for applied philosophy. I'm fresh from a philosophy conference where, I'm sorry to report, the old bias in favor of Grand Theory still has its champions. Spectators, not ameliorators, more concerned to polish their conceptual palaces than rebuild the crumbling human abode. (Thinking in particular of an environmental ethics session, where activists were slighted for being less than rigorous.)
Voltaire, as noted, was a deist, a freethinker, and a pre-Darwinian. He was not an atheist. But is that just an accident of history? If he'd come along a century later, might he have embraced godlessness?
Hard to know. He marveled at nature's universe, wondered at (didn't shrink from) the stars, and burned with a passion to make a better world. The highest powers are those aligned with that quest, not the complacent and wildly premature contention that this is the best of all possible worlds. His god, in any age, would not have been an excuse for passivity or indifference to the fate of the earth and its riders.
It's possible that he, like Yogi Berra, didn't say everything he said. Abe Lincoln warned us not to believe everything we read on the Internet. But these lines attributed to Voltaire are good:
- “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
- “Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
- “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
- “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
- “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
- “The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
- “I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health.”
- “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
- “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
- “What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.”
- “The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”
- “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion”
- “The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks.”
- “Let us cultivate our garden.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716)
...La Monadologie (Monadology) (1714) is a highly condensed outline of Leibniz's metaphsics. Complete individual substances, or monads, are dimensionless points which contain all of their properties—past, present, and future—and, indeed, the entire world. The true propositions that express their natures follow inexorably from the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.
The same themes are presented more popularly in the Discours de Metaphysique (Discourse on Metaphysics) (1686). There Leibniz emphasized the role of a benevolent deity in creating this, the best of all possible worlds, where everything exists in a perfect, pre-established harmony with everything else. Since space and time are merely relations, all of science is a study of phenomenal objects. According to Leibniz, human knowledge involves the discovery within our own minds of all that is a part of our world, and although we cannot make it otherwise, we ought to be grateful for our own inclusion in it.
And the meliorist just wants to make it better.
William James, in Pragmatism:
Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind. Leibnitz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds... (continues)And,
...there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable.
==Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism, tho it has hitherto figured less as a doctrine than as an attitude in human affairs. Optimism has always been the regnant DOCTRINE in european philosophy. Pessimism was only recently introduced by Schopenhauer and counts few systematic defenders as yet. Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.
It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism... (continues)
An old post-
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Voltaire & Leibniz
Brains, John Campbell was saying in his Berkeley interview, are a big asset. "It's very important that we have brains. Their function is to reveal the world to us, not to generate a lot of random junk."
Voltaire, dubbed by Russell "the chief transmitter of English influence to France," was an enemy of philosophical junk, too. One of the great Enlightenment salon wits, a Deist and foe of social injustice who railed against religious intolerance (“Ecrasez l’infame!”) and mercilessly parodied rationalist philosophers (especially Leibniz, aka Dr. Pangloss).
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses… Candide“There is a lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed.” [slides here]William James called Leibniz's theodicy "superficiality incarnate": "Leibniz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me. It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind..." And James's comments continue, in a similarly scathing vein. He was particularly incensed by the disconnect between Leibniz's philosophy and the suffering of a distraught Clevelander whose plight and ultimate suicide stands for the despair of so many through the ages. But if you like Leibniz's defense of the ways of god, maybe you'd love his monadology. Maybe not. But if one substance is good, how good is a practical infinity of them?
Russell raises the basic objection to Leibniz's "fantastical" scheme of windowless monads: if they (we) never really interact, how do they (we) know about each other? It might just be a bizarre collective dream, after all. And the "best possible world" claim is just not persuasive, though many will want to believe it.
People wish to think the universe good, and will be lenient to bad arguments proving that it is so, while bad arguments proving that it is bad are closely scanned. In fact, of course, the world is partly good and partly bad, and no ' problem of evil' Voltaire’s countryman Diderot offered a sharp rejoinder to those who said nonbelievers couldn’t be trusted. “An honest person is honest without threats…” [Voltaire @dawn...Leibniz@dawn... Spinoza Leibniz slides... Voltaire_Leibniz_ James]
"Whatever is, is right." I don't care which Pope* said that, it's crazy. No way to think and live.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
*An Essay on Man
Everything happens from a cause, sure, but not "for a reason" if that's code for "for the best."
Irremediably, irredeemably bad things happen. Regret is an appropriate first response. Of course we should try to prevent recurrences of the worst (by our lights) that happens.
Voltaire's Candide may be the most devastating parody ever penned. A "logical explanation for everything" leaves the world much as it found it, less than perfect and easy to improve. Feeding the hungry, curing the sick, educating the ignorant, saving the earth, etc., are obvious improvements to begin with. "All is well," Miss Blue? (An obscure reference to a sweet-hearted cleaning lady I used to hear on the radio when I was young, who ruined that phrase for me.) I don't think so.
But the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did nothing to block Voltaire's "Pangloss" from continuing to insist that everything is the result of a pre-established harmony. What must it be like, to live in a bubble of denial so insulated from reality as to permit a learned person to believe that?
After tornadoes, earthquakes, and other fatal natural disasters, people interviewed on television frequently thank god for sparing them. Hardly a reasonable response, even if a lifetime of indoctrination and insulation makes it "understandable." But to say it in the hearing of survivors whose loved ones weren't spared? Unspeakably insensitive. If "acts of god" (as the insurance companies put it) take life randomly, and you happened to be one of the random survivors, is gratitude really the humane response?
Candide's statement that "we must cultivate our garden" is a metaphor for not just talking about abstract philosophical questions but instead doing something for our species while we have the opportunity. It's a plea for applied philosophy. I'm fresh from a philosophy conference where, I'm sorry to report, the old bias in favor of Grand Theory still has its champions. Spectators, not ameliorators, more concerned to polish their conceptual palaces than rebuild the crumbling human abode. (Thinking in particular of an environmental ethics session, where activists were slighted for being less than rigorous.)
Voltaire, as noted, was a deist, a freethinker, and a pre-Darwinian. He was not an atheist. But is that just an accident of history? If he'd come along a century later, might he have embraced godlessness?
Hard to know. He marveled at nature's universe, wondered at (didn't shrink from) the stars, and burned with a passion to make a better world. The highest powers are those aligned with that quest, not the complacent and wildly premature contention that this is the best of all possible worlds. His god, in any age, would not have been an excuse for passivity or indifference to the fate of the earth and its riders.
==
BONUS: Whose ex-boyfriend said the eye was proof of intelligent design?
BONUS: Melissa Lane says it was a paradox of civilization for Rousseau that we're in a society of plenty, but are less _____ than when we wandered naked in the glades of some barbaric past.
BONUS+: Who has a "walk" in Edinburgh? Who had a dog?
BONUS++: Bertrand Russell says Hume cannot refute the lunatic who thinks he's a what?
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish…. Whoever is moved by Faith to assent to [miracles] is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. David Hume
Are you an Inductivist? Do you regularly anticipate, worry about, plan for the events of the day? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise? What is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments about what we can know, based on our experience? Do such considerations make you kinder and gentler, less judgmental, more humble and carefree? Or do they annoy you?
Do you trust the marketplace to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all? Are there some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest requires us to try and provide for one another? Is there an internal mechanism ("hand") in capitalism to insure the public interest's being met? Is capitalism inherently geared to short-term private profit, not long-term public good? Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately with climate change? (On this issue, see Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.)
Asking again: Are you happy? Would you be happier if you had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
Also note: not assigned but highly recommended, Alison Gopnik's recent PB discussion of theHume-Buddhist connection.
==
David Hume (follow his little finger) has a public "walk" in Edinburgh.
In 1724 the town council bought Calton Hill, making it one of the first public parks in the country. The famous philosopher David Hume lobbied the council to build a walk ‘for the health and amusement of the inhabitants’, and you can still stroll along ‘Hume Walk’ to this day.He agreed with Diderot that good and honest people don't need threats to make them so, they just need to be well nurtured and postively reinforced in the customs and habits of a good and honest society. Divine justice, he thought, is an oxymoron. “Epicurus’ old questions are still unanswered… (continues)”
Everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality… religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place… JMH
Hume was an interestingly-birfurcated empiricist/skeptic, doubting metaphysics and causal demonstrations but still sure that “we can know the world of daily life.” That’s because the life-world is full of people collaboratively correcting one another’s errors. Hume and friends “believed morality was available to anyone through reason,” though not moral “knowledge” in the absolute and indubitable Cartesian sense. Custom is fallible but (fortunately) fixable. [Hume at 300… in 3 minutes... Belief in miracles subverts understanding]
On the question of Design, intelligent or otherwise, Hume would definitely join in the February celebration of Darwin Day. Scientific thinking is a natural human instinct, for him, for "clever animals" like ourselves, providing "the only basis we have for learning from experience." (Millican) [Hume vs. design (PB)... Hume on religion (SEP)]
“Open your eyes,” Richard Dawkins likes to say. They really are an incredible evolutionary design. Not “perfect” or previsioned, but naturally astounding.
==
David Hume (follow his little finger) has a public "walk" in Edinburgh.
In 1724 the town council bought Calton Hill, making it one of the first public parks in the country. The famous philosopher David Hume lobbied the council to build a walk ‘for the health and amusement of the inhabitants’, and you can still stroll along ‘Hume Walk’ to this day.He agreed with Diderot that good and honest people don't need threats to make them so, they just need to be well nurtured and postively reinforced in the customs and habits of a good and honest society. Divine justice, he thought, is an oxymoron. “Epicurus’ old questions are still unanswered… (continues)”
Everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality… religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place… JMHHume was an interestingly-birfurcated empiricist/skeptic, doubting metaphysics and causal demonstrations but still sure that “we can know the world of daily life.” That’s because the life-world is full of people collaboratively correcting one another’s errors. Hume and friends “believed morality was available to anyone through reason,” though not moral “knowledge” in the absolute and indubitable Cartesian sense. Custom is fallible but (fortunately) fixable. [Hume at 300… in 3 minutes... Belief in miracles subverts understanding]
On the question of Design, intelligent or otherwise, Hume would definitely join in the February celebration of Darwin Day. Scientific thinking is a natural human instinct, for him, for "clever animals" like ourselves, providing "the only basis we have for learning from experience." (Millican) [Hume vs. design (PB)... Hume on religion (SEP)]
“Open your eyes,” Richard Dawkins likes to say. They really are an incredible evolutionary design. Not “perfect” or previsioned, but naturally astounding.
==
An early episode of the new Cosmos takes a good look at the eye as well.
Julia Sweeney's ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, an evolving eye is quite a useful adaptation at every stage.
Hume, open-eyed but possibly blind to the worst implications of his skeptical brand of empiricism, is on Team Aristotle. Russell, though, says we must look hard for an escape from the "dead-end" conclusion that real knowledge must always elude us, that (for instance) we cannot refute "the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg." Russell says this is a "desperate" result. I say it would be more desperate to feel compelled to refute Mr. Egg in the first place. Remember the old Groucho line? "My brother thinks he's a chicken - we don't talk him out of it because we need the eggs."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Team Plato along with other celebrants (like the other Marx) of "a communitarian ideal based on men's dreams," was an emotional thinker with a romantically-inflated opinion of human nature and the “noble savages” who would have embodied it in a hypothetical state of nature.
What’s most interesting to me about Rousseau is that his Emile so arrested the attention ofImmanuel Kant that he allowed it to disrupt his daily walking routine “for a few days.” Nothing short of seriously-incapacitating illness would do that to me. Apparently Kant was typically the same way, except for just that once.
Kant could get very upset if well-meaning acquaintances disturbed his routines. Accepting on one occasion an invitation to an outing into the country, Kant got very nervous when he realised that he would be home later than his usual bedtime, and when he was finally delivered to his doorstep just a few minutes after ten, he was shaken with worry and disgruntlement, making it at once one of his principles never to go on such a tour again.
So what’s in Emile that could so dis-comport a creature of such deeply ingrained habit? A generally-favorable evaluation of human nature, and a prescription for education reflective of that evaluation. Kant thought highly enough of Rousseau’s point of view to hold us all to a high standard of reasoned conduct. We should always treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means to our own ends. We have a duty to regard one another with mutual respect.
The character of Emile begins learning important moral lessons from his infancy, through childhood, and into early adulthood. His education relies on the tutor’s constant supervision. The tutor must even manipulate the environment in order to teach sometimes difficult moral lessons about humility, chastity, and honesty. IEP
Yes, fine. But what precisely in Emile kept Kant off the streets, until he was finished with it?
Could have something to do with other characters in the story. “Rousseau discusses in great detail how the young pupil is to be brought up to regard women and sexuality.” Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.
Or not. Rousseau’s observations regarding women sound pretty sexist and ill-informed, nothing Kant (as a relatively un-Enlightenend male) wouldn’t already have shared.
Maybe it’s what Emile says about freedom that so arrested Kant? “The will is known to me in its action, not in its nature.”
Or religion? “It is categorically opposed to orthodox Christian views, specifically the claim that Christianity is the one true religion.” Maybe.
The Vicar claims that the correct view of the universe is to see oneself not at the center of things, but rather on the circumference, with all people realizing that we have a common center. This same notion is expressed in Rousseau’s political theory, particularly in the concept of the general will.
That’s very promising. Kant’s Copernican Revolution etc.
I wonder if the mystery of Kant’s lost walks could be related, too, to another of fellow-pedestrian Rousseau’s books, Reveries of the Solitary Walker?
The work is divided into ten “walks” in which Rousseau reflects on his life, what he sees as his contribution to the public good, and how he and his work have been misunderstood. It is interesting that Rousseau returns to nature, which he had always praised throughout his career… The Reveries, like many of Rousseau’s other works, is part story and part philosophical treatise. The reader sees in it, not only philosophy, but also the reflections of the philosopher himself.
That may not be a clue but it’s a definite inspiration for my own Philosophy Walks project, still seeking its legs.
Melissa Lane, like me, is very interested in Rousseau's walking.
BTW: we know Rousseau had a dog. Did Kant? If so, wasn’t he neglecting his duty to walk her?
Is nature full of design without a designer (as possibly reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in the "grandeur" of nature, in Darwin's view) or what? Most designers sign their work unambiguously, even ostentatiously.
We talked miracles earlier in the semester, so this may be redundant. But so many of us were so sure that we'd encountered or directly experienced suspensions of natural law that it seems worth a second pass. Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Isn't it a miracle that you and I are alive? Or that your friend or loved one, who'd received the very bad prognosis, is? Well, not exactly. All of those are plenty improbable, given certain assumptions. But none of them is an obvious law-breaker. We need a better word for these events, a word that conveys astonished and grateful surprise but does not court woo. Or I do, anyway.
J-J Rousseau seems to have been a self-indulgent paranoiac scoundrel, but he wasn't wrong to say we need to balance personal freedom with the public interest. Minimally, we need to tax ourselves enough to provide good public education, reliable infrastructure, and a secure peace. And we need to vote. (I'll ask in class how many are registered and how many will actually cast a ballot tomorrow, then I'll ask what would J-J say.)
Maybe he was just phrase-making, but "compelled to be free" has a chillier aspect from our end of the twentieth century. Whenever we act to pad our own nest wile neglecting the well-being of others, we reinforce the "chains" of oppression. Yet life is a chain. We should remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
Whenever I hear libertarians rail against government activism, I wonder: if a Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
Last Fall I tried to buoy the spirits of my friend from Kansas City, after his upstart Royals fell to the Giants. I pointed out that teams more often rally when down 3-2 than not. His pessimistic reply: I'm a skeptic about induction. It was a joke, and maybe Hume was joking too. Aren't we all Inductivists, regularly anticipating, worring about, planning for the events of our days? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise?
Of course we could do with less worry, but that's because experience has taught the truism that most of our worries are unfounded. So what, really, is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments? It's not to urge us over the Pyrrhonic cliff, but to redouble our curiosity and our humility: to make us kinder, gentler, less neurotic friends and fellow citizens. As Hume said, "Be a philosopher; but amidst your philosophy, be still a man."
Melissa Lane's interview on Rousseau raises important questions for our time, when the marketplace so clearly has faile to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all. Michael Sandel rightly says there are some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest and common decency nonetheless require us to try and provide for one another.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" seems more invisible than ever, short-term private profiteering more prevalent. Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately, for instance, with climate change? Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate says no.
More Rousseau-inspired challenges: Are we happy? Would we be happier if we had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
But let's be real, Jean-Jacques: most of that was never on offer in any realistic state of nature.
Julia Sweeney's ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, an evolving eye is quite a useful adaptation at every stage.
Hume, open-eyed but possibly blind to the worst implications of his skeptical brand of empiricism, is on Team Aristotle. Russell, though, says we must look hard for an escape from the "dead-end" conclusion that real knowledge must always elude us, that (for instance) we cannot refute "the lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg." Russell says this is a "desperate" result. I say it would be more desperate to feel compelled to refute Mr. Egg in the first place. Remember the old Groucho line? "My brother thinks he's a chicken - we don't talk him out of it because we need the eggs."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of Team Plato along with other celebrants (like the other Marx) of "a communitarian ideal based on men's dreams," was an emotional thinker with a romantically-inflated opinion of human nature and the “noble savages” who would have embodied it in a hypothetical state of nature.
What’s most interesting to me about Rousseau is that his Emile so arrested the attention ofImmanuel Kant that he allowed it to disrupt his daily walking routine “for a few days.” Nothing short of seriously-incapacitating illness would do that to me. Apparently Kant was typically the same way, except for just that once.
Kant could get very upset if well-meaning acquaintances disturbed his routines. Accepting on one occasion an invitation to an outing into the country, Kant got very nervous when he realised that he would be home later than his usual bedtime, and when he was finally delivered to his doorstep just a few minutes after ten, he was shaken with worry and disgruntlement, making it at once one of his principles never to go on such a tour again.
So what’s in Emile that could so dis-comport a creature of such deeply ingrained habit? A generally-favorable evaluation of human nature, and a prescription for education reflective of that evaluation. Kant thought highly enough of Rousseau’s point of view to hold us all to a high standard of reasoned conduct. We should always treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means to our own ends. We have a duty to regard one another with mutual respect.
The character of Emile begins learning important moral lessons from his infancy, through childhood, and into early adulthood. His education relies on the tutor’s constant supervision. The tutor must even manipulate the environment in order to teach sometimes difficult moral lessons about humility, chastity, and honesty. IEP
Yes, fine. But what precisely in Emile kept Kant off the streets, until he was finished with it?
Could have something to do with other characters in the story. “Rousseau discusses in great detail how the young pupil is to be brought up to regard women and sexuality.” Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.
Or not. Rousseau’s observations regarding women sound pretty sexist and ill-informed, nothing Kant (as a relatively un-Enlightenend male) wouldn’t already have shared.
Maybe it’s what Emile says about freedom that so arrested Kant? “The will is known to me in its action, not in its nature.”
Or religion? “It is categorically opposed to orthodox Christian views, specifically the claim that Christianity is the one true religion.” Maybe.
The Vicar claims that the correct view of the universe is to see oneself not at the center of things, but rather on the circumference, with all people realizing that we have a common center. This same notion is expressed in Rousseau’s political theory, particularly in the concept of the general will.
That’s very promising. Kant’s Copernican Revolution etc.
I wonder if the mystery of Kant’s lost walks could be related, too, to another of fellow-pedestrian Rousseau’s books, Reveries of the Solitary Walker?
The work is divided into ten “walks” in which Rousseau reflects on his life, what he sees as his contribution to the public good, and how he and his work have been misunderstood. It is interesting that Rousseau returns to nature, which he had always praised throughout his career… The Reveries, like many of Rousseau’s other works, is part story and part philosophical treatise. The reader sees in it, not only philosophy, but also the reflections of the philosopher himself.
That may not be a clue but it’s a definite inspiration for my own Philosophy Walks project, still seeking its legs.
Melissa Lane, like me, is very interested in Rousseau's walking.
BTW: we know Rousseau had a dog. Did Kant? If so, wasn’t he neglecting his duty to walk her?
Is nature full of design without a designer (as possibly reflected in the eye), complexity without a goal, adaptation and survival without any ulterior purpose? Is this marvelous or weird or grand (as in the "grandeur" of nature, in Darwin's view) or what? Most designers sign their work unambiguously, even ostentatiously.
We talked miracles earlier in the semester, so this may be redundant. But so many of us were so sure that we'd encountered or directly experienced suspensions of natural law that it seems worth a second pass. Was it a "miracle on ice" when the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in 1980? Is it a miracle that K.C. almost won the World Series? Isn't it a miracle that you and I are alive? Or that your friend or loved one, who'd received the very bad prognosis, is? Well, not exactly. All of those are plenty improbable, given certain assumptions. But none of them is an obvious law-breaker. We need a better word for these events, a word that conveys astonished and grateful surprise but does not court woo. Or I do, anyway.
J-J Rousseau seems to have been a self-indulgent paranoiac scoundrel, but he wasn't wrong to say we need to balance personal freedom with the public interest. Minimally, we need to tax ourselves enough to provide good public education, reliable infrastructure, and a secure peace. And we need to vote. (I'll ask in class how many are registered and how many will actually cast a ballot tomorrow, then I'll ask what would J-J say.)
Maybe he was just phrase-making, but "compelled to be free" has a chillier aspect from our end of the twentieth century. Whenever we act to pad our own nest wile neglecting the well-being of others, we reinforce the "chains" of oppression. Yet life is a chain. We should remember that a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
Whenever I hear libertarians rail against government activism, I wonder: if a Rand Paul had been President in the 1960s, would there have been an effective Civil Rights movement in America?
Last Fall I tried to buoy the spirits of my friend from Kansas City, after his upstart Royals fell to the Giants. I pointed out that teams more often rally when down 3-2 than not. His pessimistic reply: I'm a skeptic about induction. It was a joke, and maybe Hume was joking too. Aren't we all Inductivists, regularly anticipating, worring about, planning for the events of our days? Would it be reasonable or prudent to do otherwise?
Of course we could do with less worry, but that's because experience has taught the truism that most of our worries are unfounded. So what, really, is the practical point of entertaining Humean skeptical arguments? It's not to urge us over the Pyrrhonic cliff, but to redouble our curiosity and our humility: to make us kinder, gentler, less neurotic friends and fellow citizens. As Hume said, "Be a philosopher; but amidst your philosophy, be still a man."
Melissa Lane's interview on Rousseau raises important questions for our time, when the marketplace so clearly has faile to provide justice, fairness, security, and a shot at (the pursuit of) happiness for all. Michael Sandel rightly says there are some things money cannot buy, but that the public interest and common decency nonetheless require us to try and provide for one another.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" seems more invisible than ever, short-term private profiteering more prevalent. Can a market-oriented economy deal adequately, for instance, with climate change? Naomi Klein's new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate says no.
More Rousseau-inspired challenges: Are we happy? Would we be happier if we had better access to health care, if college costs were lower, if career competition were less intense, if you didn't have to commute to school and work, if your neighbors were your closest friends, if your community was more supportive and caring, ...? What if any or all of that could be achieved through higher taxes and a more activist government?
But let's be real, Jean-Jacques: most of that was never on offer in any realistic state of nature.
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