foolosophy

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t?

By in atheism, foolosophy, religion, spiritual-not-religious

“I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere — childish analogies. We have to admire in humility and beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.”
Four years later, in 1949, Raner wrote Einstein again, asking for clarification: “Some people might interpret (your letter) to mean that to a Jesuit priest, anyone not a Roman Catholic is an atheist, and that you are in fact an orthodox Jew, or a Deist, or something else. Did you mean to leave room for such an interpretation, or are you from the viewpoint of the dictionary an atheist; i.e., ‘one who disbelieves in the existence of a God, or a Supreme Being?’” Einstein responded on September 28, 1949:
“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
I agree, and would also add what Noam Chomsky said when asked the same question: what do you even mean by “God” or a “Supreme Being” in the first place? At least the believers in an anthropomorphic personal god have something specific in mind that we can dismiss as a fantasy, but the attempts of sophisticated theists to be more nuanced about it quickly devolve into, uh, poetry (if you’re feeling generous), or gibberish (if you’re not).
I also pretty much agree with his characterization of the “professional atheist”. I personally identify as an atheist because, like he said about the Jesuit priest, I am one as far as the vast majority of my society is concerned. Also, given how much actual, dangerous oppression faces those in many countries who refuse to conform, I think it’s important to not take for granted our luxury to be open about our lack of belief, to help destigmatize it. But I don’t think religion ever will be totally eradicated, and my suspicion of human nature is such that I can’t get truly enthusiastic about what a wonderful world it will be if only it could be. And while I certainly understand the impulse, I can’t help but shudder a little to see the sort of tribal mentality that wants to highlight all the examples of those on “our side” — atheist musicians, actors, and other public figures. I know it can be comforting to be reminded that one isn’t alone in holding an unpopular belief, but as is so often the case with politics, it’s easy to develop a monomaniacal fixation on such a distinction. Roy Edroso has long been keenly critical of conservatives who subordinate art to propaganda for the party line, disowning entertainers who express heretical opinions, but I’ve seen quite a few liberals as well who care more about the political beliefs of an artist than the art itself.
So I feel like my atheism is more positional than ideological. I am not on anyone’s “side”. I have no desire to convince other people to agree with me; I only want to retain enough personal space in which to be free from excessive pressure to agree with them. But I’ll also assert myself against those who seem to feel that Einstein’s “attitude of humility” is somehow incongruous with open expressions of atheism. I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: in my eyes, agnosticism is a statement about the boundaries of knowledge. Atheism is a statement about the credibility of belief. We can fully admit that we don’t know absolutely everything, that we can’t see everything from a – ahem – God’s-eye perspective, while feeling confident enough to say that we see no reason to believe that our imperfect knowledge leaves a loophole for any metaphysical fantasy we can dream up.

These Are the Things I Can Do Without

By in bonsai minimalism, books, foolosophy, santutthi, Ω

I liked these passages from the chapter on Taoism in Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One:

In the face of a society that championed usefulness, the Zhuangzi championed uselessness, singing the praises of a tree so bent and unkempt that it can’t be used for anything other than shade for an afternoon nap. Zhuangzi didn’t want the Dao to be useful for politics, or even philosophy. He wanted it to be good for nothing. The same goes for each of us. Instead of making yourselves useful, he advised, make yourselves useless. Then everyone will leave you alone.
In one of the Zhuangzi’s oft-told tales, a ruler sends his officials to convince Zhuangzi to accept a prestigious government appointment. But Zhuangzi, who is fishing, doesn’t even give them a glance. As he continues his casting, he speaks of the dry bones of an ancient tortoise kept by the ruler in a temple and trotted out on special ritual occasions. “What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated or to live and keep on dragging its tail over the mud?” Zhuangzi asks. “It would have preferred to live and drag its tail over the mud,” the officials answer. “Go your ways,” Zhuangzi says, “I will keep dragging my tail over the mud.”
As in the Daodejing, the exemplary human being in the Zhuangzi is the sage, described here as a “genuine person.” The Zhuangzi also includes a tantalizing glimpse into a figure that will become central in later Daoism: the immortal who is indifferent to politics, uninterested in fame, unmoved by profit or loss, and unafraid of death.

Apophenia and Pareidolia

By in augean stables, foolosophy, spiritual-not-religious

Nicholas Humphrey:

Now, if someone tells us they have witnessed an apparently paranormal phenomenon, the situation is similar. We know their testimony could have originated from either an objective fact about the world that was genuinely paranormal or from a propensity on the observer’s part to make up a story. That is, it could have come from, as it were, either the “Objective Fact bag”, OF, or from the “Human Invention” bag, HI. In many cases we do not actually know which. We know however that the probability of finding a paranormal phenomenon in bag OF is very low indeed: otherwise the phenomena would not be considered paranormal — indeed, years have gone by and the chances are that we ourselves have seldom if ever come across clear examples of paranormal phenomena in our own experience. We also know that the probability of finding such a phenomena in bag HI is relatively high: otherwise human observers would have to be paragons of honesty and reliability, which we know they are not — indeed, every day of the week we have come across examples of people lying, exaggerating, misperceiving, misremembering, saying things for effect, and so on, and no doubt we have done it ourselves on some occasion. Hence, Hume argued, when we are required to choose one or the other hypothesis about where the testimony has come from, we ought always to assume bag HI.
It is true, Hume acknowledged, that in some circumstances we might be very unwilling to draw this conclusion. We might find it hard to believe that this person in this case could be capable of such invention. But even when the person involved is a close friend or even ourself, our understandable astonishment at this evidence for human folly ought to be much less than our astonishment at what would otherwise be evidence for natural laws being overturned.
I had cause to think of this passage recently when I heard that a guy I used to work with, a buddy of mine, had gotten a column at one of the local alt-weeklies — the one that happens to be full-on, unfiltered, Age of Aquarius-style lunacy, everything from Alien Abductions to Zodiac Signs. Put it this way: on the page opposite his column, there was a discussion of a couple books written by women who claim to be having regular conversations with Jesus His Own Self, à la Neale Donald Walsch. Fetch me my GOT-damn hip waders, Maw, it’s gonna get deep in here.
So, yeah, I picked up a copy out of camaraderie and read about the powerful mystical experience that put him on his current path of self-exploration. It was replete with all the usual SNR clichés, of course, but there were a couple unusual bits, too. For one, he claims to occasionally hear a disembodied voice calling his name. I don’t recall him saying whether or not The Voice (he capitalizes it like that) actually speaks in sentences to him, but he apparently takes guidance from it. This truly makes me worry about him a bit.
Anyway, his story followed a typical arc to a mid-life crisis, where he found himself divorced and despondent, enough so that, in desperation, he asked the universe for a sign of where to go and what to do next. His “answer” came in the form of a series of mundane coincidences, culminating in a Road-to-Damascus moment in traffic, where he took a “No Fear” license plate frame as an inspirational message from the Universe. Yes, the hillbilly who bought that frame at AutoZone because he thought it would look cool on his jacked-up 4×4, right next to the TruckNutz and the naked lady mud flaps, was actually an emissary from Beyond unwittingly delivering a spiritual pep talk. Since then, his journey of growth has proceeded apace, with people entering his life at just the right time to fulfill their role in his self-discovery, and everything happening for a reason.
I can’t help but be a little mocking in my tone, because the predictability of the script and the narcissistic absorption are just too silly. But I do think of him as a friend and a good guy, so what I really feel most of all is a little sad at yet another example of how easily people project their own power “out there”, rather than own up to it directly. It’s obvious that he wanted to receive an uplifting message specifically like that even as he professed to be open to anything; a goofy brand logo just happened to be the first thing he saw that could plausibly fit the bill. He probably saw dozens of other things that day that could have just as easily been interpreted as a divine message had he been so inclined, but he automatically filtered them out of his consciousness because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. What if, after asking for a sign, you picked up a newspaper and saw a story about a man who jumped off a bridge? How many people would shrug and accept that the Universe obviously wanted them to hurry up and kill themselves already? What if he had seen a car with a bumper sticker that read, “I’m Not Gay But My Girlfriend Is”? Would that be a sign to go get a sex change and become a lesbian? The possibilities are endless when you’re really open and creative. Try it and see! Make a game of it if you’re bored one day — ask for a sign, and then try to interpret the first significant thing you hear or see as a message. You’ll be surprised at what the Universe wants you to do!
He knew all along what he wanted to do and how to go about it, but he didn’t have the courage to admit it, so he had to go through this convoluted process of pretending to submit to some greater wisdom from another source. Horoscopes, tarot cards, palm readers, gurus, etc. all “work” on the same principle — telling you what you already know.

Thoughts are the Shadows of Our Feelings

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, psychology

You may have noticed that I like to make a game of seeing how often I can apply a quotation from Nietzsche to whatever topic I’m writing about. Honestly, when I started this blog with that amusing idea in mind, I thought it might be a little more of a challenge! But evidently, he had something to say about damn near everything, and lately, the Internet just keeps teeing up one opportunity after another. Well, who am I to refuse these gifts?

It used to be thought for the longest time, going back for thousands of years of philosophical investigation, that people think of why a certain behavior might be wrong. They think of all the rational reasons, all the things they can come up with, they go through all the pros and cons, and then arrive at the judgment, and say, “Behavior X is either wrong, or very wrong, or not so wrong, it’s fine”, and so on. So it used to be thought that people think long and hard, and then figure out the answer.
Now it turns out that actually this does not seem to be the case because first of all, people don’t always think that much, and many thought processes are not really conscious, but rather, they happen outside of consciousness. Many thoughts just happen incidentally, and people aren’t even aware of them. Therefore, instead of all these sophisticated thoughts and reasons, accidental factors enter the picture such as feelings and intuitions, for example, a sense of, “Well, I just have an intuition that this is the case”, and such factors can be much more powerful than rational thought. For morality this idea first became popular in 2001 when Jonathan Haidt published his paper on the social intuitionist model, which has been a really influential idea.
First became popular in 2001? Would you believe 1881-1888?
• They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish – and talk of “inspiration”); while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed, a kind of “inspiration” – most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract – that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize “truths” – and very far from having the courage of conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.
• Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier, and simpler.
• …so “being conscious” is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.
• ‘Once I have said I will do a thing, I do it’ – this mode of thinking counts a sign of possessing character. How many actions have been done, not because they were chosen as the most rational, but because when they occurred to us, they in some way tickled our vanity and ambition, so that we stuck with them and blindly carried them out! In this way they increase our belief in our own character and our good conscience, and thus in general our strength; while the choice of the most rational course keeps alive skepticism towards us and to this extent a feeling of weakness.

Nihil Mundi

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, nihilism, philosophy, religion

“This is my way, where is yours?” – Thus I answered those who asked me “the way”. For the way – that does not exist.

– Nietzsche
I was just reading Adam Bertocci’s brilliant Shakespearean retelling of The Big Lebowski this morning, and saw a notation where he defined nihilism as a doctrine that denies human existence has any intrinsic purpose, meaning or value. Not so, good sir! For I’m afraid it’s just a simple fact that meaning is what we make it, not an inherent property of life itself. Nihilism is the shadow of the Greek (and subsequent Christian) legacy that values universalism. The True, the Good and the Beautiful are timeless and unchanging; if deprived of the ability to believe in them, people will settle for clinging to a universal despair — there’s no meaning anywhere, anytime, in anything. The desire to make the objects of our belief and worship timeless and unchanging is still the same. (This is the sort of thing that makes Buddhists snicker — even when we seem to be utterly miserable, we’re still taking a cold comfort in refusing to give up concepts we’re attached to.) But the things you love, the things that make your life worth living, are no less meaningful just because they don’t last forever. Recognizing this is a sign of mental health, not nihilism.
So it was quite fortuitous to come across this interesting essay this afternoon:
Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of possibility. Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived. The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings. They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events. But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped. Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration.
The new possibility that Melville hoped for, therefore, is a life that steers happily between two dangers: the monotheistic aspiration to universal validity, which leads to a culture of fanaticism and self-deceit, and the atheistic descent into nihilism, which leads to a culture of purposelessness and angst.
I would add that this ties in neatly with what Isaiah Berlin noted about the importance of the Romantic movement.

You Can’t Handle the Truth

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, mythology, philosophy

John Gray:

Socrates founded European thought on the faith that truth makes us free. He never doubted that knowledge and the good life go together. He passed on this faith to Plato, and so to Christianity. The result is modern humanism.
Socrates was able to believe that the examined life is best because he thought the true and the good were one and the same: there is a changeless reality beyond the visible world, and it is perfect. When humans live the unexamined life they run after illusions. They spend their lives searching for pleasure or fleeing pain, both of which are bound to pass away. True fulfillment lies in changeless things. An examined life is best because it leads us into eternity.
We need not doubt the reality of truth to reject this Socratic faith. Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.
…The bequest of Socrates was to tether the pursuit of truth to a mystical idea of the good. Yet neither Socrates nor any other ancient thinker imagined that truth could make mankind free. They took for granted that truth would always remain the privilege of a few; there was no hope for the species. By contrast, among contemporary humanists, the Greek faith that truth makes us free has been fused with one of Christianity’s most dubious legacies — the belief that the hope of freedom belongs to everyone.
In any case, only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of the truth. Certainly ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side…Evolutionary psychologists have shown that deceit is pervasive in animal communication. Among humans the best deceivers are those who deceive themselves…In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage. The same is true in politics, and many other contexts.
But life does not work that way. Its very strength, is robustness, depends on not being a stickler for always insisting on the truth. Descartes himself acknowledged that while he was in the process of demolishing, razing to the ground, all the false ideas he had accumulated over a lifetime, he was obliged for the time being to “carry on my life as happily as I could”… To this end, Descartes decided to do what his philosophy tells us not to do, namely, follow if necessary “opinions most dubious” as if they were rock-bottom truths, and treat the merely probable as if it were certain.
If striving after truth ruins your well-being and makes you mope, if it shuts out the rest of the world and warps your temperament, what sense is there in making such a Herculean effort, especially if, at the end of it all, truth slips out of your grasp? In writing about the pursuit of philosophy, Hume repeatedly uses such terms as “fatigue”, “painful”, “burdensome”, “melancholy”. It is as if philosophy were some excruciating chore that makes the joints ache and the head throb, a two-Excedrin occupation.
…The human constitution, our biology and psychology, “Human Nature”, militates against a hermetic, solitary dedication to the truth, at least in most people, Hume suggests. In his own case, it tended to estrange him from the rest of the human species, leaving him “affrighted and confounded.”
…Our belief that we know the ultimate principles standing behind aspects of the world’s behavior is one of the mind’s illusions. The question is, how far should we surrender to those illusions? For Hume, that is a queasy predicament. To go along with all of them might make him the laughingstock of the intellectual community. At the other extreme is reason acting alone, and reason tends to feed on itself and lay waste not only philosophy but ordinary life as well. Hume is in a fix and he knows it. Should he continue to torture his brain with “subtleties and sophistries”, knowing that reason cannot justify human beliefs or prove them true? Or should he indolently subscribe to the “general maxims of the world” —an echo of Montaigne — throw his books on the fire, order a high-cholesterol dinner, and have a hilarious evening with his chums?
I have no problem with accepting that there is no such thing as “ultimate” truth, because like all human concepts, truth is defined only in relation to its opposite. Truth is not reality, it’s a idea about reality. It seems like we especially have trouble accepting this when it comes to concepts of morality. If I say that it makes no sense to talk about a state of affairs in which “everything is up”, that seems obvious — what does it even mean to talk about something being “up” without an understanding of “down”, or the potential for it to exist? But suggest that there can be no truth without falsehood being the other side of the coin, or that “good and evil” are twins as well, and people tend to act as if you’ve just set fire to the very fabric of the universe.
But I still find it useful to use a concept of truth as a polestar, as something to orient oneself around, without believing that it can ever be possessed purely and totally. Conditional truth is good enough. The alternative, to me, is accepting some form of mythological thinking, in which we base our lives on feelings rather than abstract concepts. I was thinking about that recently as I tried once again to carry on a conversation with my right-wing relatives. In one instance after another, there is simply no common ground upon which to enter into mutual understanding, because we just aren’t speaking the same language. Or, rather, we’re using the same language toward different ends. For me, it very much matters whether a particular source is reliable, or whether a given claim is true. For them, what matters is that an anecdote, a “fact”, or a belief reinforces a mythical worldview, one in which the theme is more important than the details. If forced to relinquish a particular claim, they’ll just replace it with another one. At no time is the underlying worldview called into question. That’s the ground, the base, the starting point. Everything else follows from that. And while some false beliefs are more or less harmless, what are you going to use as a basis for saying that the harmful ones should be avoided or challenged?

Bought, Ensouled

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, moralizing

“When you leave a product on the shelf, your body and soul start reclaiming itself,” says Talen. “Consumerism is never surprising. It is predicable.” His alternative call to arms? “Be imaginative.”

I’m all in favor of Buy Nothing Day. I celebrate it a couple hundred times a year, in fact. But I couldn’t help but laugh at the ironic, epigrammatic beauty of that statement. You know what’s really predicable (sic)? Romantic philippics about the “soul”-deadening effects of consumerism, as opposed to the lasting happiness of a life grounded in, uh, “natural” desires and artisanal crafts. Look, Rousseau, people were bored, unfulfilled, unimaginative and miserable long before the modern-day Satanic mills of big-box department stores, and conversely, there are people who manage to happily partake of this consumerist cornucopia without suffering an existential crash, because they were never high on utopian fantasies to begin with. All things in moderation, you know?
I note that he, like so many of his comrades, frames it as a choice between the undifferentiated mass-mind (bor-ring!) and the unique snowflake status of the true artiste (oui, oui!) Again, I suggest that people like the Right Reverend Billy might want to consider the thesis of Heath and Potter, that the real engine driving modern consumerism is the urge to distinguish oneself as an individual.

Nepenthe

By in foolosophy, psychology, science

Yeah, I’m going to say that this looks rife with potential for unintended consequences:
Soldiers haunted by scenes of war and victims scarred by violence may wish they could wipe the memories from their minds. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University say that may someday be possible.
A commercial drug remains far off — and its use would be subject to many ethical and practical questions. But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to erase memories forever.
“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, professor and chair of neuroscience in the Hopkins School of Medicine.
…”Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” she said. “But completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences.”
…Wolpe could see only limited uses for erasing a memory for now, such as for those suffering after a rape or single terrifying event.
“Certainly, there may be appropriate applications,” he said. “But human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.”
I don’t dismiss this lightly, let me add. My mom thought I had total recall as a toddler (I don’t), and I’ve had others suggest that I have a memory often found among people with some of the mild autism-spectrum characteristics (which seems plausible from what I’ve learned since then). I’ve actually long been in the habit of pretending to forget things occasionally, or downplaying how easily I can remember odd details even after long periods of time, because I’ve found that it tends to freak people out. Probably because they assume that only an obsessed stalker could possibly remember that much.
So I’m very well aware that there are a number of things that would probably increase my overall happiness were they to be surgically removed from my memory, but still, I’d never choose that option, especially in light of the theme we were just discussing.

The Religion of Comfortableness

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy

Phil Oliver:

The trouble with J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and western liberalism generally, for him, were their progressive, optimistic interest in maximizing happiness (though he announced his own “formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal”) and pleasure and minimizing difficulty and pain.

To be more specific, what Nietzsche really had a problem with was the idea that pleasure and pain were clearly mutually exclusive. Alain de Botton wrote a nice passage explaining his antipathy toward utilitarianism:
Yet traces of his horticultural enthusiasm survived in his philosophy, for in certain passages, he proposed that we should look at our difficulties like gardeners. At their roots, plants can be odd and unpleasant, but a person with knowledge and faith in their potential will lead them to bear beautiful flowers and fruit — just as, in life, at root level, there may be difficult emotions and situations which can nevertheless result, through careful cultivation, in the greatest achievements and joys.

One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis.

But most of us fail to recognize the debt we owe to these shoots of difficulty. We are liable to think that anxiety and envy have nothing legitimate to teach us and so remove them like emotional weeds. We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that ‘the higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all…everything first-rate must be causa sui (the cause of itself).’
Yet ‘good and honored things’ were, Nietzsche stressed, ‘artfully related, knotted and crocheted to…wicked, apparently antithetical things’. ‘Love and hate, gratitude and revenge, good nature and anger…belong together,’ which does not mean that they have to be expressed together, but that a positive may be the result of a negative successfully gardened. Therefore:

The emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness and lust for domination [are] life-conditioning emotions…which must fundamentally and essentially be present in the total economy of life.

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
He thought Mill, Bentham, et. al. had a simplistic, facile conception of pain and pleasure that didn’t take account of the way the boundaries between the two are always in flux, and that in some cases, it wasn’t for anyone else to judge what constituted unbearable suffering for another.
When people try to benefit someone in distress, the intellectual frivolity with which those moved by pity assume the role of fate is for the most part outrageous; one simply knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress”, the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed – all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. It never occurs to them that, to put it mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell. No, the “religion of pity” (or “the heart”) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly.
If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude towards yourself that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you for even an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together, or, in your case, remain small together.
Of course, a lot of people are accepting of the idea that pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin, and that it’s impossible to have one without the other. After all, Nietzsche’s own maxim that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has actually become a worn-out cliché in our time. A different twist that I see a lot, one that I think needs addressing, is the rationalization technique in which one tries to retroactively define negative experiences as positive ones, blessings in disguise. Sometimes you hear people say that some horrible experience was “actually the best thing that ever happened to me!” Well, no. If we’re going to turn negatives into positives, the negatives have to be allowed to remain negatives. That’s where their power derives from, so to speak. Claiming that everything is good in one form or another is like saying that “everything is up”. It makes the term meaningless. Plus, it’s just semantics. You can’t define or rationalize away the immediate experience of pain or fear, something no one enjoys at the time. You just have to accept the inevitability of it and cultivate techniques for getting through it without coming to pieces; the benefits come later. There’s no contradiction in being glad for a useful lesson derived the hard way while also admitting that you would never willingly choose to experience such a thing again.

The Adam of Blogging

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, writing

Nietzsche was very fond of him. Alain de Botton devoted an interesting chapter of The Consolations of Philosophy to him. I’ve had the Essays in the stack of books to read for a while now. And Sarah Bakewell has written what looks to be an interesting book about him:

These days, the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris. And it flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before.
Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that such understanding between remote eras and cultures was possible. “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition,” he said. We are united in the very fact of our diversity, and “this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” His book is such a world, and when we look into it there is no end to the strangeness and familiarity we might see.

For the Sake of Argument

By in atheism, foolosophy, nietzsche

Andrew Anthony:

Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a “narrow but quite deep difference” between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic.

Right on. Let me quote this Nietzschean aphorism again:

Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

Mentis Fugit

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation, science

io9:

People spend 46.9% of their waking lives thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing. It’s a terribly inefficient use of one’s mind and, worse, it actually seems to make people unhappy.

Letting your mind wander might seem like a bad thing, but really it’s just the natural byproduct of being capable of abstract thought. Humans are capable of thinking about things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that may never happen at all. (As a science fiction blog, we rather encourage doing that last part.) Sure, letting your mind wander is a good recipe for goofing off, but it’s also a necessary part of contemplation and reflection.

I’ve quoted this from Auden several times before, but it just sums it up so perfectly:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,

We anticipate or remember but never are.

But yeah, I think there’s maybe a little more nuance to this. As many have said, especially Buddhists, the future and the past are mere abstractions. We only actually exist in “now”. Alan Watts used the image of a ship’s prow to symbolize this — we only ever exist right there, at the prow, as it cuts through the water, and the past flows behind us in our wake.

If you spend every present moment wishing you were somewhere else, you’re going to feel perpetually dissatisfied, since the pleasures you’re so eagerly anticipating will seem boring once they become actualized, and you’ll already be looking forward to the next one. It’ll never feel like you’ve actually experienced anything fully. You’ve become attached to the wanting, not the having.

But on the other hand, meditation is, in many ways, a form of purposely letting your mind wander, tiring itself out. Personally, I do my meditating while listening to music, and I find it revitalizing, not distracting. It’s like a mental equivalent of a good workout. Sometimes I do it while performing simple tasks that don’t require my undivided attention, like washing dishes or cutting grass, and it seems to me that somehow, the repetitive physical activity keeps me grounded, even though my mind may be on various other things. I’m not sure how to explain that exactly.

Your Neighbor as Yourself

By in foolosophy, philosophy, religion

It seems to me that a Buddhist perspective on identity would help resolve a lot of the apparent conflicts Judith Lichtenberg discusses here:
Still, doubting altruism is easy, even when it seems at first glance to be apparent. It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled. Students in introductory philosophy courses torture their professors with this reasoning. And its logic can seem inexorable.
The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!” Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind.
A question: Why? Another one: Sez who? An acerbic response: Maybe the desire for purity is the entire problem here.
No, seriously — why is it a problem to consider that there’s always at least a subtle amount of self-interest factoring in to every decision we make? How does that somehow taint the beneficent effects of our actions? I mean, if I were a pure egoist, I would absolutely love for everyone around me to have been thoroughly inculcated with the idea that they should act to please and benefit others with no thought of reciprocation. If I wanted to create a docile group of pushovers, doormats and slaves, I think I’d find it quite useful to preach the virtues of extreme humility. There can indeed be too much of a good thing (as she admits later on, to be fair).

The point is rather that the kind of altruism we ought to encourage, and probably the only kind with staying power, is satisfying to those who practice it. Studies of rescuers show that they don’t believe their behavior is extraordinary; they feel they must do what they do, because it’s just part of who they are. The same holds for more common, less newsworthy acts — working in soup kitchens, taking pets to people in nursing homes, helping strangers find their way, being neighborly. People who act in these ways believe that they ought to help others, but they also want to help, because doing so affirms who they are and want to be and the kind of world they want to exist. As Prof. Neera Badhwar has argued, their identity is tied up with their values, thus tying self-interest and altruism together.

But phrasing it like that – “I want to help others because it’s part of who I am, and it’s the sort of world I want to live in where my values are embodied” – seems to reinforce the same “empty, unfalsifiable” egoism she wants to undermine, funny enough. To bring it back around to what I said to begin, perhaps a better way to encourage the healthy variety of altruism would be to focus on the lack of any essential separation between self and other. From that perspective, there is no more “I” or “you”, only right action.

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me

By in books, foolosophy, so many books, so little time

“I cannot live without books.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Despite having recently resolved to no longer recognize such cultural constructs as the heliocentric “calendar”, “linear time”, European “numerals” and the Hindu-Arabic “numeration system”, or “denial of impending middle age”, it nonetheless came to pass that sometime over the last week or so, I successfully completed yet another 365¼-day course of maintaining an uninterrupted heartbeat while managing to draw breath at more or less consistent intervals, a feat which our culture deems worthy of celebration and reward. That, in addition to a recent trip to the Green Valley Book Fair, has directly led to the accumulation of goods you see above. That is the current “To Read” stack, possibly a Sisyphean task, but one I accept with cheerful aplomb.
“Book addict.” “No-life-having loser.” “NERRRRRD!” These and other terms are sometimes thoughtlessly bandied about in response to such treasure hoards. But I look at it differently: this gives me something to live for when times get rough!
And in addition to the Socrates book I mentioned recently, I see another addition to the stack coming next spring. Bring it on, I say, bring it on.

I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me and We Are All Together

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, science, spiritual-not-religious

For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes;
As proper people find it strange
That we are changed by what we change,
That no event can happen twice
And that no two existences
Can ever be alike; we’d rather
Be perfect copies of our father,
Prefer our idées fixes to be
True of a fixed reality.
No wonder, then, we lose our nerve
And blubber when we should observe…
– W.H. Auden
Alva Noë:

Mind, after all, is almost universally taken to be something inside us. That was Descartes’ view. Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels. Each of us is identical to that thing. Neuroscience updates the picture by adding that that thing inside you that thinks and feels is your brain.
You are your brain!
What are the implications of such a view? One is that we inhabit our bodies as a submariner inhabits his or her vessel; the main function of the body is to transmit signals from the surrounding sea of stimulation to neural headquarters. And what of the world beyond the body? Well, it is nothing more than a sea of potential stimulation! And what of other people? These are nothing other than more-or-less persistent patterns in the flow of surrounding stimulation!
What an ugly idea!
…Let’s imagine a new possibility. Your brain is not the thing inside you that thinks and feels. Not because something immaterial does this work for you, but because nothing does. Thinking and feeling is not something that happens in you, not in your brain, or anywhere else. Consciousness is something you achieve. It is something you do, and like everything else you do, it depends on your embedding in and reliance on the world around you (including other people).
Trying to find consciousness in the brain — consider this! — would be like trying to find the value of money in the molecular structure of bank notes. And just as the fact that we can’t find the value of money using an electron microscope does not show that value is mysterious, the fact that we can’t find consciousness in the brain does not show that consciousness is somehow unnatural.
Well, first of all, monetary value is not a property of coins and dollar bills; those are just symbolic representations of value, which itself is abstract and symbolic. The brain on the other hand, is not symbolic of consciousness, and consciousness is very much an emergent property of the brain, so this metaphor kind of falls flat.
Other than that, he seems to just be playing fast and loose with the definition of who “you” are. It is, of course, obviously true that we, as conventionally defined individuals, don’t exist in a vacuum. As Nietzsche said in response to Kant’s concept of the Ding-an-sich:
The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”:
if one removes other “things”, then a thing has no properties,
i.e., there is no thing without other things,
i.e., there is no “thing-in-itself”.
You, Joe/Josephine Blogreader, are a physical product of your parents’ DNA, and all the air, food and water that have maintained you since birth. Mentally, the thoughts you think are conditioned by the culture you live in and the language you speak, both of which are organic processes in constant evolution, with countless contributions along the way from countless people. So in that sense, yes, you are not simply a self-contained, unchanging, timeless observer peering out from the fortress of your body at a world filled with dead matter and likewise separate observers. “You” wouldn’t exist without “everything else”, as a lengthy stay in a sensory deprivation tank would make clear.
However, your individual brain is the nexus, the crossroads in time, where all these physical and cultural elements come together to form unique and unrepeatable combinations of experience. Remove or severely damage that, and there won’t be anyone “doing” or “achieving” consciousness on any level. No other conventionally defined individual will have the same thoughts you do at the same time about the same events as viewed from the same perspective. No one else will ever have the precise experience that you have, informed by the same history, at 3:18 on Wednesday afternoon next week. Understanding this does not imply a life of empty, spiritual barrenness or any of the other clichés he trots out, just as understanding the former perspective does not imply mental peace and bliss. You can fully grasp that life itself, the great process, the Tao, the “I know not what” will continue on after absorbing all of our temporary individual selves back into itself and still feel a pang of wistfulness at the thought of your individual perspective, limited as it is, coming to an end at some point.

Textual Intercourse

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy, religion, spiritual-not-religious, writing

We all approach literature with a slight narcissistic perspective. We can’t help but read our own lives and experiences into the story. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. When we discussed Albert Camus’s The Fall in philosophy class, the part that grabbed my adolescent self by the lapels and shook me was the section on pp. 31-32 about friendship, and the line that burned itself into my brain right then and there was, “Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us?” At the time, I was watching many of my friends go off to college or careers, wondering if I was ever going to see some of them again, wondering if there were any relationships in my life that would withstand a long separation of time and distance. I was already concerned with a theme that still preoccupies me today; namely, that of trying to create a life that allows time for something besides working and consuming, while fearing that doing so might mean cutting myself off from some of the people I wanted to share it with.

Safe to say that wasn’t exactly the main theme of the book. But nonetheless, I wanted to read more by a man who could reach into my brain like that, pluck out an inchoate thought, and articulate it in such a poetic way. And while Dostoevsky is certainly a more complex writer than I gleaned at the time, it was his clear, uncompromising portrayal of Ivan Karamazov’s refusal to accept a God and heaven built on the needless suffering of innocents that galvanized that same idealistic, adolescent self and made me want to better understand a mind that could envision such an outlook. I entered through a narrow individual perspective, but doing so led me to much wider considerations.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my point. I recently read a paragraph from an Alan Watts lecture that touched on a recurring theme of his, one that has since been taken up by numerous people determined to believe that all religious traditions are basically stating the same eternal truths in their own idiosyncratic ways:

One day A gets furious at its natural enemy B and says, “Let us obliterate B.” They gather their forces and knock out their enemy. After a while, they begin to get weak and overpopulated. There is nobody around to eat up their surplus members, and they do not have to keep their muscles strong to defend against an enemy. They begin to fall apart because they have destroyed their enemy, and they remember that what they should do is cultivate the enemy. That is the real meaning of “Love your enemy.” There is such a thing as a beloved enemy. If the flies and spiders did not have each other, there would be either too many spiders or too many flies. These balances maintain the course of nature. It is exactly the same with the libertines and the prudes. They need each other.

Watts spent a lot of time trying to reconcile a liberal form of Christianity to the Eastern philosophy he preferred before reluctantly concluding that the exclusivity of Christian dogma made it ultimately futile, but he still kept this philosopher-Jesus on hand for frequent reference, as so many people do who want to believe that the inspiration himself would want nothing to do with what’s been done in his name. As it happens, I was just talking about this with Noel, one of the denizens I keep chained in the comment section to provide me with repartee — religious myths are, by their nature, not supposed to provide us with objective truths. They poetically express common themes that apply to the experience of specific groups, or sometimes humanity as a whole, and different people can derive different lessons from them depending on their circumstances. But Christianity is built on the assertion that an individual human, at a very specific point in time, did in fact perform certain historical acts for the benefit of those who willingly believe the story. Biblical scholarship indicates that Jesus, to whatever extent any historical information can be known about him, very much believed in a Manichean state of affairs in which good would eventually obliterate evil, not coexist with it. Now, I agree that Watts’s interpretation of the saying is a good and useful one. But it’s simply not accurate to project that interpretation backward, and as I keep saying, it’s a waste of time to try and reinvent Christianity as an allegorical fable when the majority of believers have accepted its historical claims and expect definite results at some point in the future.
It would have been silly and dishonest for me to pretend that those novels were written specifically for me as a nineteen year-old while ignoring the authors’ perspectives and motivations, and it’s no less so for people to treat religious texts in the same way. Take whatever you want away from them, but don’t forget that not all perspectives are equally valid.
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