The Digital Cave

Coming Oct 2-

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Yes we can

Walked back to the Obama Center early this morning to see more of the surrounding campus. Without yesterday‘s crush of crowd, it’s a beautiful meditative space. And inspiring. The total experience is much more than nostalgia. “Yes we can!” —as I said when we squeezed into the capacious elevator leaving the Skyview deck yesterday afternoon.

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At the Obama Center: “A dumb war. A rash war…”

Yet another war.

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Rousseau’s reminder

Spotted on this morning’s walk near UChicago.

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Talk, talk, talk! Words, words, words…

 [Substack]

We were talking (talking, nota bene) the other day about the limits of language, and William James’s sense of the “glimmer and twinkle” of something in “the living act of perception,” something that language cannot catch but that honest philosophers must acknowledge. I’ll be curious to see if the Existentialists share a similar skepticism towards those who uncritically accept our human ability to know reality verbally. The post-existentialist structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, theoretical psychoanalysts, Derrideans et al definitely do not. (Or maybe it would be better to say they don’t really buy into the idea that “reality” names something nonverbal.) Derrida famously said “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is no outside-the-text”), a view James would find laughable. Me too.

I was reminded of this while reading Emily Eakin’s new memoir/history of those post-existentialists, The Frenchmen. At the end of chapter 27 she writes of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981):

…he’d scrubbed his work of any residue of biology or Darwin… there were fewer and fewer allusions to the world of things. Lacan had abandoned Earth for the theoretical firmament. [A critic wrote:] ‘…when I read his work I can’t help thinking, ‘Words, words, words.’

And at the beginning of chapter 28:

Words, words, words indeed. You’d be hard pressed to come up with a better slogan for the decade [of the fifties in French philosophy]. 

Ha! In 1892 William James had written:

What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words. —Letters I, Dec 28

And in Pragmatism III (1907) be wrote:

The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either. It will be an alteration in ‘the seat of authority’ that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation.

James loved words too. He just didn’t think they crowd out nature and the rest of the unverbalized fields of our experience. As Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So WJ would say to Lacan and his logorrheic peers.

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Lollygaggers

That’s what we call our old Vandy grad school cohort which gathers once a year late in summer, a name culled from the Durham Bulls in the old Kevin Costner film. (“It’s a long season, you gotta trust it,” said Crash Davis.)

We’ve just concluded another great Lollygaggers August reunion, the this time in Birmingham. (We always pick a minor league venue most of us can drive to, from our various points on the compass.)

We’ve been doing these annual meetups since 2017. Now most of us are retired. For a weekend every summer we still get to feel, just slightly and sporadically, like our old young ‘80s student selves. It’s good, rejuvenating even, to stay in touch with those youngsters. I recommend it, class of 2030.

Next August in Knoxville (on our 10th anniversary) I’m going to see if I can get the guys to reminisce, on the record, about what it has meant to each of them to be an American philosopher/academic in our peculiar times. We all have stories to tell, and memories more or less intact. More than half a millennium’s worth of aggregated years between us, at an average age of 70 each. That’s a lot of lifelong learning!

Speak, memory. Before we forget.

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The Breakup

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How I’ll greet the class of 2030 today

In addition to our usual “Who are you, why are you here” (etc.) introductions, we’ll talk about what philosophy is (getting philosophers to agree about that really is like herding cats) and our personal favorites.

Philosophy Bites, Nihilism vs. Meliorism

Nigel Warburton’s podcast, a good supplement to his Little History of Philosophy (which we are reading): https://philosophybites.com/

If you search the site for “definitions of philosophy” this comes up… including an episode from 2010 that asks numerous contemporary philosophers What is Philosophy? No two answers are the same. Philosophers do tend to think for themselves. The good ones, though, do not think by themselves. They converse and collaborate. They’re Co-Philosophers, like we aim to be in this course.

My own definition of philosophy, beyond the etymological/literal “love of wisdom,” is William James’s: “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly,” and to live in the light of that clarity.

And my own personal philosophy, if reduced to a word, is decidedly not Sally Brown’s “No!” That’s too much like deep pessimism or even nihilism.

No, the word I’d choose is: meliorism. You’ll hear it again. 

It rejects pure optimism and deep pessimism alike. It means trying to make things better. And it comes from, guess who… “Willie” James (as one of mty old Vandy mentors familiarly called my favorite philosopher who’s been dead but not gone for 116+ years now. In Pragmatism–“a new name for some old ways of thinking” dedicated 

To the Memory of John Stuart Mill

from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind
and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.

he writes:

…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…

Me too.

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Independence matters

MTSU’s Fall ’26 convocation Saturday afternoon gathered the class of 2030, a nice round scifi-sounding graduation date for my last Opening Day classes tomorrow. The speaker was historian Edward Larson, author of the freshman summer read Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters as well as the prize-winning account of the 1925 Scopes Trial Summer of the Gods which we read in my MALA “Evolution in America” course. TrueBlueTV recorded it. He begins at about the 38-minute mark.

I appreciated his call to our new students to seize the spirit of ’76 and Tom Paine’s Common Sense, and each to pursue their own life, liberty, and happiness in the full freedom of independent thought and cultivated character. Hope they were listening.

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Applied Philosophy Lyceum: Oct 2, 5 pm, COE 164

The Digital Cave

Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm

An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag

Abstract

We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato’s cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger’s account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.

The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy’s task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.

About the Speaker

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors’ Choice selections.

His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.

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