“The day is good, he said, in which we have the most perceptions…” –William James, Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord (1903)
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 31, 2021
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“Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.” ―Emerson, The American Scholar (1837)
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Aug 31, 2021
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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Satisfaction https://t.co/avV0cNgTjj
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Aug 31, 2021
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Today in Happiness we consider “life satisfaction” and Daniel Haybron‘s assertion that To be satisfied does not mean you think your life is going well for you…
If you’ve spent the bulk of your life imprisoned, and declare upon eventual release that you were and are happy, does that bode ill for happiness as a worthy object for a life’s quest? Or does it just speak well of the temperament of the ex-con who persevered so heroically?
Plato’s cave-dwellers in Book VII of the Republic must have thought themselves happily ensconced in their subterranean prison, else they’d not so have resented their enlightened peer’s attempt to shine a light on their situation. Happiness surely does not supersede delusion.
Wittgenstein’s dying words, “Tell them I had a wonderful life,” belie his morose reputation. So did old Schopenhauer’s scrooge-like visage. But maybe happiness can take the form, for some, of delight in adversity and mental anguish and deep pessimism, after all.
Or maybe not. Maybe Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer and the cavers and the ex-con knew satisfaction, but not happiness. I’d like to think so, and I think a lot of us would. We’d like to think our respective pursuits of happiness won’t just satisfy but ultimately will uplift, transport, and redeem us.
Ultimately. For now, though, day by day, how do we measure our satisfaction and judge its contribution to our ultimate happiness? After all, we’re “just born, and there you are. So it’s hard to know where to set the bar for a ‘good enough’ life.”
I say set the aspirational bar high, but be prepared to appreciate and celebrate close to the ground. A low and mean life would have to be pretty low and mean to be flatly unsatisfactory. It can still be lacking, disappointing, wounding, depleting, whatever, but still satisfy in ways oblivion obviously cannot. “It sure beats being dead.”
It does, doesn’t it? Sophocles in Oedipus Rex — “…count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last” — was morosely unhappy, no fit role model for us. Right?
If you don’t know you’re pain-free, you might as well not be. If you’re happy and you know it, that deserves some applause. But if you think, with Schopenhauer, that the hunt for happiness gives rise to deluded hope and dissatisfaction, well, good luck. And don’t worry, the end is always near.
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Real fraternity and solidarity emerge in a crisis despite “that confounding Southern insistence on ‘freedom’…” https://t.co/kXdfeviD1Q
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Aug 31, 2021
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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Better ancestors https://t.co/GUbf9qPz6F
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 30, 2021
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We turn to Aristotle today in CoPhi, I’m also thinking a lot this morning about my upcoming MALA classes on educating good citizens. The Stagirite has things to say about that. He
disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires preferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that the state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of merit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is to enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best instrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake. (SEP)
My MALA focus will be first on John Dewey, whose commitment to democracy also sought an equilibrium between personal liberty and communal well-being. Like Aristotle, Dewey also thought we are political animals. We are social beings with an inherent civic duty to respect and collaborate effectively with our peers in addressing matters of common concern.
And like Aristotle, Dewey placed great emphasis on human flourishing as something far more profound and lasting than fleeting pleasures, more than a feeling. It’s a state of being, the ongoing project of a lifetime coordinate with the lives of our fellow citizens, an effort to live virtuously in a community dedicated to virtue. Being a good citizen, in these terms, involves the pursuit of personal liberty and well-being no more or less urgently than that of the entire polis.
Being a good citizen also, maybe especially, involves being a good ancestor. “The most important question we must ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?'” So said the great humanist and medical researcher Jonas Salk, without whose vaccine countless lives would have been lost and countless others would never have begun.
“In an incredibly short period of time we have endangered a world that took billions of years to evolve. We are just a tiny link in the great chain of living organisms, so who are we to put it all in jeopardy with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies? Don’t we have an obligation, a responsibility, to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?” ― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World
Dewey put it this way:
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.”
That notion of community as continuous, prior and larger and posterior to our personal selves, is crucial to good ancestry. Our “heritage of values” is a sacred trust, and potentially our greatest gift to the next generations. If we neglect it, the next generations will curse our dereliction as bad citizens and bad ancestors. If we neglect it too long and too selfishly, the long-term flourishing–if not the very existence–of the next generations will be imperiled. If we treasure it, our lives and theirs may flourish.
Aristotle had the germ of that notion of community, but it took his followers millennia finally to appreciate our Deweyan responsibility to expand it to include all citizens and all persons. So to be good and virtuous citizens, concerned not only to flourish in our own right but to ensure all others the same opportunity, it’s not enough to be good ancestors. We have to be better ones.
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@JohnKaag …In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe’s life might be, “I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.”
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 27, 2021
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@JohnKaag His late letters are terrific too. To Henry Adams’ cosmic pessimism he replied: “Though the ULTIMATE state of the universe may be its extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE state might be a happy and virtuous consciousness…
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Aug 27, 2021
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@LeahLibresco @zenahitz Humanists & atheists deserve a seat at the table, if the goal really is to achieve “a vision of how the world could work when diverse traditions focus on how to be good humans and neighbors.” Humanities academics who don’t grasp that are, well, too academic.
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Aug 27, 2021
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Up@dawn 