After hearing this, I’d enjoy a civilized social drink & conversation at (say) our #mtsu Applied Philosophy Lyceum afterparty with @slingerland20 https://t.co/JVrq2tsOcM
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Aug 31, 2022
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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Friends, clothes, and salt https://t.co/0sANLxfKuJ
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 31, 2022
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The Honors Lecture went well, I thought. I enjoyed talking about Aristotle and Wendell, and friendship and happiness.
The Instagram photo my colleague posted was not flattering, I thought. My wife said I need new pants.
But then I thought about what Thoreau said. “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.”
Right. And somebody else–not, evidently, Mrs. Roosevelt or David Foster Wallace–said something smart too, about the vanity of fretting over superficial appearances and judgments. “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
So what I hope my audience took away was the central message about the importance of investing in our closest relationships, nurturing and sustaining them, not waiting for governments and institutions or philosopher-gurus to swoop down with solutions to what’s not working in our social life. We must build and model trust, mutuality, and reciprocity for ourselves, at home and in our neighborhoods and communities. Wendell’s “Think Little” quote sums it up: “We need better government, no doubt about it.” But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.”
We need, in other words, to take responsibility and put first things first.
I hope they also got the point of those slides at the end, and that line from Aristotle about men sharing salt (“men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’…”) and something to wash it down with. You’ve gotta have friends.
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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: Aristotle and Wendell https://t.co/f03zKzWe5T
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 30, 2022
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Today in Environmental Ethics we’re receiving more Wendell Berry.
I choose that word deliberately. Wendell’s wisdom is a gift, a receipt to treasure. The astute hypothetical aliens who might ask for more Chuck would do well to ask for another Berry too.
In CoPhi it’s time for Aristotle. That serendipitously coincides with the lead-off slot I’ve been graciously asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series.
My CoPhi Section #12 will thus crash their party on the other side of campus at 2:40 this afternoon, where we’ll consider Aristotle on friendship and happiness. I’m likely to bring Wendell into that conversation as well. I’ve already noticed some affinity between he and Socrates, now I think I also detect an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That does leave Plato the odd man out.
In particular, I notice the echo in Wendell of Aristotle’s insistence on creating strong communal lives wherein individuals have learned to trust and thus mutually support one another. That’s the collective form of friendship, or at least its cousin. Good friends, good neighbors, and good citizens share a great deal of common ground. “We need better government, no doubt about it,” writes Wendell in his 1970 essay Think Little. “But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.”
Aristotle’s great theme, in the broadly-ethical sphere that asks what it means to live a good human life and thus to flourish and attain happiness, is ευδαιμονια [eudaimonia]. Nigel Warburton’s mnemonic is worth remembering, even if a native Greek speaker might say it mangles the proper pronunciation: a flourishingly happy human is one who has succeeded in replacing you die with a virtuous life of αρετη [aretê], and thus has begun really to live. That’s excellent.
Wendell’s great theme, bound up with love of one’s homeplace and a willingness to work joyously to sustain it, live from it, try to improve it, and ultimately pass it along to its next generation of caretakers, is also (I submit) something like Aristotle’s version of happiness. Both aim at the great Graceful Life prize, αταραξια [ataraxia], serenity, tranquility, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear. And happiness. “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts.”
But Wendell disagrees with Aristotle and Solon (“Count no man happy until he is dead”), we must take our happiness where and when we find it.
I’ve made a few slides, probably too many and still in poor order. But they’ll get us talking. That too is something Wendell shares with the sage of Stagira, an uncommon ability to provoke constructive conversation. And so the Socratic gadfly from Kentucky is also an Aristotelian provocateur.
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@freganmitts Get used to it.
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER)
Aug 29, 2022
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“Men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’…”-One of many Aristotelian insights I look forward to sharing in my Honors lecture… #aristotle #friendship https://t.co/O4FsSoODPp via @SlideShare
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Aug 29, 2022
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It’s wonderful that desire persists (I love that you cite Roger Angell on that), and it’s wonderful that humans have so many ways of sublimating, channeling, and proxying desire as well. It’s an extraordinary fact about us that our love of life can take so many “ordinary” forms. https://t.co/sBDCFC2PuL
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Aug 29, 2022
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@MargaretRenkl @nytopinion It’s wonderful that desire persists (I love that you cite Roger Angell on that), and it’s wonderful that humans have so many ways of sublimating, channeling, and proxying desire as well. It’s an extraordinary fact about us that our love of life can take so many “ordinary” forms.
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Aug 29, 2022
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I’ve just posted on my Blog about: What I like https://t.co/AVCe2BBryY
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Aug 29, 2022
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Up@dawn 