Growing ideas

It’s good to recall, on semester’s eve, what we collegians are supposed to be up to: discovery, creativity, new ideas and the novel application of good old ones. So it was nice to stumble upon a symbol of that, while strolling Vanderbilt’s campus on their first day of class.

That’s an alleged descendant of Sir Isaac’s own tree of knowledge, planted in front of Vandy’s library in honor of Murfreesboro’s retired Congressman Gordon. He was a good friend of science and technology. There are few enough of those, in Washington, from Tennessee. He deserved at least a clipping.

So the kids are here now, with the class of ’16 all moved in and ready for a new idea.

And so I’m reminded of Fred Rogers’ good question: “Did you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind?” I’m trying. I’ll be trying again this semester, in collaboration with a hundred or so young apple-polishers at our school. We’ll see how close we can land to Sir Isaac’s tree. It really is good to be curious about many things.

Getting started

My colleagues and I at MTSU aren’t typically enthused about commencement exercises at our school. We take turns and consider it a necessary chore, to crowd into the overheated Murphy Center basketball arena and sit in our absurd medieval robes for the perfunctory “go get ’em” address by some invited minor luminary, followed by the monotonous, interminable roll-call of names A to Zed. It takes hours that seem like days.

Vandy does it better. They sit outdoors on nice days, there’s a spirit of festivity in the air that’s been building all week, and they get on with it. Their faculty probably don’t regard their ritual  much more highly than we do ours, but I’ll swap spots with them any time.

Anyway, we all need to remember that this is a day for the students and their families.  We’re bit players, part of the stage setting. We shouldn’t complain.

I ambled purposively into the throng yesterday morning before Vandy’s commencement exercises, recalling my own walk for the PhD on this campus years ago. It was the only such ceremony I’ve ever submitted to, discounting Humpty Dumpty nursery school. The look on my Dad’s face, and I guess on mine when he snapped the photo of me exiting the stage, was worth the price of admission.

Anyway, there will need to be a section in my book (working title : Philosophy Walks) for all the formal walks down aisles and across stages that accrue to a nomal life. I’ve come at last to appreciate them. As I made my way through the crowd yesterday I thought about how, for a habitual morning walker, “commencement” comes daily.  Sometimes, it’s pro forma. But sometimes it really is a new beginning.

I also appreciated Physics & Astronomy staffer Pickert’s gesture against undue solemnity on these occasions.

Tlumak on free will

What a treat to hear another of my old Vandy profs in vintage form last night, in the 3d Berry Lecture. Jeffrey Tlumak was as smart, systematic, and comprehensive as ever, in tackling the perennially elusive questions “Do we have free will?” And “Why does it matter?” (Watch this space for the video, coming soon.)

He was as smartly self-distracted as ever, too. I lost count of the always-fascinating “by the way” detours that peppered his semi-scripted talk, and forced him to abandon the bulk of it in favor of hurried synopsis at the end. But everyone in the house was gifted with the voluminous printed text he would have  voiced, were there world enough and time, and three lengthy appendices.

One of those appendices became important during Q-&-A, when Jeffrey’s colleague David Wood wondered if the whole show wasn’t “performatively self-contradictory.”  Doesn’t the very attempt at public persuasion and argumentative analysis presuppose the free will of its audience, presumably malleable enough to choose his view when dazzled by the irresistible force of his logic and language?

Well, Jeffrey replied, if you look at my 3d appendix (that brought an audience chuckle or two, for its characteristically Tlumakian attention to systematic detail) you’ll note that I don’t claim free will to be impossible.

And in fact he’d acknowledged Wood’s worry at the very beginning, in his second paragraph. Both are so elegantly clear and concise, and so cognizant of their context, they’re worth reproducing here:

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the angels debate how some of them could have sinned of their own free wills given that God had made them intelligent and happy. Why would they have done it? And why were they responsible for their sins rather than God, since God had made them the way they were and had complete foreknowledge of what they would do? Milton describes them as “in Endless Mazes lost.” If this is the plight of angels, with what confidence can we approach such questions?

Three weeks ago John Lachs tried to persuade you that good enough is good enough. Then a week later, Rob Talisse tried to persuade you that no life is good enough, that life is tragic. I will now wonder out loud whether you or I have a free choice as to which alternative, if either, to embrace — more generally, whether you have free will in anything you have ever done or will do, or whether you even have a stable conception of what you are affirming or denying. I say “wonder out loud” rather than “try to persuade,” since to be consistent, I equally doubt whether you have a free choice whether to embrace what I say.

What then follows is a clear but complex and “spine-stiffening” disquisition on the varieties of pivotal philosophical issues implicated in the free will debate. In sum, and especially for a rationalist like Jeffrey, they basically all are. He cites Spinoza’s example of a conscious plummeting rock: it might contemplate its trajectory and philosophize about its freedom, but would be incapable of altering it, or softening its termination. Just like Douglas Adams’ whale.

Tlumak praised the new book Power of Habit, which is suggestive: if indeed we do have the power of habit, we must also have something akin to what some will insist on calling free will and others will relabel. But if it directs intelligent choice and action they can call it what they will. That’s Julian Baggini’s line in his review of Sam Harris’s and Michael Gazzaniga’s new books on the topic.

…as a “biological puppet” aware of your lack of free will you can, paradoxically, “grab hold of one of your strings” and “steer a more intelligent course through our lives”. That’s what matters, and if you don’t want to call it free will, feel free to call it what you will.

There was much about Hobbesian mechanism here, and the “thin notion of ‘could have done otherwise,'” and Locke’s distinction between the voluntary and the free,  and Spinoza’s between free will and freedom. Jeffrey’s ultimately a Kantian, on this and most issues. Freedom’s a postulate of reason, but nothing you can prove. “It is practically rational for us to believe that we are transcendentally free and practically irrational not to.” Well, that’s just about good enough for pragmatists like me, too.

But what I liked most, last night, was Jeffrey’s curtain-closing scripted statement, in which he thanked his chair

for scheduling my public doubts about free will on the Ides of March, the day Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate by a group of conspirators, as foreseen (according to Plutarch) by a soothsayer. Perhaps now I can escape intellectual blame by invoking fate.

Perhaps we all can. Then again, perhaps not.

Good enough for greatness

My old teacher John Lachs delivered this year’s inaugural Berry Lecture at Vanderbilt last night. “Why is Good Enough not Good Enough for Us?” It was just as I’ve come to expect of his talks through the years, thoughtful and elegant and crisply performed. It spurned Platonism, the impossible and stultifying “pursuit of perfection” which he said

 is not the search for something definite and well-known. The limits of human capacity and the vagueness of the ideal make attainment of perfection impossible, yet its lure ruins our satisfaction with what is clearly excellent and therefore good enough.

This isn’t the “good enough” of Lake Wobegon, where things could always be worse, but the genuine good of areth [aretê] that ought to be enough to fill our hearts and entice our eagerness for the morrow. But most of us fall prey to perfectionism at one time or another, and cheat ourselves of the life satisfactions we’ve earned.

After the talk I asked Lachs if he’d seen Moneyball. He hasn’t. But consider the case of poor Billy Beane, Oakland Athletics General Manager. Incapable of relishing his small-market team’s record-setting win streak or his own unorthodox contributions to that achievement, he’s a “perfect” illustration of  Lachs’s thesis. The A’s didn’t win the Big One at season’s end, so the perfectionist GM considered himself and his team a failure. He couldn’t give himself a moment’s pause to mark and remember their remarkable success.

In A&P yesterday afternoon we heard from Daniel about another sort of perfectionist, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Uber-prophet who came too soon. Forever too soon, for the humans he thought “all too human.” Fritz was not much of a team player, but  there are legions of Nietzscheans among us still. I considered myself one, back in my early days of grad school before discovering Willy James’s less antipathetic humanism.

I do like Nietzsche’s impulse, manifest in his “gift” of eternal recurrence, to find our permanent life in nature good enough and affirm its perpetual return. But the discipline of sublimated  self-overcoming he preached and roughly practiced is too stern and self-denying for my taste. The so called will to power, the “striving to transcend and perfect oneself,” is an example of what Lachs called

our Faustian tendency to want to have and do everything… our compulsion to pursue unreachable ideals [in] the eternal dissatisfaction that permeates Western industrial society.

Reach for the stars, by all means, but as Casey Kasem used to say as he counted down to #1, keep your feet on the ground.The “good enough” perspective “substitutes joy in the immediacies of life for all-encompassing guilt.” Of course we should all be doing what we can to ameliorate the suffering and sadness that afflict so many, and not only those in our own back yard.  The Peter Singers of the world may ask too much of us, but those to whom much is given have much to give back. We need to have an answer. And yet…

This world as we know it really is more than good enough. It might even be great, like those post-lecture beers at Blackstone’s. Just wish I’d remembered to phone home. But nobody’s perfect.

You can’t walk away from education

It wasn’t my turn to walk with our graduating class this year, so I was surprised to find myself seeking out the live stream of Vanderbilt’s commencement ceremonies the other day. By “tradition” Vanderbilt saves a dime and has its Chancellor deliver the big send-off address. That’s usually a let-down. Maybe it was again, for most of the graduates. But I was excited when Chancellor Zeppos cited John Dewey and quoted him at length, on what’s best about education. The gist of it was that education is not something you can ever walk away from, if you mean to be an educated and intelligent organism. It’s a lifelong endeavor. “The heart of the sociality of man is education,” you can’t commence anything worthwhile if you already think you know it all. Good message.

And so is Tali Sharot’s, in yesterday’s Times, on the value of “cautious optimism”:

That may be the most useful message to communicate to graduates — believe you can fly, with a parachute attached, and you will soar like an eagle.

But most college graduates these days won’t be impressed by commencement cliches. They just need a little positive encouragement. They don’t need to soar, they just want to get off the ground.

Like the shuttle Endeavour, in about an hour…

POSTSCRIPT: “Expanding our knowledge, expanding our lives in space.”