Hiking with RWE, Nz
Just got back from a conference in Big Sky, MT, where we read and then discussed Emerson and Nietzsche. (The view above is from our hotel window.) It was a great conference. Much of the discussion seemed to center around the notion of liberty — how you get it, according to each philosopher. Views differed widely among the participants. Some thought it is a matter of literary sophistication — so both RWE and Nz were trying to teach us to be better readers. Others thought it all came down to finding or creating your own voice, often or always in opposition to determining forces around you. And others thought that our thinkers never really came to a satisfactory solution. We are hemmed in by hoops of necessity, as RWE put it, and at the same time there is a space for authenticity and self-determination — and, please, don’t press for details. What a delightful way to waste a perfectly good weekend!
Powder Mountain
Went for a hike yesterday on Powder Mountain, a ski hill, with a group of old and new friends. We came across Hidden Lake, which afforded an opportunity for wading, swimming, and plummeting from a rope swing. The valley seen in the distance is where we live, Cache Valley.
Ah, the good old days…
Mike raises the following question:
From Nz’s perspective, what was the world like before the death of God? The best answer I have at the moment is The Gay Science #84 the last paragraph. Maybe that’s *way* before the death of God though or maybe that’s basically what it is.
I don’t have GS handy, but I did come across an interesting and relevant notebook entry from 1887:
What advantages did the Christian morality hypothesis offer?
1. it conferred on man an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away
2. it served the advocates of God to the extent that, despite suffering and evil, it let the world have the character of perfection – including “freedom” – and evil appeared full of sense
3. it posited a knowledge of absolute values in man and thus gave him adequate knowledge of precisely the most important thing.
it prevented man from despising himself as man, from taking against life, from despairing of knowing: it was a means of preservation – in sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism.
[This is from Pearson's and Large's Nietzsche Reader, p. 385]
So I take it that, before the death of god, it felt like we were significant, and that was a good survival strategy for staving off despair and suicide. Now the question is whether we can live with the truth, and invent for ourselves some new survival strategy. In this same set of notes, Nz provides the eternal recurrence as such a strategy. He seems to think it’s better than accepting the plain old “you live, you die, that’s it” since that thought makes nothingness the “goal” of the universe, or at least becomes the universe’s prevalent theme. If nihilism is something to be fought against — and for Nietzsche, it was — we need a replacement for God.
Two book matters
Genius of the Heart is available in Kindle form now. I have yet to hold/use a Kindle, but I hear they’re pretty great.
Also: if you, dear reader of Huenemanniac, have read the silly book, would you consider posting a review? Note that I’m NOT saying “post a review only if you have kind things to say.” That would be evil, and I’m beyond that. The one review that was there has mysteriously disappeared — maybe something having to do with the Kindle thing.
I did the 150 miles
… though in a modified fashion. Went a full 100+ miles on Saturday, and about 50 today, so the total is still what I promised. It was an interesting ride. I was by myself, floating in and out of riding conversations, with plenty of solo time to stew over philosophical questions (like, “Are there any emotions which aren’t in some way pleasurable?”).
Thanks again to all those who supported the MS ride.
Amazing chalk pictures
My apologies for the dearth of postings lately. My attention has been scattered by an essay on Spinoza, closely reading Emerson and Nietzsche for an upcoming conference, and a conference paper on Nietzsche, and a book project on Spinoza — and a family vacation to DC, which was a blast. Anyhow, in the meantime, here is a sampling of some unbelievable chalk paintings:
More about the artist, and more fascinating works, can be found here.
Spinoza’s trip to the zoo
I have been trying to get a good understanding of Spinoza’s advice for handling the passions. My understanding seems to require stories and analogies, so I ended up with this one:
Imagine taking a group of very special kids on a field trip. Each of them is enormously sensitive to different sorts of stimuli, and will react to them with great and terrible enthusiasm. Your mission is to take them to the zoo and back. If you just carelessly make the trip, there will be many, many sudden outbursts, as Mary sees balloons, Jose sees water fountains, and Tom hears lions roaring. These outbursts will trigger further outbursts from the children who are sensitive toward outbursts in general. Reasoning with the children or bribing them with sweets will not help, since the reasons and bribes you offer them will never have as much force with them as the stimuli to which they are “set” to respond. If you want to accomplish this mission peacefully, without so many disruptions, so that a good time is had by all, you will plan very carefully to avoid certain stimuli, or to have distractions at the ready, or you may choose to break the group into smaller groups and direct them toward attractions which won’t trigger the responses of the kids in that particular group.
You yourself are being driven by a desire to get to the zoo and back with as little suffering as possible. It is true that you too may be distracted, or succumb to your shameful desire to ditch the kids and go grab a beer. So you may prepare for yourself certain strategies or mantras to keep yourself on task; if you are mature enough, you may be able to stay on task by promising yourself rewards for a job well done.
In the end, you will fail. There are simply too many ways for things to go wrong. You will run into an old college drinking buddy, or the lion cage will have moved, or some idiot will be honking a loud horn and passing out free balloons. When that happens, you will console yourself by recognizing that these things were beyond your control and could not have been avoided. And why will this be consoling? Because it diffuses the blame into the wider cosmos, and offers you no tangible object for meaningful regret, scorn, or hatred. You may even come to laugh over it, as you appreciate all the causes which conspired to ruin your day. And that, my friends, is the intellectual love of God.
What’s wisdom?
The University of Chicago is hosting an interdisciplinary project called Defining Wisdom. The idea is to draw on work across disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. – to try to gain a better picture of the nature and benefits of wisdom. I like the idea, though the project is still in a very early stage, and not a lot has come of it yet. Psychologists like Dan Gilbert (see his TED talk here) have shown that “happiness” – or at least many features of happiness — is not unreachable through experimental methods. Why not think the same is true of “wisdom”? There is a rough consensus of when the label is used correctly, which makes it prima facie plausible that there is some real meaning behind the term.
My own sense is that wisdom simply means knowing what’s important. This could be over a narrow domain: a mechanic can be car-wise or a lawyer law-wise if they know their subjects well enough to sort through the noise and grasp what’s essential in the problems that come before them. Or the knowledge could be over the broad domain of life, as when people know what activities and relationships are important in life, and gear their lives toward them.
So how do you figure out what’s important? Through the tumble of experience, usually. You find out what’s not important the hard way – by spending too much time with it and realizing that your time has been wasted. If you are lucky, you will stumble across something that really feels significant, meaning (I guess) that it gives you a lasting happiness, or at least a lack of lasting unhappiness. Seems like most humans find good interpersonal relationships, mental stimulation, and physical health to be important. Some also get that significant feeling by joining into a humanitarian cause that extends their concerns beyond their own lives. (See Gilbert’s talk, linked above, about what generally leads to human happiness.)
Two concerns, though. First, it seems possible for someone to be wise without being anywhere near happiness. Think of Schopenhauer. It doesn’t seem at all wrong to call him a wise philosopher, but his wisdom consisted in the insight that all existence is suffering and it would have been better not to have been born. Second, I can imagine someone taking the stance that “just because you think you’ve found wisdom, and feel all happy about it, doesn’t mean you are genuinely wise.”
I think the Schopenhauer concern – and we could throw in the Stoics as well – shows that happiness isn’t the only measure of wisdom. There is a truth component to wisdom in addition to the emotional component. If I feel happiness as a result of false beliefs, I’m not wise. I’m just a lucky fool. On the other hand, if I self-consciously dupe myself with the aim of feeling happy, then maybe I am wise; maybe my wisdom is that happiness is the only valuable state, and one should seek whatever brings it about. But that would be an intentional self-deception based on a truthful insight. There is plenty of room for substantive discussion here – is it ever wise to dupe oneself? Are there truths we should avoid learning? But these are questions well worth asking. I hope the “Defining Wisdom” project gets on with discussing them.
This requirement – that wisdom has to be grounded in truth – goes a long way to answering the second concern as well. At any moment, I might think I am wise, and have found true bliss, etc. – but there’s always, always the possibility I’ve deceived myself and oversimplified the world. No, not just the possibility: the probability. As Dr. House teaches, “Everybody lies.”
Why be a necessitarian?
Because one cannot do otherwise, of course. But more seriously, I have been thinking about this question in the case of Spinoza. It’s clear that he took himself to be a necessitarian — “I have shown clearly enough that from God’s supreme power all things have necessarily flowed by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows that its angles are equal to two right angles.” He never flinches from the label, though many of his correspondents pester him with all of the ugly consequences this view entails (no contra-causal freedom, seemingly no moral responsibility, sin backsplashing on God, etc). The problem is that, throughout his works, he never completely explains exactly how God’s nature is supposed to necessitate all things, and even goes so far as to demonstrate that from God’s nature alone you cannot derive the existence of any particular finite thing. So it’s puzzling why he should insist on being a necessitarian while at the same time not buying the whole hog and making each and every single thing flow out of God somehow.
I don’t really believe that someone becomes a necessitarian solely from philosophical arguments. There has to be something else attractive in it. So what is it? Is it that you can forgive yourself of all the stupid and mean things you’ve done? Is it so that you can comfort yourself for all the things and people you’ve lost, since you know that nothing could have been otherwise? Or is it an aesthetic attraction: that whatever makes people love math or geometry also makes them want to see it in the cosmos as a whole? I tend to think that is what pushed Spinoza in this direction. Good lord, no one (except maybe Euclid himself) can imagine loving geometrical proofs more than he did.
Is it true that anyone who is drawn to necessitarian is also drawn in the direction of Stoicism? What might this imply? Is it a kind of fear of the emotions, and the compromising positions they can put us in?
I think what Sp really loved about the geometrical method was its mechanical necessity and unshakeable firmness. And why love that? Maybe because he saw around him so many insistent intellectuals who disagreed violently with one another — the Jews, the Calvinists, the Catholics, the Remonstrants, and so on. Maybe he thought that by taking on the geometrical form he could secure, if only for himself, a set of beliefs which would stay strong against all attacks. Temperamentally, he couldn’t handle the rough-and-tumble marketplace of ideas — which, in the 17th C., was far rougher and tumblier than any intellectual sphere is today. Maybe his adherence to the form, and his attraction to Stoicism, both stemmed from a fear of other people, and the ways they can truly mess you up.
Here’s Nz’s psychoanalysis of Sp’s attraction to the geometrical form in which he cast the Ethics (BGE 5):
… that hocus-pocus of mathematical form in which, as if in iron, Spinoza encased and masked his philosophy — ‘the love of his wisdom’, to render that word fairly and squarely — so as to strike terror into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athene — how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick recluse betrays!
Yeah, probably.
Nietzsche book now available through Amazon
See the link on the right. What a handsome cover!
Revenge of the saber-rattling officer
I have recently become acquainted with degenerationism, or the view bandied about in the late 19th century that human beings were degenerating. It was clearly a case of psychologists’ enthusiasm getting way beyond their means. A number of thinkers assessed the current state of European culture, found it lacking, and surmised that something must be causing the minds of Europeans to decay. One prominent degenerationist, Max Nordau, hypothesized that the decay was due to the increased consumption of tobacco and alcohol, and the increased pace of life brought on by steam engines. This led to decadent artists, musicians, and philosophers, who all seemed to be trashing the cherished ideals of glorious days gone by, and celebrating the seedier aspects of life.
In his 600-page tome (Degeneration, 1895), Nordau reads the riot act to many of the prominent thinkers and artists of his day (Wagner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Zola). And he can really dish it out against these would-be men of acute consciousness crawling out from beneath the floorboards. He has a chapter devoted to our dear friend, the severely degenerated Nietzsche (as an example of the subcategory “egomania”) — “this man whose scribbling is one single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out from every line!” And here what he has to say about people like us who sort of go for what Nz wrote:
Without doubt, the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides these gallows birds without the courage and strength for criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow themselves to be stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by others, who [blah blah blah]
That’s a taste of the thing. Pretty fun reading, really. But I really liked this parting shot, in his conclusion:
Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop [...], in competition with men who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke our laughter.
Old Fritz would have loved this book.
