Thoughts for the Day: 24 July 2021

 

Stalking the wild Wim Hof

What Doesn't Kill Us

Scott Carney and Wim Hof

Nature gave us the ability to heal ourselves. Conscious breathing and  environmental  conditioning are two tools that everyone can use to control their immune system, better their moods, and increase their energy. I believe that anyone can tap into these unconscious processes and eventually control their autonomic nervous system.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

 Without goals (2 words), without some purposeful anticipation, we live, Frankl said, only a 'provisional existence', a kind of marking time which is really a death in life.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

[B]ecause an increase in the wealth of societies seems not to guarantee an increase in happiness, Epicurus would have suggested that the needs which expensive goods cater to cannot be those on which our happiness depends.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt 

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

A civilization, in contrast to a culture, was the product of its greatest minds, whether Western or Eastern. One of Strauss’s favorite quotations was from Aquinas: “The least knowledge one can have of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge one has of the lowest things.”

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

All this shows what from a general knowledge of pre-Socratic physics we should expect: that Greek thinkers in general take it for granted that mind belongs essentially to body and lives with it in the closest union, and that when they are confronted with reasons for thinking this union partial, occasional, or precarious, they are puzzled to know how this can be.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

In the work of no other philosopher has the concept of appearance, and hence of semblance (of Erscheinung and Schein), played so decisive and central a role as in Kant.

Civilization

Niall Ferguson

In reality, democracy was the capstone of an edifice that had as its foundation the rule of law – to be precise, the sanctity of individual freedom and the security of private property rights, ensured by representative, constitutional government.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 26 March 2021

 

2021 publication from the outstanding science journalist

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In 1952, while acknowledging he had no meaningful evidence to support his proposition, Ancel Keys suggested Americans should eat one-third less fat than they were at the time if they wanted to avoid heart disease. In 1970, still without hard clinical trial evidence, the American Heart Association recommended low-fat diets for everyone in America literally old enough to walk.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

[Ernst] Cassirer wanted to make a clear profession of faith, a philosophical celebration of the origin of the Renaissance as a milestone in self-liberation and the reshaping of the world. The essential impulses of this immense event were overshadowed, from the seventeenth century onward, by the abstraction-fixated, anti-corporeal, consciousness-obsessed modern age of René Descartes and his methodical successors—with profound consequences well into the philosophy of the 1920s.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

WHAT MADE WITTGENSTEIN’S TREATISE [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] so incredibly difficult for its first readers (and would continue to do so for decades after) was his decision to express his thoughts through two modes of language that are so different as to seem mutually exclusive. One is the language of mathematical logic, with its entirely abstract symbols, the other a poetic language rich in imagery, concepts, allegory, and paradoxical aphorism.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Modern Monetary Theory was in some ways a re-introduction of Keynesian economics into the climate crisis. Its foundational axiom was that the economy works for humans, not humans for the economy; this implied that full employment should be the policy goal of the governments that made and enforced the economic laws. So a job guarantee (JG) was central to MMT’s ideas of good governance. Anyone who wanted a job could get one from the government, “the employer of last resort,” and all these public workers were to be paid a living wage, which would have the effect of raising the private wage floor also to that level, in order to remain competitive for workers.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 5 October 2020

 

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Writing of the literary influences over the French Revolution, Tocqueville marveled at ‘the most unusual historical situation – in which the entire political education of a great nation was carried out by men of letters’: Under their lengthy discipline, in the absence of other leaders, and given the profound ignorance of practice from which all suffered, the nation read their works and acquired the instincts, the cast of mind, the tastes, and even the peculiarities of those who wrote. So that when the nation finally had to act, it carried over into politics all the habits of literature.

The Consolations of Philosophy

Alain De Botton

We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Obliquity

John Kay

“There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

IN ORDER TO fight totalitarianism, one need understand only one thing: Totalitarianism is the most radical denial of freedom.

The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton*

In this, another delightful book from Alain De Botton, of whom I’ve previously read How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, De Botton once again adroitly mixes personal experience, paintings, literature, and famous figures to explore different aspects of travel. Each chapter is “on”: “On Anticipation”, “On the Exotic”, “On Habit”, and so on. Each chapter is a self-contained essay that explores its chosen topic through a representative figure from history, such as Flaubert, Wordsworth, and Ruskin, to name three of the more familiar figures. Each chapter uses paintings and photography to supplement the words of the essay. “On Traveling Places”, for instance, explores works of Edward Hopper, best known for his work “Nighthawks" (not used here), but who also explored trains, gas stations, and hotel rooms along his way. Finally, De Botton includes his own experiences to provide a contemporary perspective and to sometimes test the ideas of those upon whom he has drawn. 

Part of the pleasure of De Botton’s project comes from his ability to meditate on travel from many different angles. In the opening essay, “On Anticipation”, he tells the tale of J.-K. Huysmans, who decided upon a trip to London from his French residence, only to abandon it after having made all of the necessary arrangements and consulted all of the guide books. After consulting the guidebooks, he decided he’d seen enough! Sometimes, indeed, the imagination of anticipation exceeds the reality of even the most alluring of destinations. In “On the Exotic”, the French novelist Flaubert travels to Egypt to stay and experience an alien world, while Xavier de Maistre writes about his travels around his bedroom, and then his view from his bedroom window in De Botton’s “On Habit” chapter. (De Maistre travels abroad as well.) But even within the limited purview of a bedroom De Maistre finds, upon careful and leisurely inspection, more interesting things either he or we could have imagined. 

De Botton contrasts the city with the country. Samuel Johnson found the Scottish highlands a wasteland that merely created annoyance, while not long after Johnson, Wordsworth sang the praises of the Lake District. Our views of what’s worth visiting and experiencing changes with time and varies according to our temperament. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt traveled the Amazon basin in the early 19^th century to catalogue all that was new to European scientists, loving the challenge and uniqueness of the journey. 

De Botton uses the paintings of Van Gogh to illustrate what might go unnoticed or unappreciated in a region and that can be newly (or perhaps first) appreciated only after viewing a painted facsimile of the scene. Of course, Van Gogh didn’t take a realist perspective, his cypress trees look as if they are on fire and his building are often all akimbo, but he forces us to take a new and closer look at what some once considered the boring countryside of Provence. By abstracting reality, we obtain a better appreciation of it. In a similar vein, Edmund Burke argues that we benefit when Nature overwhelms us with its grandeur and power in a manner that we label “sublime”. 

If you travel or you contemplate travel, De Botton’s book will serve as a meditative preparation, one that you can dip into at leisure, as each chapter constitutes a self-contained essay on some aspect of travel. We humans have been traveling and exploring our world for tens of thousands of years, and now, with travel easier than ever, we need to reflect upon its benefits and pitfalls. And in this, De Botton serves as an excellent guide. 

*First posted in SNG Abroad blog. 

Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations: Ancient Philosophy for Modern Life by Jules Evans

Serendipity once again rode to my rescue in a chaotic Indian bookstore (actually, the pretty good Modern Book Centre here in Trivandrum). I spied Philosophy for Life, by an author unknown to me. A quick perusal of the TOC revealed that it addressed Stoicism, Epicureanism, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Skepticism, Cynicism, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and of course, the godfather of them all, Socrates. One can surmise from the all-star cast that it couldn’t help but to prove worthwhile. It did.

Evans tells an interesting story. His book isn’t just an exposition of ancient wisdom (for wisdom is the purpose of these philosophies and philosophers), but it relates each tradition to our world through his own story and those of others. Evans reports that as a young man he was plagued with anxiety and depression until he discovered Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), developed by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Put simply, CBT attacks “stinkin’ thinkin’” (a term of art I borrow from elsewhere). Indeed, CBT, as Evans discovered, draws from the tradition of Stoicism. Stoicism addresses the veracity of our beliefs and the fundamental choices that we have about our emotional reactions to those beliefs (and the events that trigger those beliefs). The help that Evans received from CBT drew him into the world of ancient philosophy and an exploration of the way in which philosophy can become a way of life. Each chapter address a particular thinker or tradition, weaving together contemporary practitioners within that tradition with the original, helping to bring to life the value of each.

Evans not only provides very sound expositions of the basic tenants of each tradition and the contemporary manifestations of each, but he also provides sound critiques. Indeed, after going through this buffet of a book (and based on some earlier reading that I’ll detail below), one might want to treat each of these traditions as a course at a meal: each dish appropriate to a particular moment in life. Stoicism helps arm us against life’s tribulations, defeats, and losses. But should we remain a Stoic all of the time? It seems too harsh. Even the warriors who often draw upon it must need some break from its implicit asceticism. Epicureanism, on the other hand, with its appreciation of pleasure and desire to avoid pain and anxiety, seems the attitude to take when enjoying a glass of wine and a fine meal--savoring the moment, as Evans dubs it. It also counsels us not to worry about that which we cannot control.

Heraclitus teaches us to appreciate the flux of life; Protagoras the benefit of reminding ourselves of ideals through memorization and incantation. Skeptics teach us to question and doubt—what I might call the Missouri method: “Show me. I’m not buyin’ until you do.” Diogenes and the Cynics, surely the most far out of the traditions, teach us the value of street theatre and radical questioning.

Evans moves on to the Big Three of Ancient Philosophy: Plato, his student Aristotle, and the master of the whole tradition (and Plato’s teacher), Socrates. Plato compels us to consider justice and the proper order of things, while his more earthy student Aristotle teaches us about friendship, politics, and all manner of earthly (and metaphysical) concerns. Aristotle serves as an antidote the Epicurean and Stoic tendency to retreat from the public space. Finally, Socrates teaches us about the value of questioning and facing death.

This book serves as an excellent introduction to this ancient tradition. Evans’ critiques are thoughtful and balanced. He looks to take the fruit of that lies within rather than rejecting the whole because of any surface imperfection. Evans touches upon the tradition’s relationship with Buddhism and the Chinese traditions, something, especially concerning Buddhism, that I’d like to see further developed. (The similarities between Buddhism and Stoicism seem to me almost patent. Nassim Taleb touches on the issue in a footnote in Antifragile: “For those readers who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, I have a simple answer: A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says “f*** you” to fate”. (153). I think that this is a bit too simple, but it’s making the connection.)

Evans gratefully acknowledges those scholars whose work he draws upon for his examination of the ancient traditions. Some of them I’ve read and can recommend if you  want to dig deeper: Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life (and anything else by Hadot); Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (her effort at an improved and expanded appreciation of the Stoic view of the emotions); Alain de Botton’s Consolations of the Philosophy (not limited to the ancients); and Richard Sorabji’s Gifford Lectures, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation.

Finally, Evans’ website www.philosophyforlife.org is an excellent resource for further exploration of these issues.