Opening deja-vu

Opening Day 2014! (8.25.14)

I've notched a few of these Opening Days on my blog-stick, enough to form a patterned schtick involving Douglas Adams' philosophical whale, Monty Python's non-argument, and a few other comic-gimmicky invitations to the philosophy dance. ("Oh no, not that again.") It's my eternal recurrence, my groundhog day, my season-opener. I love it.

I always want to convey to students on Day 1 the simple message that philosophy is for everyone (or at least it can be... No it can't... Yes it can... Oh look, this isn't an argument...), that it's at once sublime and ridiculous, frivolous and profound, serious and fun. Serious fun. When you start asking questions, all kinds of things can happen. You never know for sure what's rushing to meet you, or whether it will be your friend. That's why you philosophize, as Professor James professed more than a century ago in the lectures that would become Pragmatism:

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds. You know the same of me. And yet I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Right: you're all individuals, all citizens of the cosmos, all with your own way of seeing and feeling and talking. So let's introduce ourselves and get talking, CoPhilosophers. For, "Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use."

Nor the westernized philosophizing student intellect, either.

But of course we do know there's a hard terminus awaiting this journey called life. Is it finally terminal, or a gateway, or a release? That's a great philosophical question. Should we live as though we knew the end to be THE END? Another good one. Different philosophers have offered different answers. We should consider them. We will.

But lots of students, even some of the "best" students, don't. A review in yeterday's Times of William Deresiewicz' Excellent Sheep indicts some Ivy League overachievers for underselling themselves, not asking big questions, not giving themselves the thrill and the mind-expanding experience of philosophizing while they're still young enough for that activity to alter them in constructive ways. "Once in college, these young people lead the same Stakhanovite lives, even though they’re no longer competing to get in. They accept endless time-sucking activity and pointless competition as the natural condition of future leaders. Too busy to read or make friends, listen to music or fall in love, they waste the precious years that they should be devoting to building their souls on building their résumés."

 "The faculty could and should push these gifted obsessives to slow down and ask big questions." That's my cue. We're not in the Ivy League, but we've all got our gifts and our obsessions. We've all got questions to ask and minds to expand and souls to build. So let's get busy!
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Who's your favorite philosopher? (8.27.14)

That's the Philosophy Bites question we take up today in CoPhi. If you think it puts Descartes before the horse you can visit What is Philosophy? first. (That was the first bad phil-pun I heard, btw, from a perky Scot called Cogan on my first day of Grad School back in 1980. Not the last. It was already an old joke.)




We don't all agree on what philosophy is. Not even we "Americanists," amongst ourselves. But we try to disagree agreeably. A little post-HAP 101 exchange between a pair of students once threatened for a moment to become disagreeable (unlike the class itself, which was thrilling in its impassioned civility). Almost made 'em watch the Argument Clinic. "An argument isn't just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes," etc. etc. But I don't want to argue about that.

Maybe a round of Bruces would be welcome today, simultaneously introducing several stars of philosophy, teaching us how to pronounce "Nietzsche" (and mispronounce "Kant") and disabusing anyone who falsely presumes our subject to be overly sober and serious about itself. If any doubt about that persists, just drop in on the Philosophy Club's Thursday Happy Hour - not that I'd want to reinforce the spurious conceit that philosophers are drunks. G'day.

I don't have a "favourite"... but my favorite (as I've already told my classes, on Day #1) is of
course William James.I don't always agree with him, but I almost always want to know he'd say about the topic du jour.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices. SPP

My favorite living philosopher is John Lachs. He came for a visit last year, to my CoPhi classes.

It's no surprise that David Hume outpolls everyone on the podcast, given its Anglo-centric tilt, or that Mill and Locke pick up several votes. They're all on my short list too, as is Bertrand Russell (who definitely knew the value of philosophy).

I notice that my Vandy friend Talisse is one of the handful of Americans here, and he, like Martha Nussbaum, picks Mill. Sandel picks Hegel.) Other big votegetters: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.

No surprise either that James, Dewey, Peirce, Santayana, Rawls, and other prominent Yanks don't win wide favor across the pond. (But I hear the Rawls musical has been a hit with the Brits.)

I did hear an English philosopher praising James once, on the BBC's excellent "In Our Time." But generally they prefer William's "younger, shallower, vainer" (and more Anglophilic) brother Henry, who lived most of his adult life in Sussex.

The British roots of American thought do run deep, and the branches of reciprocal influence spread wide. Stay tuned for info on our Study Aboard course, as it moves from drawing board to future reality.

Why do I find WJ so compelling? Hard to put my finger on a single reason, there are so many. I was first drawn to him through his marvelous personal letters. Then, his essays ("On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," "What Makes a Life Significant") and lectures-cum-books (Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe). His warm, charming, playful, disarming, sympathetic personality shone through all. He was so great at tossing off wit, profundity, and practical wisdom with seeming effortlessness and concision. A born tweeter. But his health, physical and emotional, was a lifelong challenge. He expended vast effort to become William James.

Honestly, the best explanation for why I became a lifelong student of, and stroller with, WJ may just be that little moment in the Vandy bookstore back in my first year of grad school - the moment when my new mentor John Compton noticed me browsing the McDermott anthology o fThe Writings. John's warm and enthusiastic familiarity with "Willy James" hooked me. Thank you, John.

The thing James said that's stuck with me longest and made the most lasting impression, I think, is the little piece of youthful advice he once wrote to a despondent friend. I'm not quite sure why, but it lifts my mood every time I think of it:

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos.

Is this true? Maybe. Is it useful? Definitely.

We're also looking today at Nigel Warburton's introduction to Philosophy: The Basics (5th ed., 2013), in which he quite rightly points out that while philosophy can help you think about who you are and why you're here - about the meaning of your life - it isn't an alternative to other fields of study. "It is important not to expect too much of philosophy," to the neglect of literature and history and science and art, et al.

That's right. But it's equally important not to expect too little of yourself, and to think you're not up to the challenge of an examined life. To repeat Professor James's empowering declaration: "I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds." If you don't all know that yet, CoPhilosophers, we'd better get to work. Serious fun, dead ahead.