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In Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, the villainous intellectual Ellsworth Toohey shamelessly states his attitude to other people: "I play the stock market of the soul - and I sell short." Because you can't go too far wrong by doing the exact opposite of what a wicked character like Toohey does, I've been thinking about what it means to buy long in human relationships.
In Rand's later writings, she enunciated what she called "The Trader Principle", in which people "exchange value for value" in their relationships. Leaving aside the questionable status of the word 'value' in ethics (see my 2024 post on Hannah Arendt's contrast between value and worth), it seems to me that Rand doesn't go far enough here - for the truly anti-Toohey stance is not merely to trade but to actively invest in other people.
Think, for instance, of Warren Buffett's approach to investing at Berkshire Hathaway: in many cases he hasn't merely purchased stock in other companies, but instead has purchased the entire company! Similarly, venture capital firms pour their own money into early stage companies, which means they are invested in the success of those companies.
In his book Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre describes aspects of what it's like to invest in another person:
Each of us achieves our good only if and insofar as others make our good their good by helping us through periods of disability to become ourselves the kind of human being - through the acquisition and exercise of the virtues - who makes the good of others her or his good, and this not because we have calculated that, only if we help others, will they help us, in some trading of advantage for advantage.
Although MacIntyre's phrasing is rather academic, his point is clear enough, even if I prefer Walter Kaufmann's formulation: through mutual love and care we are "gradually led to more and more profound concern about the loved one's feelings, thoughts, and welfare."
Yet I think we can go beyond even MacIntyre or Kaufmann. Concern is one thing, but the long-term practice of love and friendship (φιλία) gets closer to the heart of things. To capture the essence of this practice, Aristotle used the little Greek word συζῆν: sharing in the activities of living, jointly pursuing fulfillment, making commitments together, taking action together, supporting each other's projects, celebrating each other's successes, supporting each other in times of trouble, feeling with and for each other, thinking things through together, seeking each other’s counsel, treating your shared life as one long conversation and intermingling of souls.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While reading yet another book by Pierre Hadot recently, I came across a fascinating passage from the ancient Greek writer Plutarch about philosophy as a way of life. Here's the crux of it, in my own translation:
Socrates indeed was a philosopher, even though he didn't set out benches for students or hold court in a special chair or observe set times for discoursing or walking around with pupils; instead, as chance may have it, he feasted with people, drank with them, served in the army with some of them, hung around in the marketplace with them, and in the end was locked up and drank the poison - yet he was the very first person who showed forth at all times, in all respects, in all experiences, in all activities that plainly and simply living is itself engaging in the love of wisdom.
The ancient Greeks were not the only ones to whom this idea occurred. Over 1500 years after the death of Socrates, the great Zen Buddhist thinker Dōgen formulated his conception of the unity of practice and fulfillment (shushō-ittō): if done with the right awareness and presence, anything we do - chopping wood, carrying water, cooking, cleaning, walking, sitting quietly - can count as a realization of the Way. We don't need to wait years and years to achieve enlightenment, because if we approach living in the right frame of mind then enlightenment is right here, right now, inside us and all around us.
Living wisdom is the highest form of loving wisdom.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
The United States has all of the complexities of all the other nations in the world, and also many of its own...
~ Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans
Reading about American history and culture is forever fascinating. Of late I've been focused on learning about various immigrant groups, from monumental ones like the English and the Africans (explained so well by David Hackett Fischer in his books Albion's Seed and African Founders) to relatively unknown ones like the French Huguenots who migrated to Boston, New York, and South Carolina in the 1690s and the Canary Islanders who settled in southern Louisiana under Spanish rule from 1778 to 1783. America has experienced dozens of such migrant streams, each consisting of atypically adventurous people and each adding its distinctive flavor to the gumbo of American culture. Indeed, as Walt Whitman observed in his 1855 poem Great Are the Myths, America is "the nation of clusters of equal nations"; Frederick Douglass echoed Whitman in his 1869 speech Our Composite Nation; and Albert Murray renewed these insights in his 1970 book The Omni-Americans, wherein he argued that American culture is inherently composite, pluralistic, mulatto.
Not infrequently one hears wistful calls for America to be a more tolerant and kindly place, typically along the lines of a nice Scandinavian country like Denmark. While I'm all in favor of moderation and brotherhood, my impression of Denmark (never having visited!) is that it is free to be so nice because it lacks some of the complexities we have in America. For instance, with only six million people (the same as here in Colorado), most of whose ancestors have lived there for a thousand years or more, Denmark is likely less ethnically composite today than America was even in 1776, let alone in 2025. Once you tack on the vast geography of America, its regional and local diversity, its numerous cities (42 of which are larger than Copenhagen), its many levels of governance (50 states, 3000+ counties, myriad towns and townships, etc.), its ultra-dynamic economy, its countless businesses winking in and out of existence, its outsized role in world affairs, its freewheeling, rebellious, and often troubled history, and so on, you realize that wishing America to be more like Denmark is a pipe dream.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Over lunch last week, a friend and I had an interesting discussion about the future of computer programming. At his startup, he makes extensive use of machine learning and large language models but still writes plenty of code. He called this "AI-assisted coding", in contradistinction to "vibe coding”, whereby people who don't know how to code ask the LLM chatbot to generate all the code for them. He also noted that when an LLM generates code, you have to get really good at reading code - a skill that even old-style programmers haven't traditionally cultivated or enjoyed.
Our conversation came back to me on reading Arnold Kling's post this morning about the futility of teaching young people to write. The LLMs will soon be better than 90% of human writers, so why teach people to do so? Let the LLMs do the writing and instead teach people how to edit what the LLMs produce!
Yet I suspect that vibe writing will be no more successful than vibe coding, in large measure because reading itself is becoming a lost art. Furthermore, since writing is a form of thinking, if you haven't developed the skill of formalized thinking through writing and reflective reading then your interaction with an AI chatbot will essentially be nothing more than vibe thinking.
This will not end well for society. But I, for one, won't go there.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Cross-pollination is a wondrous thing. Over the last few months I've been reading about two topics that might seem quite far apart: ancient Greek tragedy and American jazz. In the first category, I'm working my way through all the extant tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and also reading literary and philosophical analysis of tragic drama, such as Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy. In the second category, I've been reading biographies of great jazz musicians and composers (Armstrong, Ellington, Monk, Mingus, Coltrane, etc.) as well as historical and philosophical analysis of the meaning of jazz and blues in American culture, especially some amazing books by Albert Murray and some essays by Ralph Ellison.
Both Murray and Ellison (who happen to have been close friends) touch on similarities and differences between tragedy and the blues. Here's Ellison from his 1945 essay "Richard Wright's Blues"...
Let us close with one final word about the blues: their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.
In his books Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, and The Blue Devils of Nada, Murray goes even farther: he argues that the purpose of blues music is to stomp on blues feelings in such an earthy yet elegant way that our fears and sorrows are transformed (even if only temporarily) into an aesthetic celebration of resilience and spontaneity. The essence of blues and jazz is, he says, "improvisation in situations of disruption" and "affirmation in the face of adversity" (conditions that any honest reader of American history knows were faced in abundance by the descendents of captive Africans who invented these musics in the first place).
As I reflect more deeply on these topics, I might even write a longer essay for publication. Stay tuned!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Following up on my post about thinking historically, here are some further reflections on the methodological insights (and, to my mind, shortcomings) of my favorite historian, David Hackett Fischer.
As noted last time, Fischer is an empiricist who is quite leery of philosophizing, moralizing, essentialism, metahistory, the drive for certainty, the holist desire for completeness, attempts at explaining why things happened the way they did, and so on; he is much more comfortable describing a few of the "infinite number" of "factual patterns" that can be "superimposed upon past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 70). He goes on to say: "A historian's task is to find patterns which are more relevant to his problems, and more accurate and more comprehensive than others, but he cannot hope to find that 'essential' pattern..." (ibid.).
I sense a few difficulties here. First, I'm skeptical that there is literally an infinite number of patterns to be found in the facts of the past; instead, it seems to me that at any one time there are only a few patterns under serious consideration to explain a given historical phenomenon (say, the American Revolution or, more concretely, the development among the colonists of a self-perception that they were "Americans"). Second, Fischer's criterion of comprehensiveness sounds rather similar to the habit of holism that he has criticized in others as a fallacy. Third, Fischer's criterion of accuracy sounds rather similar to doing justice to the reality ("essential" or otherwise) of past events.
Indeed, slightly later in his book Historians' Fallacies, Fischer defines history as "an empirical search for external truths, and for the best, most complete, and most profound external truths, in a maximal corresponding relationship with the absolute reality of past events" (Fischer 1970, p. 87).
As I see it, accuracy, completeness, and profundity are aspirational ideals for the working historian (including the historian of ideas, which to some extent I try to be in my books on philosophers like Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Thoreau). Every researcher who is at all realistic knows that no one work can explain past events in a way that is entirely accurate, fully complete, and profoundly meaningful - yet, even so, we can try our best to achieve those ideals in our historical investigations.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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