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Yesterday I penned a letter to my best friend. And I do mean penned: after rummaging around in a box stashed in a closet, I tracked down some fine stationery I'd bought years ago and, pen in hand, sat down to write. Having been away from letter-writing for decades, I was reminded of a few long-forgotten essentials:
I foresee more letter writing in my future...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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On this day in 1857, Thoreau wrote as follows in his journal:
Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. You may run upon them as much as you please — even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content. You may see them on chance any warmer hour. In these banks, too, and such as these, are my funds deposited, a fund of health and enjoyment. Their (the crickets) prosperity and happiness and, I trust, mine do not depend on whether the New York banks suspend or no. We do not rely on such slender security as the thin paper of the Suffolk Bank. To put your trust in such a bank is to be swallowed up and undergo suffocation. Invest, I say, in these country banks. Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.
These thoughts echo something Thoreau wrote on the first of May in that same year:
It is foolish for a man to accumulate material wealth chiefly, houses and land. Our stock in life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have had, which we have thought out. The ground we have thus created is forever pasturage for our thoughts. I fall back on to visions which I have had. What else adds to my possessions and makes me rich in all lands? If you have ever done any work with these finest tools, the imagination and fancy and reason, it is a new creation, independent on the world, and a possession forever. You have laid up something against a rainy day. You have to that extent cleared the wilderness.
While perusing Plato's Apology recently, I realized that these observations chime with something Socrates said at his trial (here in the translation that Thoreau would have read, Sydenham and Taylor 1804, volume 4, p. 213):
I go about doing nothing else than persuading both the younger and older among you, neither to pay attention to the body, nor to riches, nor anything else prior to the soul; not to be so much concerned for any thing, as how the soul may subsist in the most excellent condition. I also say that virtue is not produced from riches, but riches from virtue, as likewise all other human goods, both privately and publicly.
As previously noted, during his time at Walden Pond Thoreau borrowed this translation of Plato's dialogues from his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (who also owned the woodlot where Thoreau built his cabin). His masterpiece Walden was in many ways an apologia, a defense of his way of life: not the superficialities of his two years at the pond that everyone focuses on these days, but his deep cultivation of simplicity, independence, contentment, magnanimity, wisdom, and other excellences of character. Both Socrates and Thoreau recognized that the true wealth consists not in material possessions, but in the higher riches that only soulcraft can procure for us.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Following a gap of nearly forty years (!), I'm re-reading Alasdair MacIntyre's influential book After Virtue. As I do so, I'll post occasionally on the reflections it inspires.
Right off the bat on page 6, MacIntyre gives three examples of contemporary moral disagreement that, from my recent philosophical perspective, I find questionable: just war, abortion, and rights to health care and education.
Notice that these topics concern politics or public morality, they are general or impersonal, they aren't things I can take action on directly (unless I happen to have a significant role in political governance), we are supposed to deliberate about them in a disinterested or dispassionate manner, and our deliberations should result in policies or rules that are universal. Thus to my mind they are actually matters of statecraft.
Flipping these qualities around, we get a glimpse of what, by contrast, soulcraft is all about: those aspects of life that are private, personal, practical, passionate, and particular. Consider a few of the more momentous matters one might deliberate about in life: Is this the person I want to marry? Do we want to start a family? Is this the line of work that comprises my calling? Should I quit my job and become an entrepreneur? How can I help my best friend, who is facing a personal crisis? I suspect I'm in an abusive relationship, should I move out and start over? Is now the time for me to retire? How can I give back in my community? Is this avocation expressive of who I really am? How can I do justice to my highest potential as a human being? And so on.
Here's how I would unpack these qualities:
Statecraft is what most people pontificate about on social media, blogs, Substack, and the like - but what matters most in our pursuit of happiness and fulfillment is soulcraft.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Aristotle wrote three books with "ethics" (ἠθική) in the title, where the word ἠθική is derived from the Greek word for character (ἦθος). Yet to modern ears, "ethics" brings to mind commandments, guardrails, and other restrictions on behavior. Thus arises the question: how best to render the word ἠθική into English?
After much reflection, I've provisionally settled on soulcraft, in part because it contrasts nicely with statecraft as a rendering of πολιτική; politics deals with the public world of societal interaction and governance, whereas ethics deals with the private, personal world of character and cultivation of one's highest self.
These rather arcane matters of translation are bound up with what lately I've been calling public philosophy vs. private philosophy. Consider a beautiful statement that, according to Plato, Socrates made at his trial (Apology 29d-e, Grube translation modified):
I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: 'Good Sir, you are an Athenian and a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for sagacity [σοφία] and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, status, and prestige as possible, while you do not cultivate [ἐπιμελέομαι] nor give mind [φροντίζω] to wisdom [φρόνησις] or truth [ἀληθεία], or the best possible state of your soul [ψυχή]?
Although I use the word soul, I wish to avoid misunderstandings about belief in an "immortal soul" within various religious traditions. By contrast, for Aristotle the word ψυχή meant something closer to "aliveness" (since he argued that animals and even plants have ψυχή) or, for human beings, "personhood".
One may wonder: since ψυχή (commonly Romanized as psyche) is the source for our word psychology, could it be that soulcraft is properly the concern of psychology rather than philosophy? More specifically, cultivating the best possible state of your soul might sound like something that the recent school of positive psychology could help you accomplish.
The relationship between psychology and philosophy is a large topic that I can't hope to cover with any thoroughness in one of these brief journal entries (expect further reflections in coming weeks). However, as I see it psychology and philosophy should be able to work together to clear the underbrush on this path, with further contributions from literature, anthropology, history, and biography among other disciplines, none of which has possession of the complete truth (if there even is such a thing). Soulcraft is nothing other than the great task of figuring out how to be human, and in that endless endeavor we can use all the help we can get!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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With winter preparations already underway here (I don't want to get caught flatfooted as happened last year when we were hit with three feet of snow in the first week of November), I was reminded of a story that Henry David Thoreau related in his journal on December 15th, 1859:
Philosophy is a Greek word by good rights, and it stands almost for a Greek thing. Yet some rumor of it has reached the commonest mind. M. Miles, who came to collect his wood-bill today, said, when I objected to the small size of his wood, that it was necessary to split wood fine in order to cure it well, that he had found that wood that was more than four inches in diameter would not dry, and moreover a good deal depended on the manner in which it was corded up in the woods. He piled his high and tightly. If this were not well done the stakes would spread and the wood lie loosely, and so the rain and snow find their way into it. And he added, "I have handled a good deal of wood, and I think that I understand the philosophy of it."
During my youth growing up in Maine, I too handled a good deal of wood, for we mostly heated our house by means of two woodstoves and I was responsible for hand-splitting the 6-8 cords of firewood we burned every winter. Based on my experience, I concur with Thoreau's neighbor about splitting the wood fine. The old-timers called this "biscuit wood" because the finely-split wood burned hot in the cookstove, thus enabling one to bake biscuits at 500+˚F. (Or at least such was my understanding - my Dutch mother didn't make American-style biscuits!)
Come to think of it, don't most of the practical aspects of life have an associated philosophy? There is beautiful wisdom to be gained and passed on about chopping firewood, baking bread, canning, knitting, gardening, carpentry, fishing, sailing, and countless other skills and crafts. Perhaps these prosaic forms of philosophy are more directly meaningful in life than the endless speculating and professing that goes on in academic settings...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
One of the differences, I'm finding, between public philosophy and private philosophy is that the former is full of well-established trails, whereas the latter is largely an unexplored territory in which bushwhacking is required if you want to blaze a path to wisdom. For instance, there are probably hundreds of books on a typical public philosophy topic like free will vs. determinism, whereas there are few if any about, say, understanding and navigating the varieties of grieving.
In the many years that I worked on Internet protocols, we used to distinguish between clear-cut problem spaces and messy problem spaces. For instance, encryption is a clear-cut problem space: either an attacker can eavesdrop on communication or they can't. By contrast, internationalization (a.k.a. i18n) is a messy problem space because of the hundreds of languages and writing scripts we humans use, the serious potential for ambiguity and confusion depending on context, etc. Since I worked on both encryption and internationalization, I can attest that problems in both spaces can be hard to solve, but they're hard in different ways.
Similarly, private philosophy strikes me as much messier than public philosophy because it's rife with confusing ambiguities, contextual subtleties, difficult tradeoffs, emotional entanglements, and other factors that militate against the application of clear-cut rules.
This might be why philosophers have traditionally shied away from the private and the personal, leaving such matters to novelists and psychologists. Having just read a beautifully insightful novel by Willa Cather, and having read my share of the psychological literature over the years, I greatly appreciate what novelists and psychologists bring to the table. Even so, I've always felt that, at its best, philosophy too can make unique contributions to the great task of living: an emphasis not just on personality but also on character development and ethical aspiration, well-reasoned examination of alternative perspectives, a drive toward wisdom and sagacity, pursuit of profound meaning, and a high-minded idealism about human potential and human fulfillment.
Trying to understand these matters for myself while bushwhacking through the undergrowth of life is, however, quite a challenge. Thankfully the task is made easier because of interaction with those who are dear to me, both living loved ones (you know who you are) and a variety of "ancient friends" (Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Thoreau, George Eliot, Willa Cather, etc.). It also helps that, no matter how dense the thickets may be, eventually the sky above will always clear to a pure and crystalline blue.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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