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Sometime in the next few weeks my friend Adrian Lory and I will hold a Substack Live video conversation about philosophy and psychology as complementary paths to wisdom and fulfillment. In preparation, I've been thinking up some questions about the relationship between philosophy and psychology, as well as their respective contributions to the good life. Here's what I have so far:
Stay tuned for details about the Substack Live session and be sure to subscribe to Adrian's Substack so that you can see what fascinating questions he's been thinking up. :-)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In his book First Things, Last Things, Eric Hoffer makes some observations about change and revolution:
We used to think that revolution is the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: revolution is a by-product of change. Change comes first, and it is the difficulties and irritations inherent in change which set the stage for revolution. To say that revolution is the cause of change is like saying that juvenile delinquency is the cause of the change from boyhood to manhood.
[P]eople who undergo drastic change recapitulate to some degree the passage from childhood to manhood, and mass movements are in a sense the juvenile delinquency of societies going through the ordeal of change. The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition. There is a family likeness between juveniles and people who migrate from one country to another, or are converted from one faith to another, or pass from one way of life to another....
Although Hoffer's primary interest here is change and revolution in society (see also his most famous book, The True Believer), I wonder if something similar applies to individuals. Consider two quotes from Tolstoy:
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Could it be that the inner revolution of personal regeneration is often made possible by a move to another country, joining a different faith, pursuing a new career, getting married, getting divorced, becoming a parent, or some other change in one's way of life?
To me it seems more likely that in these matters causation is bidirectional. After all, personal regeneration simply is changing oneself - or, more accurately, a change in oneself. Yevgeny Zamyatin once wrote that "there is no final revolution", which at the personal level implies that one needs to keep changing throughout life based on one's ever-widening range of insight and experience; indeed, living an examined life requires nothing less.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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The other day in my post about Making It Personal, I wrote as follows:
I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Today I'd like to focus on that last part, because over time I've found that my To-Don't List can be even more beneficial than my To-Do List.
It strikes me that most of the books, news articles, blog posts, advice columns, and Internet memes floating around out there are implicitly or explicitly universalist: they talk about how society needs to change, about how "we" (always undefined) need to take certain actions, about how everyone should do what the writer or influencer says, etc. Yet changing society, modifying government policy, or convincing everyone to act in a certain way is completely outside my span of influence and control.
Yes, I freely grant that it's awfully tempting to make such universal claims; for much of my life I did the same thing myself! However, I've learned that when I give in to this temptation I immediately start weaving a tangled web of unrealistic hopes and self-righteous expectations, which inexorably pulls me into a cycle of anger and frustration ("why don't other people do what I think they should do?!").
This temptation to universalism is itself nearly universal: it seems to lie at the root of politics, activism, punditry, and far too much of philosophy, psychology, religion, literary criticism, sociology, and similar disciplines.
For myself, I've discovered that attempting to translate universal prescriptions into personal practices provides an effective filter on the endless stream of news, advice, and propaganda; and if a source of such information is too insistent, I simply start ignoring it. And in my own writing I try to scrupulously avoid the universalist temptation.
Naturally, I'm not saying that you should start doing things my way or that society needs to become less universalistic, because if I did then I'd be caught in the same old web...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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My increasingly strong commitment to personalism and particularism has prompted me to make some changes in how I read, think, and act. Specifically, I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Consider, for example, the following opinion expressed by Eric Hoffer in his book First Things, Last Things: "My hunch is that to keep stable and healthy a free, affluent society must become a creative society." Universally speaking, that claim may or may not be true (it's not clear to me how we would prove it). However, if I agree with its underlying aim then there are two paths I can take.
The public path would be to advocate for a more creative society, write books and articles about the importance of beauty and the arts in human experience, donate time and money to museums and other cultural organizations, lobby the government for increased public funding of the arts, and so on.
The private path, by contrast, is simple and direct: I could be more creative. For instance, I could study classical guitar, compose music, write poems, pursue nature photography, observe the movements of birds and animals, read great literature, watch the sun rise and set, gaze up at the moon and stars, contemplate paintings and sculptures in my own house or at museums and galleries, learn more about the history of the arts, apply my mind to answering novel questions in philosophical aesthetics, and so on.
Oh wait, I already do all those things! It seems that at a deeply personal level I agree with Hoffer's claim, because I'm working to make it real in my own life - taking, however, the quiet, private path rather than the noisy, public path. Since nowadays our society seems to honor public things far above private things, we could even call this taking the road less traveled by. So far in my pursuit of human fulfillment, doing so has made all the difference.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Beauty is not limited to the arts (indeed, art is not always beautiful, but that's another topic). This set me to thinking about the many sorts of things that we humans can call beautiful:
And these are still quite general: it's not all of mathematics that we consider beautiful, but certain equations (e.g., Euler's equation and Maxwell's equations); in baseball, a well-turned double play can be a thing of beauty, but a routine fly ball not so much; and so on.
Furthermore, these beautiful things exhibit a wide range of attractive qualities, such as: fluidity, simplicity, intricacy, purity, polish, smoothness, sleekness, elegance, proportion, symmetry, asymmetry, line, composition, arrangement, form, structure, solidity, color, tone, rhythm, harmony, aliveness, permanence, evanescence, transcendence, earthiness, spontaneity, precision, virtuosity, imagination. It's not a mistake that some of these qualities are - or at least seem to be - at odds with each other. For instance, we might value precision and virtuosity in a musical performance, but if it's too precise it might start to feel robotic. Similarly, criteria of beauty can vary across times and cultures; as one example, in some East Asian cultures people rate symmetry less highly than people did in classical Greece.
The endless variety and particularity of beautiful things might make theoretical speculation more difficult, but they also give us so much celebrate and explore in the natural and human worlds.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Once more unto the breach with Santayana! (Three posts in a day on this topic were not what I expected.) Before saying goodbye to him, at least for now, I thought it would be fun to look at his use - or abuse - of Shakespeare at a crucial point in The Sense of Beauty. As Santayana leads up to this definition of beauty, he quotes Sonnet 54, which runs as follows:
O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses;
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their maskèd buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, by verse distills your truth.
As always with Shakespeare, there is so much we could say about a mere fourteen lines! But first, let's see how Santayana makes use of this poem:
The passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. [Here Santayana quotes all but the last two lines of Sonnet 54.] One added ornament, we see, turns the deep dye, which was but show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and reality, and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion are hardly beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much more necessary would they be for the sweetness itself to become a beauty! If we had the perfume in a flask, no one would think of calling it beautiful: it would give us too detached and controllable a sensation. There would be no object in which it could be easily incorporated. But let it float from the garden, and it will add another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously recognized, and help to make them beautiful. Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified. ~ The Sense of Beauty, §11
Here Shakespeare, as is his wont, seems to draw a contrast between appearance and reality. The canker (a.k.a. dog-rose) puts on a beautiful show but lacks the sweet odour that lives in and defines the true rose; similarly, the fresh loveliness of the Fair Youth will eventually fade away, whereas the truth of his many virtues will live on in Shakespeare's artfully beautiful verses.
Yet Santayana sees things differently. For him, the truth about the rose (its sweet odour, which distinguishes it from the dog-rose) is merely yet another ornament which, when added to the rose's visual appearance, doubles the pleasure and therefore makes us exclaim (if we are in an extravagant mood) that the rose is beautiful. Without the corroboration of scent, we think the dog-rose is rather plain, despite its deep-dyed color, its shapely form, and its pleasing motion in the summer breezes. There is no truth to claims of beauty - it's all subjective.
To my mind, Santayana has twisted Shakespeare's meaning to suit the purposes of his argument. Few indeed are the beautiful things that benefit from "the cooperation of pleasures" - Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has no color, Shakespeare's sonnets don't taste delicious, and the Mona Lisa isn't wearing an expensive perfume! Although classical Greek sculptures originally possessed the added charm of paint, it's not as if the ancients could call them beautiful whereas we, missing out on their vivid colors, therefore can call them, say, mildly pleasing or merely showy. Yet that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, would it not?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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