John G. Messerly's Blog, page 150
March 20, 2014
Seamus Heaney on Poetry and Meaning
An earlier post today (“More Songs About Time”) used music as a way of revealing deep truths. This reminded me of something I read by the Nobel prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939 -2013), who was the most famous poet in the world before his death. Here he is on what poetry is, wants to be, and how it can bring meaning to life:
“[A poem] begins in delight … and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion … in its repose the poem gives us a premonition of harmonies desired and not inexpensively achieved. In this way, the order of art becomes an achievement intimating a possible order beyond itself, although its relation to that further order remains promissory rather than obligatory. Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it.”1
Heaney believed that meaning does not derive from one large idea like god, but from many smaller ideas put together from poems, art, conversations, and experiences. A good brief poem hastens the encounter of language with meaning.
But does poetry (or art or music) intimate an order beyond itself, can it unravel the mystery of meaning? I don’t think so. Heaney has it right that it intimates “a possible order.” But Heaney has it wrong when he suggests an order exists that poetry is a rehearsal for, or a sketch of. This implies that the order is out there waiting to be uncovered. No.
The only goodness and beauty and justice and truth and unity is the kind we build from the ground up, through arduous toil, as mature adults without heavenly help, and with the outcome uncertain. Poetry, like the rest of literature, music, art, and politics is a small part of the ediface. But none see through to a beyond. The only human endeavor capable of seeing past our intuitions and realizing our dreams is science. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen.
All of this may not ameliorate our fears, but it is an honest appraisal of our situation.
1. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, London: Faber & Faber, 1988, pp. 93-94.
Who Am I?
Who am I? This is surely one of the most fascinating questions we can ask. Am I an immaterial soul trapped inside a body, or am I just matter, or do I have “no self” as the Buddhists say? Am I a separate ego distinct from every other thing, or a window, vortex, or aperture through which the universe temporarily becomes conscious, or something else?
Or if I do have a self, is it just a social face I present to the world, what Jung called “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.”1 After all, the English word person derives from the Latin word “persona,” which referred to the mask actors wore in stage plays. Do I then have many masks, many persona? I just don’t know.
Notice how language is deceiving? I ask “do I?” “Am I” “I have” “I think” assuming there is an I. If I say “I have a body,” that assumes dualism of self and body. If I say “I am a body,” that’s better, but it still sounds like the I exists. Perhaps, when pointing to myself, out of this mouth should come “bodying.” The pointing is to an event rather than a substance; an event rather than a substance ontology. It is all so confusing. So again who am (I)?
Perhaps some snippets of poetry might help. Here’s the Italian poet Eugenio Montale:
I am no more
than a spark from a beacon. Well do I know it: to burn,
this, nothing else, is my meaning.
The Chilean Pablo Neruda began his poem “We Are Many” as follows:
Of the many men who I am, who we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
The American Ezra Pound said it like this: “In the search for oneself, in the search for ‘sincere self-expression,’ one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says ‘I am this, that, or the other,’ and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.”2
In T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman, a character says:
I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone
And in becoming no one, I begin to live.
All this reminds me of Keats who talked of one’s need “to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought not a select party … to have no identity … no fixed character, no fixed opinions.”3
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in the Estate of Poetry said:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.
I am not one person, but am I anything? You are not one person, but are you anything? If I pretend to be someone, who is doing the pretending? Could it be there is no one pretending, because there is no one or no(thing) behind the mask? Both the Buddhists and Hume said as much. But surely this is true. I am not a self/soul in a body, for my body is porous and needs the air which needs the trees which need water which needs earth which needs the universe … and the multiverses too if they exist. So is I just another name for everything. We’ve come full circle to the same question. Who am I and do I exist?
Confusion reigns. Poetry reveals the mystery we live within, but it gives no answers.
C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (London 1953) p. 190
Michael Hamburger, The Truth in Poetry: Tension in Modern Poetry… p. 267.
Michael Hamburger, An Unofficial Rilke, p 16.
More Songs About Time
My post of Jan. 21, 2014, “The Passage of Time,” contained a few music videos on time’s passing. An astute reader sent me three more videos touching on the same subject. I was moved by them all. They reminded me that music communicates something that prose cannot; it evokes different sentiments. Perhaps that is why Gabriel Marcel, the existential philosopher and concert pianist, thought that many great philosophical ideas couldn’t be put it into words but could be played on the piano. (For more see his : Music and Philosophy, trans. Maddox and Wood.)
The first one is a little known Sinatra tune, “100 Years From Today.” It’s philosophical argument is straightforward, live life now because in a hundred years you won’t be here.
The next one is from the group Fountains of Wayne and the song is titled: “All Kinds of Time.” It uses a football quarterback surveying the field in the last few moments of the game as a metaphor for the moments of our lives. For me it evokes the sense of eternity in the moment, as well as the possibility of doing great things with a single act. But I’ll leave you to interpret it for yourself.
“All Kinds of Time” — somehow evokes the ineffable in the commonplace for me. Football is just a metaphor:
The final song is “Wheels of a Dream,” from the musical Ragtime. It conveys the hope that each new child will move us forward; and most importantly that the dream of a better world keeps us going. So moving.
I thank my reader for his contribution.
March 19, 2014
Resignation or Rage?
Occasionally, an interesting comment piques my interest; here is an excerpt from one about yesterday’s blog:
“The “lostness concerning our place in an indifferent cosmos” as you put it … seems to be a pervasive thought process even among the laymen when presented with the idea of an over all lack of meaning, but why is that? I tend more to agree with guys like Simon Critchley in that meaningless is awesome! Yeah, the cosmos is indifferent! All that means is that we have been granted access to this amazing, possibly infinite sandbox to play in for as long as we allow ourselves to do so! Maybe that’s just me.”
I wish I could embrace the possible meaninglessness of life the way Critchley does. He eschews all narratives of salvation, and is edified by the ordinary things around him which, on closer inspection, are really extraordinary. Perhaps this is what Kazantzakis had in mind when he called hope “the last temptation.” Rather than hope for unattainable salvation, we should find meaning in the sights, sounds, and loves around us. This was Zorba’s solution in Kazantzakis’s novel. You find a similar idea in Stoicism. If we could be resigned and indifferent to our fate, while doing our duty at the same time, we would experience equanimity of mind. This might be the best we can do.
But then again, to quote the commentator, “maybe its just me” but this doesn’t seem to be enough. Which raises a question. Is there something wrong with me because I cannot find the extraordinary within the ordinary, I cannot accept my fate and my finitude; or is something wrong with the world, that it appears not to give me the infinite being, consciousness and bliss I so desire? Shakespeare said that the problem wasn’t in the stars but in ourselves, but I think the problem is in both. To be truly content we must change both ourselves and the world.
Yet it is a big project to change the world. For now we may be forced to accept our fate and find solace in doing so. Perhaps this is the best we can do. Just let it go–resignation, acceptance, peace. The nirvana of nothingness.
But as soon as I say such things another voice within me objects, and it is a poet’s voice:
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
March 18, 2014
The Tragic Sense of Life
I was re-reading a small part of Miguel de Unamuno’s, The Tragic Sense of Life (1910), when I came across these haunting lines:
“Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions: (a) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or (b) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or (c) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or are resigned despair, and hence conflict.”
For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic Jew (Spinoza), our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought by a man and for all men…
And this personal and affective starting point of all philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life.”
Unamuno’s sublime description of the tragic sense of life is reminiscent of the sentiments of Pascal. Both convey a lostness or insignificance concerning our place in an indifferent cosmos. When I use to teach existentialism–Unamuno is an early existentialist–students complained that it was both tragic and depressing. They saw little value in the longings of someone like Unamuno, or in Dostoevsky, “suffering is the origin of consciousness,” or in Sartre: “Life begins on the other side of despair.” They even found Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning too depressing.
Now I do not believe there is any intrinsic value in suffering; I do not believe in pain, suffering, war, death or in any of the other limitations and evils that surround us. But the recognition of how terrible, tragic, and absurd life is compared with how good it could be has a redeeming feature–the possibility that this recognition may motivate us to eliminate these evils. This is the value of Unamuno’s recognition of the tragic sense of life.
March 17, 2014
The Outer Limits of Reason
But as for certain truth, no man has known it, nor will he know it; neither of the gods, nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter the final truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses. ~ Xenophanes
THE LIMITS OF REASON
Just finished reading large parts of Noson Yanofsky’s, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, And Logic Cannot Tell Us. He covers paradoxes, conundrums, puzzles, impossibilities, limitations, perplexities and obstructions in philosophy, mathematics, computer science, physics, and logic. Topics include: self-referential paradoxes, the ship of Theseus, Zeno paradoxes, different sizes of infinity, the halting problem, the Monty Hall problem, chaos theory, the travelling salesman problem, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and more. Much of the book is tough going, although Yanofsky does make difficult topics understandable.
Of particular interest to a philosopher is his conclusion. After an entire book on reason’s limitations, he meditates the definition of reason. While many definitions have been offered, Yanofsky settles on: “Reason is the set of processes or methodologies that do not lead to contradictions and falsehoods.“1 Processes that do not lead to contradictions and falsehoods are reasonable ones; whereas if we derive a falsehood or contradiction we overstepped the bounds of reason.
Of course determining whether some idea or process is reasonable or steps over the limits of reason is hard to determine. At one time scientists believed in ether, phlogiston, phrenology and spontaneous generation. Often the problem lies in relying on intuition, which sometimes misleads. The earth may seem stationary and flat, but it is not; motion may seem independent of speed, but it is not. But what of dark energy, dark matter, string theory, supersummetry and the like? For now we don’t know if they have overstepped the bounds of reason, but as we learn more about reason and science we will hopefully find out.
THE DANGER OF GOING BEYOND REASON
Yanofsky is at his best extolling the virtues of reason. “Jonas Salk did not find a cure for polio using intuition … Imagination was not used to get humans to the moon … World hunger will not be solved by feelings of love and warmth…”2 Moreover to go beyond reason is dangerous, even if the answers to our problem are out there. Yes there is a shortest route for the travelling salesman, but we cannot know it; and we cannot prove that Godel’s sentence–this logical statement is not provable–is true, even though it is. In short there is knowledge out there that we can’t access.
Why not then just speculate? Because there is nothing intelligent we can say when we go beyond reason, especially if we are trying to avoid contradictions or falsehoods. To go past reason leads inevitably to mistakes, and is characterized by guesses and conjectures. He counsels accepting our limitations lest we fall into error. Yet there is a bright side; we live, we love, we have aesthetic and moral experiences. As for reason it both powerful and limited, but it is not all we have. In this we should take comfort.
1. Noson Yanofsky’s, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, And Logic Cannot Tell Us, 345.
2. Noson Yanofsky’s, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, And Logic Cannot Tell Us, 349.
Philosophy & Wonder
I have taught out of more than a hundred philosophy books in my career as a college professor. One textbook had a prelude with a futuristic photo of a spaceship or missile launching or futuristic house (depending on the edition) along with a few words from the author. It set the tone for the exploration upon which my students and I were about to embark.
I was a bit embarrassed to read the words though. They were so simple and philosophy was generally believed to be, at least by my students, a foreboding, esoteric pursuit. Still I always thought they captured what philosophy is, as well as who would and wouldn’t like it in a clear, concise, and moving way. They felt written by a professor who was not out to impress his students with his intellect, but communicating at least partly with his heart. You response to them may be a test case of whether you will like this blog. Here is what he wrote:
The following pages may
lead you to wonder.
That’s really what philosophy
is—wondering.
To philosophize
is to wonder about life—
about right and wrong,
love and loneliness, war and death.
It is to wonder creatively
about freedom, truth, beauty, time
and a thousand other things.
To philosophize is
to explore life.
It especially means breaking free
to ask questions.
It means resisting
easy answers.
To philosophize
is to seek in oneself
the courage to ask
painful questions.
But if, by chance,
you have already asked
all your questions
and found all the answers—
if you’re sure you know
right from wrong,
and whether God exists,
and what justice means,
and why we mortals fear and hate and pray—
if indeed you have completed your wondering
about freedom and love and loneliness
and those thousand other things,
then the following pages
will waste your time.
Philosophy is for those
who are willing to be disturbed
with a creative disturbance.
Philosophy is for those
who still have the capacity
for wonder.
James Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering
March 16, 2014
Have I Been to Jupiter?
FALLIBILISM
In my previous post I claimed to be a fallibilist. This is a somewhat technical philosophical term which I have described to students as “the belief that any idea I have could be wrong.” Here is a more precise defintions.
Fallibilism (from medieval Latin fallibilis, “liable to err”) is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world, and yet still be justified in holding their incorrect beliefs. In the most commonly used sense of the term, this consists in being open to new evidence that would disprove some previously held position or belief, and in the recognition that “any claim justified today may need to be revised or withdrawn in light of new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences.”[1] This position is taken for granted in the natural sciences.[2]
FALLIBILISM AND SKEPTICISM
Perhaps the most important issue is to distinguish fallibilism from skepticism–the doctrine that no idea, view, or claim is ever well justified or is knowledge. Generally skepticism is thought to be a stronger claim than fallibilism. Skepticism implies that we should assert nothing, suspend all judgment, or doubt the reliability of the senses, whereas fallibilists generally accept the existence of knowledge or justified belief. (Most contemporary epistemologists are fallibilists, but not skeptics.)
But how can we reconcile these two views? May we say, with consistency, that our ideas might be mistaken, yet we are still justified in believing them? If John claims to know x but admits that the truth might be not x, then how is what he claims to know, knowledge? To say you know something, but at the same time admit you might be in error seems mistaken.
At this point the reader is welcome to consider sophisticated replies to this problem such as David Lewis on “epistemic contextualism” or P. Rysiew on “concessive knowledge attributions”—i.e., sentences of the form ‘S knows that p, but it is possible that q’ (where q entails not-p).
FALLIBILISM AS CRITICAL THINKING
But let’s approach this issue more simply. If you buy a lottery ticket and the odds of winning are 1 in 10 million, do you know you won’t win? No, you don’t know this for sure but you can be very certain you won’t win. If you play the lottery and buy two tickets you have a slightly greater chance of winning, but again you can be very confident you won’t win. And the same thing if you buy a thousand tickets. (Of course if you buy every combination of tickets you will almost certainly win, although maybe not–the lottery could be rigged!) Even if you buy a thousand tickets you can justifiably say, “I know I won’t win,” if by know you mean very, very certain.
Now if I say that I know that evolutionary, quantum, atomic, relativity, or gravitational theories are true, this is short-hand for “they are true beyond any reasonable doubt; meaning they are true unless gods, intelligent aliens or a computer simulation is deceiving my cognitive and sensory apparatuses, i.e., they are true unless something really weird is going on. Of course something weird could be going on and aliens may be having fun at my expense, say by making evolution look true when it isn’t. There may be deceiver gods or aliens or computer programs. But no one should believe this.
This is the essence of good thinking; proportioning our assent to the evidence. There is overwhelming evidence for the framework ideas of modern science, but none that people who play the lottery generally win. In fact the evidence shows that almost everyone who plays the lottery loses. A well-developed mind learns to distinguish the almost certainly true from the probably true from the equally likely to be true from the probably not true to the almost certainly false. To better understand, consider some simple examples.
EXAMPLES
Suppose I say, as one born in the US and a current resident of Seattle WA, one of the following:
1. I have been to Jupiter.
2. I have been to the South Pole multiple times.
3. I have been to the South Pole once.
4. I have been to Russia.
5. I have been to Europe.
6. I have been to Portland.
7. I have been to Seattle.
It should be easy to see that as we proceed down the list the probability that I have been to any of these places increases. In the beginning the chance was practically zero–although as a fallibilist you must concede that I may be an alien who has taken human form and in fact have been to Jupiter. By the bottom of the list the chance is 100% that I’ve been there, unless I’m lying to you or am being deceived by gods or aliens or simulations as to my whereabouts. If I tell you #1, then you know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the claim is false. If I tell you #7, while standing next to you at the Space Needle, then you know (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the claim is true. Finally if I tell you #4, you just don’t know and have to examine the evidence to determine the probability my claim is true.
And this is how one can be a fallibilist and claim to know things simultaneously. Any idea I have could be wrong, but I feel amazingly confident that #1 is false and #7 is true. If I am justified in being amazingly confident by the evidence, that counts as knowledge. And here is a another example. Suppose I say:
1. If they play a football game, the Seattle Seahawks will beat a Pop Warner team.
2. If they play a football game, the Seattle Seahawks will beat a high school team.
3. If they play a football game, the Seattle Seahawks will beat a college team.
4. If they play a football game, the Seattle Seahawks will beat an NFL team.
5. If they play a football game, the Seattle Seahawks will beat a team of omnipotent, omniscient, godlike, super duper football players.
You should say to me, I know #1 is true beyond a reasonable doubt (although the Seahawks could lose on purpose, all simultaneously have heart attacks during the game, or die on the way to the game in an accident and forfeit), and that #5 is false beyond a reasonable doubt because the Seahawks opponents are godlike football players.
So I am a fallibilist. Any idea I have could be wrong but some ideas are more likely to be true than others. All one can do, as a rational person, is proportion their assent to the evidence. You might win the lottery, I might have been on Jupiter, and the Pop Warner team might beat the Seahawks … but don’t bet on it.
Nikolas Kompridis, “Two kinds of fallibilism”, Critique and Disclosure (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 180.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996
March 15, 2014
Atheism as Intellectual Snobbery?
Just a few brief remarks about Emma Green’s recent piece in the Atlantic: “The Intellectual Snobbery of Conspicuous Atheism. (I have covered these issues in detail in multiple blog posts and in my recent book.)
Green says: “Theirs [atheists] is a subtle assertion: Believers aren’t educated or thoughtful enough to debunk God, and if they only knew more, rational evidence would surely offset faith.”
Reply: The fact is that religious belief declines with educational attainment, particularly with scientific education.1 Studies also show that religious belief declines among those with higher IQs.2 Stephen Hawking, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins are not outliers, and neither are Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Surveys of scientists as a whole show religious belief among them to be small compared to the general populace, and surveys of the members of the national academy of sciences, comprised of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically non-existent.3 The most recent and comprehensive study of professional philosophers shows that less that 15% are theists.4
This does not show that theism is false, but the correlation between education and the lack of religious belief is strong.
Green says: “And this is where the intellectual snobbery comes in … [they believe that] Because intellectual history trends toward non-belief, human history must, too.”
Reply: Human history trending toward non-belief. The decline of the influence of religion in Western culture since the 17th century is one of the most significant changes in history. The trend will continue. Are we really to imagine that in 1,000 years or 10,000 years our technologically-modified descendants will believe in gods? That in Yahweh or Allah they will find their answers? This belief strains credulity. (For more see my recent post: “Transhumanism and the End of Religion.”)
And why is disbelief in ascendance? Adam Gopnik summarized it succinctly in his recent New Yorker piece:
What the noes, whatever their numbers, really have now … is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: The advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident.
1. http://freakonomics.com/2011/04/25/does-more-education-lead-to-less-religion/
3. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html
4. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/b...
A Fun Football Story
Every now and then you have to forget the meaning of life and have fun. This story is dedicated to my son-in-law who finds all this so amusing.
Resistance to change is everywhere–even in sports. Think of the slow embrace of using stats or changing the rules in professional sports. Consider an example. I grew up in St. Louis and our NFL team then was the St. Louis (now Arizona) Cardinals. From 1963 to 1978 our kicker was Jim Bakken. He was a 4 time pro-bowler and 2 time first team all-pro, one of the best kickers of his era. You can see all his stats here:
http://www.pro-football-reference.com...
As you can see Bakken made 63% of his field goals for his career from all distances; about 43% from 40-49 yards; and was 0 for 15 from 50 yards or more. Bakken also missed 19 extra points in his career in 553 attempts. Compare this to stats for kickers in the NFL last year.
http://www.nfl.com/stats/categorystat...
As you can see about 1/2 the kickers made over 90% of their field goals almost all the rest made over 80%. Even in the 40-49 yard range most kickers missed very few if any attempts. Last year in the NFL there were 1183 extra points attempts and 5 misses. They made 99.6%!
Today kickers are better for many reasons, but mostly because they kick the ball with their instep. Bakken, like most kickers of his era, kicked with his toe! When the first soccer style kickers came along, they were viewed with suspicion. Who would kick a ball with their instep instead of their toe? Wow that’s radical! That’s what I mean, resistance to change. Humans prefer stasis to dynamism; there are always stuck in the past.
Now to finish my finish my story. In 1974 the St. Louis (football) Cardinals gave a tryout to a soccer player from St. Louis University named Pat Leahy. Naturally the Cardinals kept Bakken and cut Leahy–heck Leahy didn’t kick with his toe! Leahy went on to become the kicker for the Jets from 1974 to 1991. Here is the New York Times story about his retirement at age 41.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/07/spo...
Leahy finished his career 3rd on the all time scoring list in the NFL. No he wasn’t a great kicker by today’s standards, but he was a LOT better than Bakken. So why did the Cardinals chose a toe over a whole foot?
Well kicking a football like a soccer ball is just weird, whereas kicking inaccurately with your toe is normal. That’s just what we do, we use a little pointed toe, the one adjacent to your big toe, the one that sticks out the farthest on some people. Why would you use your much wider whole foot? That just isn’t traditional.
That’s what I mean, resistance to change. It’s everywhere. And, on a serious note, we’ll only survive if we adapt.
