MALA 6030-A Stroll Through Western

CivilizationPhilosophy in the peripatetic style

Summer 2016, Middle Tennessee State UniversityPhotos by Dean Hall

5.25.16

Thursday, May 26, 2016

What's real

We took our Stroll out into the empty, summery courtyard late yesterday afternoon, pondering our "Knowledge is power" chapter and wondering if it's true that what can't be measured and quantified is not quite real. I say no. I think that's what Louis Jenkins says too, in today's poem.

The speaker points out that we don’t really havemuch of a grasp of things, not only the big things,the important questions, but the small everydaythings. “How many steps up to your back yard?...

With the right measurements we can build bridges and rockets and computers, cure diseases, etc. etc. But we must also acknowledge the limits of quantifiable engineering, and the depths of imprecise and subjective (hence non-quantifiable) but still very real experience. Such is the source of some of our best poetry, music, literature, and philosophy. More than that, the lack of an appreciation and aptitude for the non-quantifiable dimension of life would deprive us of some of our most winning human qualities: empathy, compassion, toleration, respect.

Some students balk at this, mostly I suspect because they're frustrated by encounters with others' subjectivity (as imperfectly represented in language) rather than fully attentive to their own. Words are slippery, compared to numbers. We love that about them, we humanists and innumerists (see, I think I just made up another slippery word), while engineers and mathematicians mistrust them. We should all mistrust them, but they're a currency we must trade in if we want to scratch beyond the bare surface of inner life.

"The fons et origo of all reality is subjective," said William James. Subjectivity is real. It's "the deepest thing in our nature, a dumb region of the heart which is yet our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things." Taking it seriously means admitting the Buzz Lightyear principle: reality goes to infinity and beyond. That's the objective truth.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Old nonsense

“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air,” urged Ralph Waldo Emerson, born 213 years ago today. And, finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

Speaking of old nonsense, today's stroll (it's Week 3 of our 13-week "Stroll Through Western Civilization" course) brings us to Plotinus and the Great Chain of Being, the idea that we occupy a midpoint between divine perfection and imperfect nullity, a notch below the angels and above the animals. Matter on this scale is literally next to nothing.

Nonsense. William James, contemplating the mortal remains of a dear friend, spoke of the "sacred" matter that had been capable of assuming such exquisite form…

Up@dawn

"My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." Montaigne

"Solvitur Ambulando. It is solved by walking." Diogenes the Cynic