Incomprehensibly miraculous

I liked the way that the train company has lowered it's expectations of human behaviour; the 'quiet coach' is now renamed the 'quieter coach' in the hope that people might be able to just keep it down a bit.

Network Rail on the other hand are my new favourite company as when I went to the loo on York station I found this wonderful *FREE* sanitary towel dispenser in the ladies. How excellent is that. I mean I don't need them any more, but hurray for progress. 

I have been up and down the country, and then down and up the country in the last ten days and was looking forward to a little calm relaxation for the last few days of my leave but tomorrow I find myself getting the middle-of-the-night coach to London to keep Monkey company while she gets her VISA FOR JAPAN!!! It's been a frustrating six months that she should have been there enjoying all sorts of wonderful experiences, but they finally opened the border again on 1st of March and with any luck she might still see some cherry blossom. 

Also so much for all the blog posts I was going to get written (travel time can mean plenty of reading time) but this is due back today so will just get the one done.

I have followed Oliver Burkeman's column in the Grauniad and he has written lots of books, of which 'Four Thousand Weeks' is the most recent. Four thousand weeks sounds like a lot in one way, but hardly any in another (it is only an average, I plan on having well over 5000). I liked this book because it is more about having some perspective on our ideas about time and how we use it, rather than yet another time management tome. I am not one of those busy busy people anyway. I fritter my life away in huge swathes some times. I can't remember what I have done with the last decade. And I have developed my 'saying no' skills over the last year. I noted when I looked at my payslip yesterday that I have earned less this year than last, and that's because I have done less overtime, taken my days off and enjoyed them. But I do still worry about wasting time and that I should have some kind of long term plan with things I want to achieve. Along comes a book that basically tells me not to stress about it. 

He talks here about how people try and 'clear the decks' of all the small clutter of life before they feel about to apply themselves to the big important projects:

"One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.
What's needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counter-productive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges - to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what's truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all." (p.50)

I liked the book because it is a philosophical musing on existence as much as it is advice:

... but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there's something very entitles about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality an outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who'd failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given - as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all." (p.66)

This one drew my attention because it coincides with my own feelings about parenting and children. Too much parenting focuses on what the child will become and does not allow them to just be, though it is just as applicable to adults:

"In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck - and who's life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. 'Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up,' Herzen says. 'But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't distain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment ... Life's bounty is in its flow. later is too late.' " (p.132)

And this, most of all, because it proposes the idea that a life well spent does not mean you have to achieve something significant, and it is the one I felt that I really took to heart from my reading:

"No wonder it comes as a relief to be reminded of your insignificance: it's the feeling of realising that you'd been holding yourself, all this time, to standards you couldn't reasonably be expected to meet. And this realisation isn't merely calming but liberating, because once you're no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a 'life well spent', you're freed to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time. You're freed, too, to consider the possibility that many of the things you're already doing with it as more meaningful than you'd supposed - and that until now, you'd subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they weren't significant enough." (p.212)

He ends the book with some questions and some points of advice but also with a quote from Jung that says, to paraphrase and abbreviate, put one foot in front of the other and quietly do the next and most necessary thing.

Stay safe. Be kind. Relish the miraculous.

George

Reading the Grauniad on my lunch break the other day I was taken with a review of 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain' by George Saunders, a literary analysis come writing advice book focussing on Russian short stories. The library has a couple of copies on order, so I am in the queue. Then coincidentally the literary diet comes up with this commencement speech by him from 2013:

It was preceded by Seamus Heaney's poem 'Mossbawn Sunlight', which is very much worth far more than the minute or so it will take you to read. 

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

100 Days - 27th : Good and Evil

The "Evil God Challenge" by Stephen Law from Steph Hope on Vimeo.

Stephen Law always makes me think hard about stuff, and I like the way he often relates philosophical problems to what happens in real life (because philosophy is often connected in people's minds with the abstract and abstruse). Here is an animation explaining in layperson's terms his longer thesis challenging the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent all-good god.

In other news today, people died.

Watching the crisis unfold has often felt a little unreal, as if it is happening elsewhere to other people. I have felt that naming people, as happened a lot with the early deaths, and the deaths of medical professionals, is important so that we remember it is real people dying. The New York Times today printed over 1000 people's names, along with some detail about them. Here are some people who  have died: Solomon S. Podgursky, 84, New Jersey, loved to figure out how things worked; Ruth Skapinock, 85, Roseville, Calif., backyard birds were known to eat from her hand; Irene Gasior, 94, Pennsylvania, great-grandmother with a flair for pizzelles; Dale E. Thurman, 65, Lexington Ky., tailor known for his exacting work and strong opinions.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

Kierkegaard and all that

I have been doing a few more Coursera courses over the last few months, having started several last year but not completed any. The course on Kierkegaard was another that I did not complete, put off partly by the fact that I was supposed to write a real essay to pass the course, but also by the utterly unreadable nature of his writings. So I borrowed 'Kierkegaard: A guide for the perplexed' by Claire Carlisle from the library, since the lectures were interesting and I followed enough to feel that he had something significant to impart.

The thing that strikes you is how learning about Kierkegaard the man is vital to understanding his way of thinking (second only to learning how to spell his name of course). What is most interesting is that he doesn't think of philosophy as some kind of abstract ideas, but as integral to being human:
"Instead of excluding his personal life from his intellectual work, he turned his experiences of love, suffering, spiritual weakness, moral conflict and despair into philosophical problems, and insisted that these could not be addressed through rational, abstract thought. Kierkegaard argues that objectivity is dishonest and unable to capture what is most fundamental to human existence, because before anybody becomes a philosopher - and even, in fact, before they start to think about anything - they are already an 'existing individual' who lives, breathes and moves continually closer to death. The idea of an 'existing individual' is absolutely central to Kierkegaard's philosophy, but of course this is more than just an idea, and abstract concepts fail to capture the vitality and fluidity of life." (p.15)

There is much debate about the distinction between the person he was and the person he presents as in his writing; was he trying to create alternate personas for himself, or is it the case that it allowed him to posit all kinds of potentially unpopular views and arguments. The vast majority of his writings were published under a series of pseudonyms. He argued that the aim was to distance himself from the reader so he would not be viewed as some kind of authority figure. Heavily influenced by the thought of Socrates his aim was not to present a coherent package of ideas or 'truths' but to lead students to find the truth for themselves. He did not want to tell people how they should live, but encourage them to think for themselves.
"One of his priorities is to awaken readers to their capacity for choice, and by refusing the role of author and authority-figure he is giving the reader the opportunity to exercise her freedom." (p.38)

Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel, an important and influential german philosopher of the time, was an ongoing theme in much of his writing; his influence is significant if you consider how much time and effort Kierkegaard put into it (here talking about Either/Or).
"By dramatising the philosophical debates of his contemporaries, he takes the issues out of the purely reflective, theoretical context, and into actual existence. There is  in Kierkegaard's thought an attempt to move beyond academic philosophy, as well as to criticise Hegelian ideas in particular. This means that his relationship to both philosophical traditions and the academic world is rather ambiguous: on the one hand he draws from concepts created by other philosophers, which were already topical - such as Aristotle's principle of contradiction - but on the other hand he uses these concepts to argue that philosophy cannot express the whole truth about human existence." (p.56)

He wanted to shift the focus of thinking away from Hegel's insistence on objective truth, for Kierkegaard the 'inwardness' of the individual was all important. As the book points out, "Kierkegaard's philosophy reflects a common experience of feeling occasionally at odds with the world and unable to express oneself fully within it", and perhaps this is why he has come to be linked so closely with 20th century existential philosophy. For him subjectivity was more significant:
"'Subjectivity is truth' means that truth is a way of being a subject, or a way of existing as a human being. Kierkegaard says that subjective truth is a matter of how - how one lives - whereas objective truth is a matter of what one knows or believes." (p.68)
However:
"Right through Kierkegaard's authorship there runs the claim that, from an existential point of view, intellectual reflection alone is unable to reach the goals of ethical and religious life. Religious faith is presented as a greater task and a rarer achievement than rational thought." (p.61)
I begin to loose contact with him at this point because he moves off into the realm of theology and I skimmed though the last part of the book. In the same way that Descartes came up with all sorts of interesting challenges to mainstream thinking of the day, he baulks at actually questioning the existence of god. Challenging the doctrines of the church is one thing, anything that might undermine their essential message is quite another. There are some interesting introduction to critiques of Kierkegaard on his Wikipedia page if you are interested. So, a very interesting person, privileged by his independent wealth to spend his life thinking about what it means to be human, something that we should all do from time to time.

"He wrote a book on the topic, with a title that summed up his quandary: Either / Or. Either get married to Regine or don’t get married. What’s it best to do? Settle down to family life? Or look for someone else? Stay single? Or settle for what you know already? After a year of agony (of angst), he broke off the engagement. But he pined for Regine nevertheless, leading to a memorable outburst: 'Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.' "(Quoted from The Philosopher's Mail)

Getting to know myself...

... or am I a figment of my own imagination?
A while ago I was pointed in the direction of the Coursera website, it offers university level courses, for free, to students all over the world, mostly pitched at people without prior knowledge and who are armed merely with a curious mind. So since March I have being studying a course entitled Know Thyself that has encompassed a variety of disciplines, but tutored by a philosopher, Mitch Green.

The first thing that the course has given me is a profound awe for the human mind. It is oh so much more sophisticated than most people appreciate. Secondly I feel cleverer just studying philosophy, and I discover this is because the concept of 'philosophy' is positively somatically marked, the word is linked in your mind with all sorts of associations that imply intelligence. We started the course with the work of Socrates and the notion that 'the unexamined life is not worth living', or as an alternative translation suggests, is 'not to be lived', taking pains to point out that Socrates probably was not advocating a cull of thoughtless people, just that their lives lacked some quality if they went about never considering the what or why of their thoughts, beliefs or actions. As a philosopher I am not sure he is such a great example, he tends to live up to the stereotype of the aloof, 'disconnected from the real world' kind of philosopher, that had given philosophy an undeserved bad name, but he was prepared to die for the idea that he should be allowed to question everything, so all credit to him in my book. Descartes on the other hand was a bit of a chicken and having made a very convincing case for the existence of a human consciousness as the basis for all knowledge (I think therefore I am) he then goes and spoils it by arguing that god exists, mostly because saying that he didn't was not socially acceptable at the time. I found myself at odds with the dualist notion of the separation of the mind and the body, influenced partly by the religious overtones but also by my reading of 'Still Alice' at the time; where Descartes says the mind can exist beyond the death of the body, but not vice versa, what I learned about Alzheimer's Disease seems to imply that the body is perfectly able to live even when everything that makes up the human mind, the thoughts, memories, instincts, wishes, all cognitive functions, have ceased to operate.

Lots of different theorists have different views on what constitutes the human mind; for Descartes our mind is our ability to reason, for Gilbert Ryle we are made up of a collection of 'dispositions' to behaviour, then for Freud our minds are made up of the Ego, the Id and the Superego. The study of the brain has often focussed on learning about it's function by seeing what happens to it when things go wrong, either with physical brain damage or mental illness. But many of them came back to the idea of introspection, Socrates' notion of an examined life, that to understand your own behaviour and actions you must examine your thoughts and attitudes. Although much of Freud's theories about human nature have been discredited psychotherapy remains an important mechanism to understanding the human mind. Different theories emerged about the unconscious and our ability to understand what goes on in the part of the mind that we are often unaware of. What emerged also was the notion of the interdependence between mind and body, between thoughts and actions, each impacting upon the other and also between our supposed rationality and our emotions. It has only been much more recently that  neuroscience has progressed and we have more and more knowledge about the inner workings of the brain on a cellular level.  I am still reading Antonio Damasio's book 'Descartes Error' which turns on it's head the idea that human beings should or do make decisions based on rationally choosing the best outcome and that allowing emotions to intervene is necessarily a bad thing, but this book makes use of  knowledge about the functioning of regions of the brain for different purposes (review coming of this book at some point, hopefully soon).

Having morphed from a philosophy into more of a psychology course and drifted briefly into neuroscience, we went back to examining the idea of deception and self-deception, not just in terms of lying but more subtly in terms of your internal spin-doctor who helps you make the best of life when it's really not that great. And finally to Buddhism and Zen and how it is more in rejecting the notion of 'self' that we can come to any sense of meaning.

I have been trying to write something of an overview of what I learned but find that although I enjoyed it the ideas were all very discrete, different views at how we humans have considered our own minds. There is a 'Cartesian View' or a 'Freudian View' or a 'Buddhist View' of the human mind, they are separate paradigms and do not lead one to another, nor did each necessarily help in understanding the next. I found that the most helpful thing were the questions that Mitch posed at the beginning and end of the course, that he told his students to always ask about any idea: What do you mean? and How do you know? You should be able to challenge yourself to question the theories and ideas that you hold and reason with yourself about them. I especially like the concept of 'Occam's razor' which states that 'among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.' The human mind is an amalgam of all the assumption it has acquired through experiences, many of them very flawed, and trying to figure out which is most of the battle. I am left with the feeling that to know your own mind certainly could be the work of a lifetime, and if you focus inwards too much you might be both tying yourself up in knots and missing something much more important outside.  What I liked most was that it felt like real studying; video lectures prepared specifically for the course, suggested reading, online discussions and feedback. It had to be done within the course schedule and there were weekly tests to see if you had paid attention and understood the concepts in the lectures so you had to treat it seriously if you wanted to 'pass'. Of the 70,000 odd who signed up apparently less than 10,000 were still actively participating at the end. Creature and I have since begun an Introduction to Psychology course together and will be starting 'Introduction to Art' next week too. I have several more in the pipeline that start later in the year. I would highly recommend it to anyone either just wanting to try something new or interested in getting back into formal education.

Birthday reflections and Fibre Arts Friday

So yesterday was my 21st birthday (again). I got despondent in my mid thirties about the advancing years and so decided to start counting backwards, and as with such things the offspring have continued to find it amusing, consequently Creature made me a 21st birthday cake.

Mum and dad sent me this most beautiful enamelled pendant from a craft event at Bovey Tracey, made by an artist called Janine Partington. As I said to mum on the phone it is the most perfect of presents as I would have seen it and thought how lovely but never bought it for myself. I gave up wearing much in the way of jewellery when the children were tiny since babies always got their fingers tangled in necklaces (and who has time in the morning to choose body decoration with four small children demanding food), so maybe now is the time to start again.

I had a plan to write myself a 'before I'm 50' bucket-list-type-thing of stuff to try and work on/achieve/whatever over the next year but I didn't want it to be a 'go bungee jumping/skydiving/walk the great wall of china' thing (mainly because I have no money, but also because I am not that into heights:-) Anyway I made a list that is more like new year resolutions than buckets:

• submit something to the Bridport Prize competition 
• learn some poetry by heart 
• spend more time reading and less on the computer
• systematically look for a new job
• stick with the zumba
• go to the theatre
• go back to the felting and spinning, much neglected in the last year

I have started doing a course on Coursera entitled Know Thyself, a mixture of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, aesthetics and Buddhism (as the description says), run by the University of Virginia. I have started (yet another) blog as a place to put the 'assignments', though strictly the assignments are for your own benefit and you pass the course by passing the online tests each week, but I feel like what is the point if you don't give some real thought to the questions they are raising. So far, so interesting.

Since today is Friday please also pop over (for those craftily inclined) to Fibre Arts Friday and see the shares. I have spun one hank of the roving that I dyed last week and am very pleased with it. I only use a spindle and just spin singles, I have no idea how to go about plying. Not sure I will knit anything with it any time soon as Dunk has been hinting for his jumper and I have a plan for a knitted dress that we found in one of Julie's magazines.

New New Books

... that is, as opposed to new second hand books, which make up most of my book purchases.
Mum and dad gave me a book token for Christmas which I spent in Waterstones a few weeks ago:
Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn - many many people over on Friday Reads have been reading this one, and since I picked up on Stephen King's 11/22/63 from there I thought I would trust their recommendation.
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles - read about it somewhere and it was on my library request list but when I picked it up and read the first few sentences I knew I was going to love it, so I bought it.
Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins - I reviewed one of his books three years ago and have been intent on some more.

Then I decided to spend my found money collection on books. I quite deliberately wanted to pick a variety of reading experiences, and so this bundle arrived in the post earlier this week:
The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) - having reviewed Saul's book the other week I decided to invest in some serious Renaissance reading, this is going to be quite a long term project at over 1300 pages.
Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger - this one had been on the wishlist for ages, since I read From A to X four years ago I have been planning to read more from John Berger, this is a book about drawing, but more than that.
The days run away like wild horses over the hills by Charles Bukowski - I quoted one of Bukowski's poems some time ago and after reading Post Office I have had it in mind to acquire a book of his poetry.
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly - another from the wishlist, something a bit different from my usual reads.
Dreamland by Madeliene Peyroux -  this was right back at the beginning of my wishlist so I have no idea where I heard about it. I have not bought any music in a long time.

Rub and polish your brain

"When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me? - Montaigne and being in touch with life" by Saul Frampton. I first mentioned this book two years ago because it is written by my cousin Saul (and it's always good to have a little reflected intellectual glory) and I came back and requested it from the library before Christmas after reading the Alain de Botton book that talked about Montaigne and re-piqued my interest. This is a really intellectual book, but I was pleased to find that it was very readable and, although liberally sprinkled with words I had to look up, accessible to a non-academic audience.

During the late middle ages life for most people was (to quote someone) nasty, brutish and short. The people of Europe were plagued by Plague and beset by religious strife, and into this arena stepped the person of Michel de Montaigne. After the death of his father he inherits his title, land, house and vineyards and proceeds to retire to his library, and spends the next twenty years writing his reflections on life in a series of essays. The essays, published and extensively revised during his lifetime, were widely read at the time, are considered a major contribution to philosophy of the Renaissance and continue to be influential today. The book is much more than a mere biography; it delves into the philosophical  influences that would have been part of Montaigne's education and follows his own reasoning through the essays as he moves away from certain popular viewpoints. There is an interesting mixture of social and political history too, that gives you the background of the world that he lives in. While there are some quotes from the essays the aim of the book is to give you an overview of his ideas, translating them somewhat for the modern reader and also placing them in their historic context.

Montaigne is quoted and referenced extensively through western thought and literature; I discovered towards the end of the book that Shakespeare was a big fan and a speech from The Tempest is almost a direct quote from one of his essays. What is impressive is that he has something to say on every aspect of human life, and what is so engaging about him is that his thoughts and opinions are based on his own life experiences and observations, rather than on abstract reasoning. On warfare, he observes the increased use of gunpowder as a weapon, altering the whole nature of battle, and the unpredictability of civil war:
"Moreover, the natural bonds between people are severed by civil war - the 'divisions and subdivisions' which threaten to tear his country apart - rendering them incapable and indeed scornful of sympathy and fellow feeling. Human behaviour, like that of gunpowder, is now unpredictable: we wander a battlefield in darkness and despair." (p.63)

His fondness for cats (see the title) is extended into musings about the relationship/bond between humans and animals:
"We have cat-fights and bear-hugs, we feel bird-brained and sheepish. And if all goes to the dogs, we can resort to calling people pigs, chickens, or cows - or reach for that symbol of our over-eating, over-heated age: the beached whale. This may be just horsing around, but the more we look at history, the more our debts to animals emerge: where they stand as the silvering to the mirror of ourselves, a differential equation through which our humanness is constantly worked out." (p.100)

On communication (specifically here body language):
"And this opens the way to a cautious optimism: that despite the rifts and divisions opened up by civil war, people retain the ability to communicate with each other. Our bodies are engaged in a form of commerce that ties us together, despite the differences in our thoughts ... Despite our political and religious differences, men have an inbuilt disposition towards communication, and the recognition of this will allow truth - or rather trust - to find a way through. (p.119)

He was well travelled and interested in other cultures and traditions. Though never going to the Americas himself he heard many first hand experiences and developed a quite novel notion of civilisation:
"Montaigne asks: if we are all in fact descended from the same land mass and are in fact all related (as palaeobiology now shows that we are), who is to say, therefore, who is civilised and who is not? Or who will be civilised and uncivilised in ages to come?" (p.145)
And challenged the received opinion that inhabitants of the New World are 'barbaric': 
"It is therefore ourselves who are really barbaric, in corrupting and smothering Nature's beauty with clothing and decoration. ... Montaigne thus turns the tables, and inaugurates a tradition that culminates in Rousseau's idea of the noble savage - a prelapsarian state of nature more to be esteemed that artificial poise." (p.146)
On meeting some Tupinamba Indians and striving to understand, as was his wont, what they might think of his culture,  he notes how they observe and cannot understand the extremes of wealth and poverty alongside each other:
"Montaigne then finishes with an ironic flourish: 'This is all very well, but hang on, they don't even wear trousers' - meaning that we will forever judge others by our own habitual prejudices. But this sense of honour as manifested in an openness to the other person, in a gesture of welcoming them and meeting them half-way, is something that seems to strike a certain chord with Montaigne." (p153)

What is also interesting is that he writes about things that often do not concern other philosophers. The nature of human friendship and it's importance is a strong theme; his close friendship with a poet called Etienne de La Boétie that was cut short by his early death was an ongoing source of grief to Montaigne. 

"In this sense the special nature of friendship is not to do with the fact that it comes with no obligations, but because friendship necessarily activates and invigorates our proxemic senses: it arises when two bodies that had once been unknown to each other meet; as Montaigne says: they 'embraced' each other 'by our names', seeking each other out amidst the throng of a civic feast. Montaigne's writing about friendship thus shows a man profoundly impressed by the stoical composure of his dead friend,
yet also drawn to friendship as constituted by physical proximity, an unspoken, invisible but nourishing force." (p.209-10)

He mourns also the way the civil war estranged people from each other in quite extreme ways; pity and sympathy seen as weaknesses, people divided from one another economically, people hoarding wealth because of fear for the future, neighbour being set against neighbour. He writes an essay 'Of Coaches' describing how they physically divide the haves from the have-nots, making it easier for one side to hate the other.

As he goes along the essays become a means of questioning everything he encounters, challenging commonly held beliefs, a process of self-discovery. I get the impression that if he were alive today Montaigne would be a blogger with a lot to say about the state of the world is in now. I love Saul's concluding reflection on Montaigne's life:
"But in closing the slim manual of Stoicism, Montaigne opens the large volume of life. He states in his later essays that it is 'living happily, not ... dying happily that is the source of human contentment'. And whilst there are no 'skyhooks' on which to hang this morality, neither is there an abyss below: 'When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.' Montaigne is perhaps the first writer in human history to lay his hand on human consciousness, though not, like Descartes, in an attempt to achieve certainty, but in an attempt to justify life on its own terms. Thinking may allow is to part company with ourselves - 'my thoughts are sometimes elsewhere' - but it is the task of philosophy to 'bring them back' to the human, to slow our walk through the orchard of life, and hold in our mouths, for as long as we can, the 'sweetness' and 'beauty' of living." (p.249-50)

I loved also Saul's description of going to visit Montaigne's house, where you can wander around and stand in the library where he wrote; I can imagine that having lived and breathed such a person in the researching of this book you could not help but develop such an affinity with him and want to step into his life. What a wonderful book, and what a fascinating man. I was left feeling that I got to know and like him, but I also learned something of the period that was unknown to me. A copy of his essays is definitely on it's way here.

(p.s. the post title comes from his essay on education, the idea that travel provides a most important lesson, to "rub and polish our brains with others.")

Digging in the Dark

I bought 'The Consolations of Philosophy' by Alain de Botton some time after Dunk and I went to Oxford where we saw an exhibition about his work. What is good about this book is that it is very much written for the non-academic reader, for someone who might ask the question, "What's the use of philosophy?" It has a reputation for being cerebral and remote from real life, when in fact it is quite the opposite, and is concerned essentially with the way that human beings choose to live.

"Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order  to avoid suspicion and unpopularity. Some of these societal conventions are given explicit formulation in a legal code, others are more intuitively held in a vast body of ethical and practical judgements described as 'common sense', which dictates what we should wear, which financial values we should adopt, whom we should esteem, which etiquette we should follow and what domestic life we should lead. To start questioning these conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgements are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny." (p.9)

It seems to be the job of philosophy to do just this, even if, as poor Socrates found, it annoys people so much they demand your execution. So through the millennia philosophers have set out to question assumptions about the way humans live. Socrates was executed on the order of a jury of 500:
"Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth's relation to unpopularity: errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition.
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it." (p.29-30)

The book is a browse through the variety of worries and concerns that human beings suffer, and the ways in which various philosophers have addressed these concerns. Rationality seems to be at the root of most philosophy, the use of reason and logic to understand. I like this one from Epicurus on death:

"Epicurus was especially concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. If one thought rationally about mortality, one would, Epicurus argued, realise that there was nothing but oblivion after death, and that 'what is no trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation.' It was senseless to alarm oneself in advance about a state which one would never experience." (p.59)

Epicurus is very in tune with the current notion of downshifting and simple living, with him emphasis on satisfying the simple basic needs of human beings and avoiding excessive consumerism, placing more value on things like simple pleasures and the importance of friendship. Botton's definition of an 'acquisitions list' for happiness consists of: a place to live, friendship, 'to avoid superiors, patronization, infighting and competition', thought, and (tongue in cheek I guess) a strange obsession with Madonna by Giovanni Bellini.

We then move on to Seneca. What I enjoyed so much was that each chapter gave me a whole new way of looking at things, and that I found ideas within each philosophy that were already part of my own thinking, but articulated them in a way that I have never bothered with. Seneca introduces the element of 'Fortune' into human affairs, that things happen to people and it was not a moral judgement on them:

"We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing  will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter that Seneca invoked the goddess. ...
The cornucopia was a symbol of her power to bestow favours, the rudder a symbol of her more sinister power to change destinies. She would scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed shift the rudder's course, maintaining an imperturbable smile as she watched us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear in a landslide."

His 'praemeditatio' sums it up:
"The wise will start each day with the thought ...
Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.
Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl.
Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years, at the cost of great toil and through the kindness of the gods, is scattered and dispersed in a single day. No, he who has said 'a day' had granted too long a postponement to swift misfortune; an hour, an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires." (p.91)

An idea of 'justice' is inculcated in education and in most religions; that if you are honourable you will be rewarded, if you are bad you will be punished. Then when you have acted correctly but bad things happen there ensures confusion, a feeling that maybe you were bad after all and deserve the punishment. There is an appeal to 'injustice', which shows a continued belief that the world should be fundamentally 'just'. But it isn't. Seneca's own life became a perfect example of his philosophy at work; he loses everything after falling out of favour with Claudius, a situation which could have led to self-blame, bitterness and resentment, however:

"Seneca's political failure did not have to be read as retribution for sins, it was no rational punishment meted out after examination of the evidence by an all-seeing Providence in a divine courtroom; it was a cruel but morally meaningless by-product of the machinations of a rancorous Empress."

While it sounds like it could potentially be a little depressing I found it quite enlightening, because he also emphasises that events and inanimate objects are not deliberately conspiring against you, that nature and the world are neutral in relation to your existence. It is kind of at the root of that slightly twee quote about accepting the things you cannot change, changing the things you can and wisdom to know the difference. Sometime, despite this, people so often give too much weight and importance to things and events outside their control. It is not a recipe for passivity and acceptance but for the use of reason to not waste energy trying to alter the genuinely inevitable, but to save it for the things that are alterable. A neat little conclusion:

"To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. We should place a fireguard between the noise outside  and an internal sense of deserving punishment. We should not import into scenarios where they don't belong pessimistic interpretations of others' motives. Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious." (p.105)

"When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, 'Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.' " (p.108)

The book then jumps several hundred years to Michel de Montaigne, who lived in France in the 16th century. The influences however travel as thread through history, since everyone has been influenced by those who came before, and such a thing is never more true than when it comes to philosophy. The ancient greeks loom large right through to the modern day thinkers. Montaigne was another who worked hard as questioning the assumptions of his culture, but also to question the authority of great thinkers:

"It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clairty and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves...

But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is not printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits. ... 

Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital  to creative work in their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an appreciation of their strengths." (p.161-3)

What I really liked about him is that he thought, and reiterated frequently, that leading an ordinary quiet life gave you just as much insight into the human condition as being in the thick of politics and 'society'.  And he was equally critical of pretension in writing and philosophy:

"It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable fear ones do not. ...

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style  is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say." (p.157-8)

Schopenhauer gives us our consolation for a broken heart; a philosophy born, I felt, out of his own inability to find love. He defines for us the life force, or will-to-live, the thing that disrupts our rationality and makes life so damn difficult.

"He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and whose offspring look like gelatinous worms - but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself. ...

We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems - and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image." (p.199) (and the quote continues here)

And thus:
"We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge." (p.202)

"Few philosophers have been thought of highly for feeling wretched. A wise life has traditionally been associated with an attempt to reduce suffering: anxiety, despair, anger, self-contempt and heartache.

Then again, pointed out Friedrich Nietzsche, the majority of philosophers have always been 'cabbage-heads'. " (p.205)

Who would have thought that Nietzsche would have been the one to make me laugh. My ex studied Existentialism at university and Nietzsche was much a topic of conversation in our house for a while, from whence the expression 'existential angst' entered my vocabulary, and very useful it has been too. Botton's description of it however I found to be much more positive and life affirming than I had understood. He understands life as the balancing of pain and pleasure, that life's satisfactions are nothing unless hard earned:

"Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples, and ask yourself whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. ...

Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfilment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable." (p.215)

So, a clumsy and woefully incomplete and incoherent examination of a wonderfully enlightening book. It has inspired me to read some more philosophy and to try and get my head round some new ideas. The best advice however comes, again from Nietzsche, right at the end, and I read it as NaNoWriMo finished. However it puts the 30 days nicely into perspective. How to write a novel:

"One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present; one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer ... one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human action, disdain no signposts for instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise for some ten years; what is then created in the workshop ... will be fit to go out into the world." (p.217)

Oh well.

Existentially deracinated

The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands. This book was mentioned a while ago by Yvette on Felting your Soul and I was intrigued (her blog is in dutch but you can get a terrible google machine translation if you click the picture at the top). Again it is nice to be able to say that I have never read a book quite like this one. It does what it says on the tin; it is about a wolf, with some philosophy thrown in. No, that is not fair, it is much more than that, but it's quite hard to put your finger on what it is. So this philosopher buys this wolf cub. Now you have to be a strange kind of person to do this in the first place, and he admits he didn't have an awful lot of time for human beings. The book is about Mark and Brenin, and how their relationship impacts on his life, both in a real practical sense but also in a philosophical sense. It made me laugh out loud, and I always consider that a good thing in a book. I guess you can't ever own such an animal without it becoming the centre of your existence, a wolf does not sit quietly while you get on with life, and this one didn't even like to be left alone for a moment, somewhat impractical if you are a university lecturer. So he lives a life amongst students, where Brenin sleeps in the corner of the lecture theatre and Mark struggles to maintain some kind of physical superiority over him. I loved the bit that described going for runs in an attempt to tire Brenin out, runs that got longer and longer as the wolf got fitter and fitter. After some years of this he then takes himself off to Ireland and basically becomes a recluse, writing philosophy books, and living with Brenin, joined later by Nina (a Malamute/German shepherd cross) and then Tess (one of Brenin's only litter of pups). In amongst their story are scattered Mark's reflections on the nature of human beings as compared to wolves, the nature of human society and morality. It is almost as if the years he spent with the wolf led him to think in a different way about life, the universe and everything. And he comes up with a much better answer than '42'. They lived together so closely that he comes to see existence from a wolf point of view and it helps him to understand what is missing from how humans live. The best chapter title is definitely, "The Pursuit of Happiness and Rabbits", in which he looks at the way people seek 'happiness' as if it were a thing, when they should be chasing rabbits with the enthusiasm that his animals do (and incidentally also do so relatively unsuccessfully.) And then during the year they live in the south of France Brenin falls ill. Through Mark's fierce determination and dedication he recovers and they have a grace year before the cancer catches up with him. It is almost as if it is Brenin's death that brings together the understanding that he has been developing into the big question of 'the meaning of life'. It is interesting how he makes his case because he lays out a variety of well examined philosophical arguments and then tears them apart to see what is wrong with them, to look at the underlying but unacknowledged assumptions about human nature. I liked his conclusion because it is not upbeat or simplistic. It is a challenging read, he does not have a very positive view of human nature and can be pretty tough on how people relate and behave to each other. Although he knows that the mere process of being a 'philosopher' makes him "existentially deracinated" (that's 'pulled up by the roots')(and that's me enjoying being pretentious) he does come across as remarkable well grounded. He does not say 'go out and find your own wolf' but that is kind of what he means.