Book Review: Poetic Philosophy / Philosophical Poetry

A review of Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy, by Jennifer Lobo Meeks

By Moristotle

From her opening pages, Professor Meeks, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Perimeter College of Georgia State University, manifests writing mastery and loving expertise on the technicalities and history of her subject. I recognized a book I wanted to savor; anyone interested in the roots of philosophy in Homeric and Hesiodic myths would.

13 Years Ago Yesterday: An ontological argument for the non-existence of god

A mid-17th century
engraving of Anselmn

By Moristotle

[Originally published, without an image, on December 6, 2007. Dawkins’ reference to the “ironic ‘proof’ ” he announces understates the pleasure it afforded me when I read it again this year.]

In the year 1078, St. Anselm of Canterbury (England) proposed an “ontological argument” for the existence of God:

Independence from procrastination, or what?

And does writing this take care of it?

By Moristotle

Months ago (a year?) I told colleague Bob Boldt and others that I planned to write a sestina on the theme of my being discovered dead under the persimmon tree (near our bird feeders). I’ve been saddened to discover a few dead birds there, and I identify with birds (and many individual creatures generally). And we are all mortal....
​    But I have not yet written this sestina....

Four Years Ago Today: Value experience for its own sake

It’s an art

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 5, 2014]

A passage in John E. Smith’s study of The Spirit of American Philosophy recently brought me full-stop. It was like the birth of Minerva from my own skull.
    The passage was in Chapter IV, on the philosophy of John Dewey, and it was about Dewey’s conception of art. It provided a formula or metaphor for me to express my own personal sense of the holy or sacred.

Seven Years Ago Today: A funny from Bertrand Russell

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 25, 2010, not one word different, but a better photo of Mr. Russell has been substituted.]

My wife didn’t laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s 1909 essay, “Pragmatism,” but I did, and I hope you might too:

Correspondence: The sexes

Edited by Moristotle

[Items of correspondence are not attributed; they remain anonymous. They have been chosen for their inherent interest as journalism, story, or provocative opinion, which may or may not be shared by the editor or other members of the staff of Moristotle & Co.]

Interesting view of feminist philosophy, which seems to promise improvement, not only in the climate for women, but also in philosophical thinking itself: “Feminism and the Future of Philosophy” [Gary Gutting, NY Times, September 18]. Excerpt:

Thor's Day: Value experience for its own sake

It's an art

By Morris Dean

A passage in John E. Smith's study of The Spirit of American Philosophy recently brought me full-stop. It was like the birth of Minerva from my own skull.
    The passage was in Chapter IV, on the philosophy of John Dewey, and it was about Dewey's conception of art. It provided a formula or metaphor for me to express my own personal sense of the holy or sacred.

Thor's Day: Couples who stay together

Benjamin Whitrow as Mr. Bennett in the 1995 BBC TV series

The true philosopher, Mr. Bennet

By Morris Dean

It is said that couples who pray together...stay together. In the case of the parents of the five Bennet daughters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, their staying together derives from another source:

Calling all bikers & philosophers

Moristotle's sometime guest contributor Motomynd has launched his own website. I gather, from the runaway popularity of Motomynd's two articles here, that his new website will quickly become even more wildly popular than Moristotle (if you'll indulge me in a little irony this morning).
    Motomynd.com is said to be "for people who know enough about motorcycles to understand they will never know it all. If you are a beginner we can help you get started safely. If you are an experienced rider we can help you stretch your limits."
    I think that motomynd.com is more generally for people who examine their lives and ask the Socratic questions, the Paul Gauguin questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Particularly the last two questions—the first one might not be practical enough for Motomynd. He's a man of the road yet to be traveled.
    And, who knows?, maybe the true philosophers are the ones who ask the big questions while they're tearing down the road with the wind in their eyes and the bugs in their teeth. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know?
    Go ride with Motomynd, but come back from time to time to do some armchair philosophy with Moristotle.

Mystery machine

Something that doesn't exist can be anything we want. That's why God, for example, is so many different things to people. Everything from a forgiving father to a despot demanding the heads of infidels. He's whatever people want, or think they want, or have been told they want—or their parents wanted.
    And our imagined future is another example. We can't be different today from what we are today, but we can imagine that, in the future, when we don't yet (and might never) exist, we can be anything we want.

Something that doesn't exist can be anything we want. What a strange thought that is. And what a play on be!
    Nature, in evolving minds, created not just exquisite plumages and coats, symmetrical smiles and curves, but a marvelous, mysterious neuronal machine—a machine that can play with what isn't as well as what is.

Beware the cricket up your skirt

I pulled approximately 847 weeds out of our front yard this morning. In one area I disturbed some lawn crickets, whom I sent scurrying, one of them barely missing the gap between the bottom of my left thigh and my walking shorts. I imagined that a cricket up my shorts leg would have provoked a lively dance.
    But my mind, anyway, was already doing its wonted lively dance. Gardening, especially Sunday-morning gardening (with its contrast of my form of outdoor "worship" to that of church-goers), has for years set me to musing and, in doing so, has continued to recommend itself to me as a mentally healthy activity.
    What struck me this morning was that weeding (by the way, if you google on "weeding photos," you'll likely be asked whether you didn't mean "wedding photos" and, even after you insist that you meant "weeding photos," you'll be given the addresses of surprisingly many sites where "wedding" is spelled "weeding")...what struck me was that weeding can be an apt metaphor for what ex-smokers do when they vehemently condemn smoking and smokers. Their sometimes vociferous condemnation seems to me to be an act of negative exultation. By dwelling on the evils of smoking in restaurants, second-hand smoke, etc., they're reminding themselves how happy they are that they themselves were able to give up smoking.
    Pulling weeds out of your lawn and planting beds can be a way of exulting in how nice your yard looks. I certainly think ours looks nice and I always enjoy it when a passer-by stops to compliment me on it.

Negatively exulting seemed to me to be what I do in continually harping on religion. (My wife and my daughter occasionally comment that I seem to be obsessed with it.) If I weren't so happy that I was finally able to give up religion, I probably wouldn't condemn its second-hand smoke so often or with such relish.

A funny from Bertrand Russell

My wife didn't laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell's 1909 essay, "Pragmatism," but I did, and I hope you might too:

The legitimate conclusion from [William James's] argument [that if we don't have the necessary information for deciding between, for example, "God exists" and "God doesn't exist," we ought to choose one anyway in order to have a 50% chance of being right] would be that, in such cases as William James has in mind, we ought to believe both alternatives; for in that case we are sure [emphasis mine] of "knowing" the truth in the matter. If it were said that to believe both is a psychological impossibility, we would rejoin that, on the contrary, it is often done, and that those who cannot yet do it need only to practice the "will to believe" until they have learnt to believe that the law of contradiction is false—a feat which is by no means as difficult as it is often supposed to be.

Who said philosophy couldn't be a barrel of laughs?
_______________
Another passage a page further down:

To go about the world believing everything in the hope that thereby we shall believe as much truth as possible is like practicing polygamy in the hope that among so many we shall find someone who will make us happy.

Bertrand Russell was a great writer. Did you know that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950? Well, he was. "..."in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

The happiness machine

The Matrix, the 1999 film by Andy and Lana Wachowski, posited a machine that was capable of producing in a person hooked up to it the same state of mind as actual experiences, without the actual experiences. It could ensure that you would feel continually happy and would be so convincing that you would not know you weren't actually having the experiences you thought you were.
    David Sosa, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, recently wrote¹ that The Matrix had been scooped twenty-five years earlier. A Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, had written in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. [p. 3]

Sound good? Instant, easy bliss. No sweat, no pain.

Sosa says wait a minute. He argues that

There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel...Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false—an intellectual mirage. A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.
    Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine—you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too—duped, to boot!...

A former correspondent who went by the Last Judgment eponym "Sheepandgoats" once suggested that my rejection of theistic belief might be motivated by my wishing to avoid being duped. I failed to realize at the time how appropriate the suggestion was. I didn't want to be hooked up to his happiness machine. The Jehovah's Witness brand, in his case. (They're big on separating the sheep from the goats.)
    As Sosa explains,

In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend.
    ...Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief...Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

    No imaginary friends on high for me, thank you very much.²
_______________

1. Once again, I have my more timely read friend Ken to thank for bringing this item to my attention. He wrote me Friday, "Did you see the article 'The Spoils of Happiness' in the NY Times the other day? It raises some points that I think would interest you." Indeed it did.
2. Thanks to Ken for suggesting the analogy between the happiness machine and religion. I can't be certain that the article would have elicited it from me if I hadn't just read his email:
   

   How much like the "happiness machine" are the major theistic religions of the world, given their visions of a blissful afterlife? Do they make their practitioners happy?

Weighing on me

A pervasive sadness has lain on me lately. The 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which describes the annual killing of dolphins in a national park in Japan, went back to the library yesterday unwatched. I told the librarian, "I just didn't have the courage to watch it."
    As I waited in line at Costco's optical shop on Friday, I had, on several huge HDTV screens, watched the complaisant exultation of two overfed fishermen who had just landed a huge fish on their boat and were displaying it for the videographer.
    For several days, I've been listening to Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 account of the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, in Oxford, North Carolina, Blood Done Sign My Name. Forty years later, we still haven't seen the last of white supremacy in this country, and we may be as unlikely ever to see it as we are to see the last of the human presumption that dolphins and fishes and other creatures have less right to live than we do.
    I don't know why the weight of this racial immorality should be lying so heavily on me precisely now, but its balance could have been tilted on Saturday night by my watching Michael Moore's 2009 expose, Capitalism: A Love Story. I think that its incontrovertible thesis that Jesus would not have approved of capitalism thrust a sword into my breast for having theretofore had little reaction to the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. I suspect, that is, that I'm suffering remorse for my own apathy, as well as despair that the weak and powerless of the earth will continue to come in last.

Peripatetic me

I was delighted to see that yesterday's "Word of the Day" from dictionary.com was

peripatetic \pair-uh-puh-TET-ik\, adjective:

1. Of or pertaining to walking about or traveling from place to place; itinerant.
2. Of or pertaining to the philosophy taught by Aristotle (who gave his instructions while walking in the Lyceum at Athens), or to his followers.
3. One who walks about; a pedestrian; an itinerant.
4. A follower of Aristotle; an Aristotelian.

Nevertheless, the attachment which in later life he developed towards Charleston suggests that his peripatetic childhood had left unsatisfied his need for a permanent home.
-- Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography

I was born in Italy, my sister on the west coast of Canada, because my father was pursuing a peripatetic career as an artist.
-- Anna Shapiro, USA Today, July 13, 2000

He would have a long way to go before he would match his peripatetic father. Nick had now moved five times and lived in four states from Kentucky to California.
-- Allen Barra, Inventing Wyatt Earp

Peripatetic derives from Greek peripatetikos, from peripatein, "to walk about," from peri-, "around, about" + patein, "to walk."

If I am philosopher at all, I'm certainly an itinerant one, thinking and writing about whatever strikes my fancy as I walk about life. Moristotle is my peripatetic homage to Aristotle. As for pedestrian, I confess that some of what I say about religion sometimes feels a bit pedestrian to me, religion's being such a dead horse to flog.

Theologically speaking, that is

For her light piece, "Dinner Companions," inside the back cover of the March 8, 2009 New York Times Book Review, Leanne Shapton asked some writers what authors they would take to dinner. Daniel Kehlmann replied:

Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation is the most enjoyable, and the funniest, of all the major works of philosophy, perhaps because it's the bleakest—a reminder that a world in which living beings have to survive by eating each other can hardly be called a good place [theological emphasis mine].

And god was the word

My skeptical friend Ed wrote me overnight:

I don't know if you have noticed, but you seem to be talking more about God now that you don't believe than before.

Well, I pointed out to Ed, I had noticed something like that. In the footnote to my preceding post ("The GWB proof of the non-existence of god"), I had written:

And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking. [emphasis added]

But I also pointed out that I have definitely not been "talking more about God." I have not been talking "about god" at all, for there is no god to talk about—or to pray to or be aided, hindered, inspired, judged, forgiven, saved, or condemned by.
    What I have been talking a lot about is not believing in god and believing in no-god, which of course is quite different. I wouldn't trouble to comment on Ed's use of language (which was likely intentional, for the sake of irony), except for the fact that serious philosophical problems arise from misapprehending language.
    For example, the Gospel According to John opens thus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What this can only, truly mean is that god is only a word¹. Theologians have for centuries tied themselves into knots trying to interpret it otherwise. Maybe if they'd noticed that John could have been dyslexic....

There are many reasons, psychological and social, for my dwelling on what I believe. My own dear mother was a devout believer, "rest her soul." But for her I would likely never have become as involved in religion as I did. All four of my sisters have been believers and many if not most of my aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. (Only two of my sisters survive, and one of my previously many aunts and uncles; "rest the souls," too of those departed.) I come from a religious background. Thus, "becoming" an atheist is very much to go my own way. I have had to endure many tsk-tsks and "I'm praying for you's." I've had to choose between keeping quiet or exposing myself. Obviously I haven't kept quiet, so I've had to deal with the reality that I've amazed and even offended people.
    More than half of the members of my commute van pool talk of going to church. At least the two drivers know that religious radio programs offend me. When I objected to their tuning them in, I told them that I'd signed up to commute, not to attend church. Some of them know that I read books by Ian McEwan and Richard Dawkins. But maybe not everyone had picked up on this: "What's that you're reading?" The Blind Watchmaker. "Is it a novel?"²
    Some of my neighbors are evangelical Christians. One of them has the email address, everyoneneedsjesus@...Now, that's evangelical!
    Etc.
    So, in addition to the "joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of [seeing religion for a sham]," I also have a sense of sadness at having made myself peculiar³ to a number of my relatives, possibly some of my friends, and perhaps one or two of my neighbors. But being somewhat estranged from them is a price I'm willing to pay for refusing to join them in their superstition. Centuries of clever Jewish, Christian, and Muslim apologetical book-keeping have not rendered the superstitious beliefs of the fearful ancient Israelites—that groveling, guilt-ridden, image-worshiping, animal-sacrificing, women-subjugating people—any less superstitious today.
_______________

1. As Christopher Hitchens writes in his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (dedicated to Ian McEwan):

   [Kant] undid the ontological argument by challenging the simpleminded notion that if god can be conceived as an idea, or stated as a predicate, he must therefore possess the quality of existence. This traditional tripe is accidentally overthrown by Penelope Lively in her much-garlanded novel Moon Tiger. Describing her daughter Lisa as a "dull child," she nonetheless delights in the infant's dim but imaginative questions:

   "Are there dragons?" she asked. I said that there were not. "Have there ever been?" I said all the evidence was to the contrary. "But if there is a word dragon," she said, "then once there must have been dragons." [p. 265]

2. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, explains how natural selection, acting over millions and millions of years, fashioned the human eye, bat echolocation, and other marvels of nature.
3. I recall a Pentecostal sermon that was preached at me over fifty years ago. The preacher told us that as Christians we were "peculiar," which he explained at length (in the way that such preachers loved to go on glossing words) to mean that we were "circled about" by people who were not like us. To be really circled about in our society today, be an atheist.

An ontological argument for the non-existence of god

In the year 1078, St. Anselm of Canterbury (England) proposed an "ontological argument" for the existence of God:

It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists! [courtesy Richard Dawkins, p. 80, The God Delusion]

A contemporary of Anselm, one Gaunilo had, reports Dawkins, "suggested a similar reductio." And a contemporary of Dawkins, "the [philosopher] Australian Douglas Gasking, made the point with his ironic 'proof' that God does not exist:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being—namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.
   Ergo:
7. God does not exist."

[p. 83, The God Delusion]

...but I did read the book

On Saturday, in my post about high school biology, I failed to mention that even though I dropped out of the course, I did read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in high school. I'm now wondering whether I read it after dropping out of biology (perhaps as some sort of atonement), or before and the book prompted me to sign up for the course? If the latter, then it appears that I must have found the actual task of acquiring the vocabulary of biology less exciting than reading the story of Darwin's discovery.

I have, in fact, always seriously doubted that I had a working scientist's temperament. Scientist after scientist has reported that doing science is mostly very hard work. The discovery of the structure of DNA (or of evolution by natural selection) comes to few scientists.

If only I hadn't dropped out of high school biology

I'm finding it a bittersweet experience to read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. It's sweet because I trust that I can look forward to reading Dawkins's other books, and books he cites, and be continually rewarded with the intellectual thrill of evolutionary biology. But such reading is also bitter, in that if only way in which people can indulge when looking back on their lives.

I've been thinking about how I dropped out of high school biology after a week or two, mainly, I think, because I didn't want to work hard enough to learn all of its technical terms. I switched to physics, which turned out to be taught by an evangelical Christian who, though he let me write a paper on the relationship between religion and science instead of doing a standard science project, took the opportunity to put in a plug for God's divine plan or something. Mr. Wilson. I didn't realize until now that I remembered his name, and I can still see him—tall, blond, and boyish, and probably fifteen years younger than my children are now.

In dropping out of the biology course (of whose teacher I have no recollection, but I'm confident he or she was excellent), I effectively closed the door on what might have been an exciting life as an evolution theorist. Unfortunately, during those teenage years I came across no book like Dawkins's brilliant, creative work. (At the time I was dropping out of biology, he had just entered college.)

But I did in those years come across books on metaphysics—books that attempted to answer the questions, What is man? and Why? And they, at that time, I found no less thrilling than I find Dawkins now.

But now there's the bittersweetness that comes from reading this on page 1 of The Selfish Gene:

Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is Man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely."

That was the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.