Up@dawn 2.0

Sunday, February 21, 2016

An interview with happiness philosopher Daniel Haybron

Dan Haybron is a professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University. He was recently awarded a $5.1 million grant for a three-year interdisciplinary project on happiness and well-being from the John Templeton Foundation and Saint Louis University. In this interview, he talks about spending summers in, and falling in love with, North Carolina, developing an aversion to snobbery, and a taste for blowing things up (figuratively and literally), getting into Wesleyan and deferring upon the realization that he hated school, selling insurance, working in retail and then deciding to go back to school, the illuminating but somewhat Victorian political atmosphere at Wesleyan at the time, getting into his philosophy of science and philosophy of religion classes and eventually developing an interest in metaphilosophy, interviewing Philip Glass, moving to the Bay Area and doing tech support, going back to grad school, bodysurfing, working with Steve Stich and Wayne Sumner (one of the only philosophers working on happiness and well-being at the time), scorpions, the job market, landing a tenure track job at Saint Louis University, the protests in Ferguson, the totalitarian response, the concept of privilege, and our diversity problem, the Templeton grant, the dangers of the soap box, his favorite movie, and his last meal.
Hey man, thanks for doing this! I understand you’re a bit reluctant…                                                         
I’m not sure how to talk about this stuff, since I can’t imagine many people are interested in the details of my life. But I’m not sure it’s worth saying anything if I don’t fill things in enough to paint a real picture, especially since a lot of my approach to philosophy is rooted in my personal history. Also, a lot of people come to academia from non-typical backgrounds, and maybe it’s useful to hear the stories of others. So I guess I’ll go long…
Well, I’m interested. So, where did you grow up?                                                                                                                       
I grew up between two very different worlds, spending most of the year in a small town near Cleveland, and a few months each summer on a small island in North Carolina. As far as I was concerned, the island was my spiritual home, but I was very much a child of both places—and in some ways a child of neither—and that mix has had a huge impact on my thinking. Northern and Southern, urban and rural, affluent and not, with a good dose of piratey island culture thrown in. (Some of the islanders are descended from pirates, and there’s a long seafaring tradition that took many around the world—a very free-thinking, independent-minded bunch.) 
What did your folks do?  
My mother was an artist and my father a physics professor and writer, so we had a lively combination of creative/analytic thinking in our household. Both were real characters, with a lot of weird, amazing friends. My father’s background, growing up poor in Southern Ohio, also was a major influence, as he always took pride in those roots. I internalized much of his aversion to rank and snobbery—he was at the physics department at Princeton for maybe three days before deciding to hell with those people, and his favorite job might have been straightening railroad track with a crew of ex-cons and the like. I think it meant more to him that I could handle myself around roughnecks than that I could impress academics. My mother also didn’t have a snobbish bone in her body, and was as happy chatting with a homeless guy as with a fellow artist, maybe happier. Once she locked herself out of her car in a rough area and sought out the toughest-looking kids to help her get in, which they managed handily. Of course they were complete gentlemen with her. She paid them the compliment of treating them as trustworthy, and they responded accordingly.
Did your folks have an influence on your philosophy, you think?
Both parents had an enormous influence on my philosophical thinking. My mother stoked a lot of my intellectual curiosity trying to get me to read the Bible and talk about the issues; the religion never stuck, but the love of ideas did. I’m not sure most of my philosophical work doesn’t amount mainly to ideas I picked up from, or with, my father. I still hope to publish a collaboration of sorts we’d talked about. Neither was really capable of caring enough about money to make much of it, but they put every spare penny into getting us onto the island each summer. So my Ohio friends always had nicer stuff, but I got to spend part of the year in what I considered paradise. Which seemed like a pretty good tradeoff. 
What was this collaborative project with your father?
He had a manuscript for a book based on the journals he kept during our years on the island. Aside from a shorter version for a literary journal, it never got published—a neat regional house picked it up but went out of business before it could see print. In general, he didn’t have great commercial instincts as a writer, so he left a lot of good material behind. Anyway, we talked about me writing a sort of philosophical postscript, making some of his ideas more explicit, roughly along the lines of Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. I’d still like to do that, as he says a lot of the stuff I’ve been thinking about much more eloquently and poetically than I could...