Up@dawn 2.0

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Quiz Oct 5

Lenoir 16-18 (Individual & collective happiness etc.).

1. Who said he was most at home with earthly happiness?

2. What does Lenoir see as the main difference between ancient and contemporary quests for happiness?

3. What are the novels of Michel Houellebecq about?

4. What obsession thwarts happiness?

5. Depression is allegedly symptomatic of what?

6. What adaptive quality may be our greatest obstacle to happiness?

DQ:

  • Is there such a thing as natural salvation, utterly disinterested in the prospective sublimity of an eternal afterlife? Is there a meaningful, hopeful sense of "afterlife" that abjures any hope in a heavenly reward? Is the quest for personal immortality delusional? Is there anything wrong with it?
  • What do you think "transmission" has to do with happiness? 99 What concrete form does it take in your own pursuit of happiness?
  • Are we an age of "joyless hedonism" and "passive nihilism"? 101
  • Do you agree that the "New Age" is passe? 102 Do you subscribe to the "Secret" worldview, the so-called "law of attraction," etc.? Does this mindset do more harm than good?
  • Do you participate in any of the modern forms of "asceticism" mentioned by Lenoir, or know anyone who does? 104Do you judge them, or consider it everyone's perfect right to pursue their own good in their own way?Is Lenoir objectionably moralistic about this?
  • Do you agree with Lenoir's evaluation of the results of "American studies"? 104
  • COMMENT: "The art of happiness consists entirely in not setting goals that are too high..." 106
  • COMMENT: "Human beings are perpetually dissatisfied, and stagger from desire to desire." 108
  • Would you become blase, were all your desires satisfied? 109
  • Your DQs...
Another potentially-relevant & timely SoL video-



“There are few more shameful confessions to make than that we are lonely. The basic assumption is that no respectable person could ever feel isolated – unless they had just moved country or been widowed. Yet in truth, a high degree of loneliness is an inexorable part of being a sensitive, intelligent human. It’s a built-in feature of a complex existence. There are several big reasons for this…” (continues here)
==
A follow-up from Sherry Turkle on the lost art of conversation:
My recent Sunday Review essay, adapted from my book “Reclaiming Conversation,” made a case for face-to-face talk. The piece argued that direct engagement is crucial for the development of empathy, the ability to put ourselves in the place of others. The article went on to say that it is time to make room for this most basic interaction by first accepting our vulnerability to the constant hum of online connection and then designing our lives and our products to protect against it.

Some readers agreed with me. Others, even as they disagreed, captured the fragility of conversation today... (continues)

Though one goal of visiting a professor during office hours is certainly transactional — to increase your knowledge and improve your grade — the other is to visit someone who is making an effort to understand you and how you think. And a visit to a professor holds the possibility of giving a student the feeling of adult support and commitment.

But students say they don’t come to office hours because they are afraid of being too dull. They tell me they prefer to email professors because only with the time delay and the possibility of editing can they best explain their work. My students suggest that an email from them will put me in the best position to improve their ideas. They cast our meeting in purely transactional terms, judging that the online transaction will yield better results than a face-to-face meeting.

Zvi, a college junior who doesn’t like to see his professors in person but prefers to email, used transactional language to describe what he might get out of office hours: He has ideas; the professors have information that will improve them. In the end, Zvi walked back his position and admitted that he stays away from professors because he doesn’t feel grown-up enough to talk to them. His professors might be able to help him with this, but not because they’ll give him information.

Studies of mentoring show that what makes a difference, what can change the life of a student, is the presence of a strong figure who shows an interest, who, as a student might say, “gets me.”

You need face-to-face conversation for that. nyt
==
Who is Michel Houellebecq? (This being Music & Happiness day, it may be relevant to note that he's a fan of Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Schubert, Leonard Cohen, Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, & David Crosby.)
==
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize With the Hammer
Bob Marley
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Bob Marley
Albert Einstein
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
Albert Einstein
Aldous Huxley
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Charles Darwin
“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
J.K. Rowling
“Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!”
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Ludwig van Beethoven
“Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy”
Ludwig van Beethoven

“Play it fuckin' loud!”
Bob Dylan

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness
Oliver James
“Music is my higher power”
Oliver James

Schopenhauer on music:
No wonder that Schopenhauer was the darling of composers in the 19th and 20th centuries, for he argued that music has a truly exceptional status among the arts and uniquely reveals the essence of the “in itself” of the world. Music that affords such insight—the only music he deems worthy of the name—is Classical/Romantic, non-programmatic music without a text, or what was termed late in the 19th century, “absolute music.” Unlike all of the other arts, which express or copy the Ideas (the essential features of the phenomenal world), Schopenhauer affirmed that music expresses or copies the will qua thing in itself, bypassing the Ideas altogether. This puts music and the Ideas on a par in terms of the directness of their expression of the thing in itself (WWR I, 285). In order to understand Schopenhauer's reasoning for this rather stunning view of the cognitive significance of music, one needs to pay attention to the role of feeling in Schopenhauer's epistemology, and especially to the feeling of embodiment that a subject can experience by attending to ordinary acts of volition.

It is the feeling of embodiment—the intuitive, immediate knowledge that one wills when, for instance, one wills to raise one's arm—that is monumentally significant for Schopenhauer in his identification of the Kantian thing in itself with will. First-personal knowledge that one wills is immediate, rather than inferred from observation, according to Schopenhauer, and is shorn of all of the forms of the PSR (including space, causality, and even being-an-object-for-a-subject) with one exception, the form of time.

Similarly, Schopenhauer holds that the experience of “absolute” music (music that does not seek to imitate the phenomenal world and is unaccompanied by narrative or text), occurs in time, but does not involve any of the other cognitive conditions on experience. Thus, like the feeling of embodiment, Schopenhauer believes the experience of music brings us epistemically closer to the essence of the world as will—it is as direct an experience of the will qua thing in itself as is possible for a human being to have. Absolutely direct experience of the will is impossible, because it will always be mediated by time, but in first-personal experience of volition and the experience of music the thing in itself is no longer veiled by our other forms of cognitive conditioning. Thus, these experiences are epistemically distinctive and metaphysically significant.

Since the will expresses itself in Ideas as well as in music, Schopenhauer reasons that there must be analogies between them... (continues, SEP)



19 comments:

  1. According to Lenoir, how many "individualist revolutions" have there been?

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  2. Sorry, I thought I had headed this as "Quiz Question," but apparently not.

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  3. Discussion Question

    Do you, like the Greeks, hold the common good over individual happiness? Or do you think that "the interest of each also lies in the happiness of all?" If each person is seeking to make himself happy, does it then follow that everyone is happy? Is sacrifice an outdated or unnecessary concept?

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  4. DQ: What do you all think about the "Third Individualist Revolution?" Do you think this fits us here in America?

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  5. Quiz Question: Does the pursuit of happiness quest predicate the birth of Christian theology?

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  6. Discussion Question from above.
    6. Would you become blase, were all your desires satisfied?

    I would think so, because then I would just continuously search for something beyond the desires that have been satisfied. "When our minds are thus enlightened, they lead our willpower to love life as it is, not as we would wish it to be" (110) I think that statement sums up the idea that desires will lead us back and fourth like a pendulum as Schopenhauer says. So therefore, we just should try to ride all desires, because we will become bored and continue the search.

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  7. Extra credit

    What if happiness is something that could be completely controlled by you. Could this sort of experience be possible through language? Language is symbolic in nature and ends up becoming an ouroboros for defining perceptual experience. For example, if we are talking about a stop sign what are we referring to? Stop sign consists of the perceptual experiences of each part including the colors of each part as well. Perceptual experience can be looked at in this kind of reductionist fashion too. The experience of perception is a cycle that seems to go like this: There is an object that irritates your sensory surfaces, your mind filtered through your perception interprets one attribute of the object. Then this decaying sense of perception is stored as a memory that changes every time you think through it. So this seems to show that memory is a very non-permanent and distorted thing. Even perceptual experience seems to be distorted. The neuroscience experiment that found that our unconscious mind is running even before you get to conscious thought. Or how our perceptual experience takes some time to filter through our senses to where it can be translated, and then we see the world. So the moment and conscious thoughts could be transient non-existing things that are a small part of the whole of experience. So much of our experience could be defined internally by our brain's unconscious and represented for our consciousness to view. Is our experience a scaled up version of the simulacrum in the allegory of the cave? Proposing that our experience is just the shadow of a lattice of colorless odorless atoms, is it possible that we have control over the interpreter of the shadows (our mind)? Is it possible to view the attributes of the objects of reality like cloud watching. Cloud watching is a very subjective experience, but the most important part is if you really wanted the cloud to look like Anny Bonny it would look like an 18th century pirate. So is it possible to make the experience of happiness the same way. Happiness can be found even in the mundane things that don’t look happy. I also wonder if it would be possible to even take it to an extreme. Like the people that put on the happy face. Could you learn to condition yourself to view the world in that extreme level of happiness. Just how pliable is our experience of reality in the internal pragmatic sense.

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  8. Looking forward to this!

    And, btw: congrats on your new conjugality, Kodi, I'm sure you're way above set-point this week! -and hope you'll defy the predicted return to earth for as long as possible.

    I'll send you an author invitation, jpo

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  9. QQ: Which philosophers agree that the world has to yield to our desires?

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  10. DQ: Before taking this course, how often did you find yourself pursuing happiness to an unhappy degree? (The obsession of happiness)

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    Replies
    1. To a very high degree. I was confused and always sought happiness in the wrong way.

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  11. Extra Credit Essay:
    Can you be happy in the absence of meaning and truth?

    I tend to cringe at the thought of living a life without meaning and truth. I was raised to tell the truth and fundamentally value it, which makes me feel like I was disrespecting my parents if I lived a life doing the opposite of just that. A couple of summers ago, I binged watched this series on Netflix called “Lie to Me” and the basis of the series was based on the private firm of a scientist that could tell when a person was lying. His research and methods were based from micro facial expressions as well as micro body movements. Throughout the show, he pointed out so many lies in people. It got to a point where characters in the show were lying about almost everything then the truth would be brought out through the main character. Throughout all these realizations of lies, I began to reflect on situations in my life that brought me to lie. All of which I considered petty. This show rejuvenated my belief in truth so much so that I no longer see the point in lying, for it just prolongs the truth from coming out. Meaning falls in line as well because I cannot see myself being happy without it. There is the meaning that I have with family. I know that my mom and dad are great caretakers and have all the love in the world for me. This fact gives me feelings of elation, so imagining a happy life without meaning is unfathomable.

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  12. Extra credit Exam 1
    Do you spontaneously look on the bright side of life? Can you teach yourself to adopt that outlook? Does it make you a shallow person? Is it possible to smile in the face of your mortality?

    For a long time I saw no point in looking on the bright side. Everything that is out of your control is out of your control and so I often took the pessimistic side of things, so as not to get my hopes up to be let down. However, I was very unhappy, almost by choice. But it wasn't that I was choosing to be a "debby downer" I simply chose a neutral state of mind. This too, was equally as bad as taking a pessimistic view because I didn't form any thoughts whatsoever about any given circumstance or situation. As a result, I was still unhappy because essentially I didn't have a voice. So I began to want to change myself. I disliked my temperaments and hated feeling like nothing mattered. "It doesn't even matter" was my high school phrase for the yearbook. I began to look on the bright side of little things. Like, "aw man I dont have any more cookies, but I probably need to lay off the sweets anyway." So this outlook I adopted has shaped the way I handle situations no matter how large. Unfortunately, not all situations have a bright side directly and the only thing that can handle it is time with the hope that eventually with action things will change. So, no, it doesn't make you a shallow person if you respond to a negative situation with a positive and determination because if things are already bad a negative approach will either make it worse or never change. However, looking on the bright side doesn't mean smile and move on. It means that out of a shitty situation you look toward a solution to appease it. So in the face of my mortality I do smile because I didn't ask to be born into this world, but I sure as hell am not going to wallow in it.

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  13. Would you become blase, were all your desires satisfied?

    Yes I would. Nothing really excites anymore. I have experienced most ups and downs that life has to offer.

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  14. Possible Discussion Questions:
    1. Do you agree or disagree with Denis Diderot's statement 'There is only one duty: making ourselves happy"?

    2. Why do you think people prefer happiness or the sublime?

    3. What do you think of Lenior's idea of a 'third individualist revolution'.

    4. What would you consider 'psychological ' or 'spiritual' work? Do you participate in this work, and if so, in what ways? Do you think this work helps or hinders your personal happiness?

    5.Have you ever experienced unhappiness after setting too-lofty goals for yourself. If so, how?

    6. Have you ever achieved a goal without stress? Do you always achieve goals without stress? How does stress affect your goal management?

    7. Why do you think dissatisfaction is the largest obstacle to happiness?

    8. Why do you think some philosophers are so skeptical of the idea of happiness or the quest to attain it?

    9. What do you think of the idea of happiness only being the moments when pain is not suffered?

    10. Have you ever met a completely narcissistic individual, as described in Michel Houellebecq's novels?

    Possible Quiz Questions:
    1. What text did Max Weber publish on the puritan work ethic?

    2. What are the two sides of the sovereign individual?

    3. What larger project was the Declaration of Independence a part of?

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  15. Put the comment on the wrong article.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kcOpyM9cBg&index=1&list=PLvJ5Fn585ApECkowhvuTjWrUNj0_eH1nb

    This should take you to the start of the happiness playlist.

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  16. "Would you become blase, were all your desires satisfied?"

    Honestly,it probably would. Yeah a nice life where I live somewhere with a good view, plenty of what I want and no worries sounds great, but if I didn't make myself want things it would get boring and I'd roll into a rut.

    So if I ever do find myself with everything I want, I'll have to do what my dad does and want new things that I make with my own hands. Maybe if I have enough excess funds I'll try to make the best Christmas light display that I can muster, or maybe figure out how to build a working servant robot.

    Or maybe my desire to write will burn until the day I die and I can leave some mysterious half-finished manuscripts for future people to discover.

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  17. - COMMENT: "Human beings are perpetually dissatisfied, and stagger from desire to desire." 108

    Too true. It's within our nature to be this way. It's what keeps us moving and innovating and surviving. It's what's driving us to live at all, these desires that we have. Were we to be utterly desireless, we would have no desire to live on. So the sort of dissatisfaction that comes from this natural occurrence isn't a bad one - it's what makes us human. It's what keeps us alive. It's what keeps us moving forward. It's necessary if we want to live any sort of life at all, including one that has happiness.

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  18. Extra questions for chapter 16-18:
    1) Who was Pascal Brucker?
    2) What did he write on page 97?
    3) What is the name of the Voltari’s poem that was mentioned on page 97?
    4) What is the Epic of Gilgamesh?
    5) What inside of novels of Michel Hauellebecq contained?

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