Quiz Sep26

Lenoir 7-9 (Being Oneself, Schopenhauer, $). And, take a look at the Schopenhauer post below.

1. Who said the "process of individuation" often begins only at midlife or later?

2. What was Plato's distinction of temperaments?

3. What was Schopenhauer's "curious contradiction"?

4. How does Lenoir disagree with Schopenhauer ?

5. How much of our happiness does Sonja Lyubomirsky say is subject to volition?

6. What did Seneca say about invidious happiness comparisons?

Your Quiz questions...

DQ:

• AGREE? "Worldly success is the consolation prize for those unhappy driven souls..." (etc.-see "Pessimism" post above)
• "Everyone takes his enjoyment in his own way and for himself alone." Is Flaubert right? Is this a defensible attitude? Are you an egoist? Does this preclude altruism? 
• Have you discovered your own "deeper nature" and the "atmosphere that suits" you best? Do you acknowledge a plurality of such natures in yourself and others? Is it fixed or alterable?
• Is your sensibility, character, taste etc. as little affected by externals as Goethe suggested?

• 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?
• Do you attempt to modify your perceptions, or do you accept them as a given? Does this mark you as a Stoic, a libertarian, or what?
• Is Renard's attitude misanthropic? Do you share it?
• Do you believe religion/spirituality adds quality years to your life?
• COMMENT: ..there are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world's salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism...Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become. It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism... Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking

Pragmatic meliorism

• Your DQ suggestions...

Podcasts: Happiness 7-9... Seneca, Schopenhauer...
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Sep28-EXAM today, no quiz... but here are questions to add to the Study Guide, & stuff to talk about:

Lenoir 10-12 (The Emotional Brain; The Art of Attention; Dreaming) 

1. Which molecules play an important role in well-being and emotional balance?

2. What do dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin have to do with happiness?

3. What crucial point did the Stoic and Epicurean sages of antiquity underscore?

4. Why did Montaigne ride his horse? (And a BONUS QUESTION: what startling equine event changed Montaigne's life?)

5. Aside from the importance of letting the mind wander, what important qualification does Lenoir attach to the primacy of the present moment?

6. Who pioneered Positive Psychology?

DQ:

1. Does it bother you to think of your happiness being governed by the "molecules of emotion"? Is this an objectionably reductive way of understanding subjectivity and the mind, or merely a strategically useful handle on one's state of well-being? Does it over-objectify experience, or imply a deterministic worldview at odds with your notion of free will (see my dawn post, below)?

2.Given the importance of diet, sleep, and emotional equanimity to happiness, what do you do to insure their adqeuate provision in your own daily habits and routines? What can't you do, that you wish you could?

3. If the quest for a "happiness gene" is misguided, is there a place for genetic engineering in the future pursuit of happiness? What regulations on such research would you impose, if you were Philosopher-King/Queen?

4. How do you cultivate the skill of attention? How "mindful" are you? Can every moment of life really be a source of happiness?

5. Do you agree with Woody Allen?

6. Are you temperamentally more American or French? Who's happier?
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An old dawn post:
Choosing free will

More in class today on free will. Augustine's theological commitment to the concept is one hook, neuroscience is another. "Our brains take decisions before our minds are aware of them," reports the BBC podcast I've asked students to consider.

"But there's evidence that whether or not we have free will, believing in it is good for us." Some experiments support the claim that those who believe in free will, and act on that belief, are by various measures happier, healthier, more conscientious and ethically responsible, less liable to cheat, steal, and lie.

The "happier" claim is most arresting, or it will be for us in Happiness class this afternoon. William James, in his books but more impressively in the totality of his post-free will crisis lifetime, supports it too. One day he "just about touched bottom," the next he resolved that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will," and in subsequent decades he certainly seemed to find pragmatic vindication for the concept. In his own terms, he found it better for him to believe in free will. Far better. That's not proof, but neither is it irrelevant or illusory.

But is it an adequate answer to Gregg Caruso's contention (and Sam Harris's) that as a society we would be better off giving it up, even if some individuals like James would not be? Caruso:

I maintain that life without free will may actually be good for our well being, and our relationships with others, since it could tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger, a kind of moral anger that's corrosive to our relationships and to our social policies...

We need to acknowledge the role that luck plays in our lives, who we are, and how we turn out... Let's give up the belief in free will, and with it, the pernicious belief in just-deserts, that people justly deserve what they get. Let's leave this adequate notion behind, lose our moral anger and stop blaming the victim. Instead, let's turn our attention to the difficult task of addressing the causes that lead to criminality, to wealth inequity, and educational inequity. Once we relinquish the belief in free will, this will allow us to look more clearly at the causes and more deeply at the systems that shape individuals and their behavior, and this will allow us to adopt more humane and more effective policies in education, criminal justice, and social policies.

 Sounds great. It might be the right choice, if we have one. But I don't think it would have got William James up off the floor, when he touched bottom. I'm not sure it would have got me up out of bed this morning at 5 am. I choose to suspend final judgment on this issue. Or think I do.

5:30/6:38, 61/88

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Caruso's TED Talk, "The Dark Side of Free Will"
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Sam Harris:

I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape. I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will, that can be read in a single sitting.

The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high... (continues)

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For our (my) amusement:

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Schopenhauer on "the wisdom of life"

Happiness lies in our sensibility, said Schopenhauer. But Lenoir reads him as denying that there's anything any of us can do to alter the particular sensibility or temperamental receptivity to happiness embedded in our own "deepest nature." If that's so, one wonders why he devoted so much attention to the subject, as in his Wisdom of Life:

In these pages I shall speak of The Wisdom of Life in the common meaning of the term, as the art, namely, of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest possible amount of pleasure and success; an art the theory of which may be called Eudaemonology, for it teaches us how to lead a happy existence. Such an existence might perhaps be defined as one which, looked at from a purely objective point of view, or, rather, after cool and mature reflection—for the question necessarily involves subjective considerations,—would be decidedly preferable to non-existence; implying that we should cling to it for its own sake, and not merely from the fear of death; and further, that we should never like it to come to an end.

Now whether human life corresponds, or could possibly correspond, to this conception of existence, is a question to which, as is well-known, my philosophical system returns a negative answer. On the eudaemonistic hypothesis, however, the question must be answered in the affirmative; and I have shown, in the second volume of my chief work (ch. 49), that this hypothesis is based upon a fundamental mistake. Accordingly, in elaborating the scheme of a happy existence, I have had to make a complete surrender of the higher metaphysical and ethical standpoint to which my own theories lead; and everything I shall say here will to some extent rest upon a compromise; in so far, that is, as I take the common standpoint of every day, and embrace the error which is at the bottom of it. My remarks, therefore, will possess only a qualified value, for the very word eudaemonology is a euphemism. Further, I make no claims to completeness; partly because the subject is inexhaustible, and partly because I should otherwise have to say over again what has been already said by others.

The only book composed, as far as I remember, with a like purpose to that which animates this collection of aphorisms, is Cardan's De utilitate ex adversis capienda, which is well worth reading, and may be used to supplement the present work. Aristotle, it is true, has a few words on eudaemonology in the fifth chapter of the first book of his Rhetoric; but what he says does not come to very much. As compilation is not my business, I have made no use of these predecessors; more especially because in the process of compiling, individuality of view is lost, and individuality of view is the kernel of works of this kind. In general, indeed, the wise in all ages have always said the same thing, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done just the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave this world as foolish and as wicked as we found it on our arrival... (continues)

In his World as Will & Representation, happiness also gets considerable attention. For instance:

...childhood is the time of innocence and happiness, the paradise of life, the lost Eden on which we look longingly back through the whole remaining course of our life. But the basis of that happiness is that in childhood our whole existence lies much more in knowing than in willing—a condition which is also supported from without by the novelty of all objects. Hence in the morning sunshine of life the world lies before us so fresh, so magically gleaming, so attractive. The small desires, the weak inclinations, and trifling cares of childhood are only a weak counterpoise to that predominance of intellectual activity. The innocent and clear glance of children, at which we revive ourselves, and which sometimes in particular cases reaches the sublime contemplative expression with which Raphael has glorified his cherubs, is to be explained from what has been said. Accordingly the mental powers develop much earlier than the needs they are destined to serve; and here, as everywhere, nature proceeds very designedly. For in this time of predominating intelligence the man collects a great store of knowledge for future wants which at the time are foreign to him. Therefore his intellect, now unceasingly active, eagerly apprehends all phenomena, broods over them and stores them up carefully for the coming time,—like the bees, who gather a great deal more honey than they can consume, in anticipation of future need. Certainly what a man acquires of insight and knowledge up to the age of puberty is, taken as a whole, more than all that he afterwards learns, however learned he may become; for it is the foundation of all human knowledge. Up till the same time plasticity predominates in the child's body, and later, by a metastasis, its forces throw themselves into the system of generation; and thus with puberty the sexual passion appears, and now, little by little, the will gains the upper hand. Then childhood, which is prevailingly theoretical and desirous of learning, is followed by the restless, now stormy, now melancholy, period of youth, which afterwards passes into the vigorous and earnest age of manhood...

We recall, of course, how Schopenhauer "helped" us begin our semester with the denial that our "hunt for happiness" could possibly succeed. ("What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life" etc.)

We'll talk about it Tuesday.