Digressions&Impressions

Two Dogmas of The Image of Science

An image of science (recall these posts on Hume, Williamson, Spinoza) contains a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate. Images of science can circulate within the sciences, in public discussion, and even in philosophy. Here are two dogmas in the contemporary image of science:

(1) While science may be a complex network of collaboration and competition, it also involves a self-correcting and free exchange of ideas.

(2) Consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science.

Within philosophy, these two dogmas are familiar from Thomas Kuhn's work. Within economics and formal decision theory the dogmas are linked (at least since Aumann (1976), where (1) helps generate (2)).

In some contexts such consensus within science is a species of higher order evidence and generally a cue to defer to the science. And this reinforces how science can settle debate, and thereby open space for public action (assuming that prior to action there is public debate). Lurking in the previous two sentences is the idea that science can provide (some) authority to public policy based on it. So it is no surprise that governments promote institutions that help discover or articulate such consensus. In practice, governments and science, while distinct from each other (and sometimes at odds), frequently lend each other (some) authority by presupposing and reinforcing the two dogmas. 

So far so good. 

But because settled science is so important to authoritative action [and consensus such an important proxy of it], this also creates incentives to generate or organize the appearance of consensus. And there is conceptual space for such organized consensus. For even if one grants that consensus is the natural effect of a proper functioning mature science, this is compatible with consensus also being the effect of malfunctioning science. Let's call the agreement that is the product of malfunctioning science 'ersatz consensus.' (And I'll use 'real consensus' when I distinguish a naturally occurring consensus from the ersatz type.) 

It's worth noting that, despite the way I have phrased it in previous paragraph, participants in malfunctioning science need not have the intent to produce an ersatz consensus. By this I mean two things: first, some strategic agents may well intentionally wish to promote deliberate confusion such that there does not seem consensus at all (think of the tobacco industry on the relationship between smoking and cancer; or the energy industry and man-made global warming, etc.). Second, sometimes an ersatz consensus is the product of the absence of proper exchange of ideas in science (because of bad replication or publication practices, or because of temporary embargoes on circulation of ideas [not uncommon in medical and defense sciences]). So, sometimes ersatz consensus is the effect of top-down organization, and sometimes it's the effect of bottom-up failures of process.

It's not surprising that for outsiders it's incredibly difficult to distinguish between an ersatz consensus and a real consensus, especially if the science is incredibly esoteric and/or interdisciplinary. But sometimes it is very difficult for insiders to know whether the consensus view is real or ersatz in their own science. There need not be anything nefarious about this; all that's needed is that because of say extensive cognitive division of labor even insiders may be unaware (of the nature and extent of) that the process that shapes the exchange of ideas within their own science is malfunctioning. 

Even though I have well known skeptical leanings, I don't want to exaggerate the claim in the previous two sentences. There are forensic techniques that provide signals about such matters. In addition folks in adjoining sciences may have the skill set to notice communicative problems I am hinting at. (In a way that's the story of how the replication crisis got tackled.) But it may take  time to sort such things out.

Notice that so far I have not touched the two dogmas of the contemporary image of the science (although I have hinted that (1) may be an idealization). What I have done is extrapolate some of their mutual entailments. 

As an aside, even without governments nudging us to accept a scientific consensus is authoritative, (2) has very deep roots in the intellectual culture. The Stoic sages and the Spinozistic wise are said to agree, and I am sure you can list a whole number of other examples. But -- pace Kuhn -- it is worth noting that there were scientific periods where within science persistent disagreement over many important issues was not taken to be embarrassing (I think this was common view of late nineteenth century physics if you go look at Poincare, Duhem, Hertz, Mach, etc.). 

For, it is worth noting however that (2) is not self-evident in all contexts. Sometimes different scientific research groups within the same scientific community rely on different auxiliary assumptions or computational shortcuts to generate (say) agreed upon predictions (go check out real-life examples of Quine-Duhem thesis). So even though at one level of description there may be consensus, at another level of description (including the auxiliaries) there is not. I suspect this situation is endemic in a lot of sciences. (Again, over time this may well be sorted out if the auxiliaries start to matter for some reason.)

In addition, in a very neat recent paper, Kevin Dorst has argued (on the Bayesian terrain of Aumann) -- in the context of trying to provide a mechanism for group polarization -- that if evidence is ambiguous we should not expect consensus. (He has a neat scientific example, so go read it.) My view is that in sciences with incredibly robust and mathematically refined background theories (and instruments) such ambiguity of evidence may well be rare, but that in many sciences ambiguity of evidence and, thus, lack of consensus is to be expected and rational. 

Let me stop here for now.

 

 

On adequately filled places (Covid Diaries & Seneca)

After nearly a month, it's time for another long covid update. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, here;  here;  here, here; here; and here). And, as usual, the situation is a mixed bag.

First, the good news. Thanks to non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (basically extra strength Aleve for those Stateside) I have managed to eliminate debilitating headaches. By 'debilitating' I mean: being in bed all day, and being incapable of reading or watching streaming online content. So, the amount of suffering has been reduced dramatically! In addition, if I take the meds before I socialize -- say a lunch in a quiet place -- I am capable of enjoying it without nuisance. So, I have some hope that I can reduce my relative social isolation. My body does notice I have socialized (I have a strange kind of fatigue then), so it's not without consequence, but it's better than it was. 

Unfortunately, some of life's simple pleasures remain out of reach due to my inability to engage in quite modest cognitive multitasking: even gentle walking while talking with others wipes me out cognitively. (I can do serious walking alone.) I am unable to enjoy music in the background while we're talking or even playing silently. I can't cycle in the city, I can't play basketball with my son, etc.

For example, recently, I had a lunch with a college friend in a quiet London club. The background music and noise of other lunch-guests were quite modest. I enjoyed it. (Hurrah!) I did have a vague sense that my capacity to eavesdrop on other conversations was much diminished. Once I walked out of the club into the air, I noticed how exhausted I was; and despite the lack of headache, and more meds, I was unable to concentrate again that day. It would not be wrong to call it 'brain fog', but the fatigue in my body is even worse: I walk slower then, and think slower. As I have mentioned before, I suspect a lot of symptoms commonly associated with aging are really the effects of post-viral syndromes. 

In Seneca's Letter 56, he notes that "words seem to be more distracting" to him "than noises; for words demand attention, but noises merely fill the ears and beat upon them." Seneca mentions that shouting is not as distracting as singing and an intermittent noise more troublesome [molestior] than a steady one, and I would agree. In fact, hearing other people talk or even just hum while I am engaged in some activity of my own drives me batty. (Well not as badly as a few months ago, but still.) I have mentioned, I think, that this makes family life with a teenager challenging. He hums when he is happy.

While Seneca repeatedly suggests in this letter and others that finding inner mental tranquility is fundamentally healing, he also recognizes that rousing ourselves to keeping busy with good works is healing, too [ad rerum actus excitandi ac tractatione bonarum artium occupandi sumus], and, if I read him alright, necessary for the non-sage (that is all of us). A Christian may well think this is a call to charity, but I read it somewhat self-servingly as keeping true to my vocation (as scholar and teacher). I don't want to claim Seneca invents the protestant work ethic, but I do think he is an important voice in its development.

In fact, Seneca notes that when he is in forced retirement (due to illness or political failure--the letter contains a rare admission or at least allusion to it) ambition is often revived [interdum recrudescit ambitio]. I recognize the truth of this because much to my own surprise, in my forced leave of absence, my disabilities have re-directed even expanded my vocational ambitions as a scholar (even if I have come to accept that some projects have to be let go), and (while more challenging) teacher.

Even though I had to withdraw from quite a few projects and also have given up on a number of papers, in some respects being a scholar has become easier because I have so many fewer social interactions and don't travel to conferences. I probably read more than I have ever. 

One unexpected effect -- I have mentioned it before -- of these covid diaries is that other scholars reveal their own enduring challenges with disability to me. I recognize that in my environment I have missed a lot of quiet suffering and almost heroic persistence. It's humbling to recognize what a bad observer of my umwelt I have been and, more importantly, to recognize that so many folk have achieved so much with chronic pain and cognitive instabilities. 

This experience makes me interpret Seneca's suggestion that a hidden disease is worse than one in the open (which is on the road to being cured) in a social way. Norms that internalize suffering, 'being Stoic' as they say, hidden from the world are, while convenient to the powerful, a social evil. In a famous passage, Adam Smith notes that people tend to refuse acknowledgment of poverty and disease and thereby make it worse. (Smith thinks our gaze and recognition naturally falls on the rich, famous, and beautiful/healthy.) Sometimes I wonder if I hear about other people's suffering now because other people sense greater receptivity on my part, or if they think it's only fair that after having read about my trials I ought to welcome learning of theirs, or if I have actually become more willing to discern other people's struggles. Despite my vocation as a teacher, I tend to be skeptical of narratives of growth. 

And after hinting at the need for regular cognitive-therapy -- good and solid thoughts [cogitationes bonas, solidas] -- as the road to wisdom, Seneca grudgingly admits that sometimes the best self-care is to seek out a quiet spot. I laugh, and admit that the reading room of the British Library is indeed my best friend. In fact, I now have my spot in the reading room that the other regulars leave alone -- and the librarians at circulation have started to recognize --; I love quietly reciting, in the spirit of cognitive-therapy, Newton's (early) definition of place being a part of space that a thing fills adequately just before I sit down at 'my' desk. 

This past month a co-authored paper was rejected by referees. And I had hoped to circulate the first seven chapters of my Foucault/liberal art of government book [I am soliciting catchy titles!], which covers his material on the physiocrats and the ordoliberals, to trusted friends. But the manuscript is still too much a mess, and so its circulation has been pushed back into the Summer. No professional life without ordinary professional disappointments, I tell myself. 

This is also my last digression of the academic year. On Saturday, we go on family holiday, and I don't expect resuming D&I until August. Thank you, my dear reader, for your continued interest in my (near) daily mumblings. 

On Withdrawing from Life (Covid Diaries): Seneca Letter 55

3. As my habit is, I began to look about for something there that might be of service to me, when my eyes fell upon the villa which had once belonged to Vatia. So this was the place where that famous praetorian millionaire passed his old age! He was famed for nothing else than his life of leisure, and he was regarded as lucky only for that reason. For whenever men were ruined by their friendship with Asinius Gallus whenever others were ruined by their hatred of Sejanus, and later by their intimacy with him, – for it was no more dangerous to have offended him than to have loved him, – people used to cry out: "O Vatia, you alone know how to live!" 4. But what he knew was how to hide, not how to live; and it makes a great deal of difference whether your life be one of leisure or one of idleness. So I never drove past his country-place during Vatia's lifetime without saying to myself: "Here lies Vatia!"

But, my dear Lucilius, philosophy is a thing of holiness, something to be worshipped, so much so that the very counterfeit pleases. For the mass of mankind consider that a person is at leisure who has withdrawn from society, is free from care, self-sufficient, and lives for himself; but these privileges can be the reward only of the wise man. Does he who is a victim of anxiety know how to live for himself? What? Does he even know (and that is of first importance) how to live at all? 

...

8. The place where one lives, however, can contribute little towards tranquillity; it is the mind which must make everything agreeable to itself. I have seen men despondent in a gay and lovely villa, and I have seen them to all appearance full of business in the midst of a solitude. For this reason you should not refuse to believe that your life is well-placed merely because you are not now in Campania. But why are you not there? Just let your thoughts travel, even to this place. 9. You may hold converse with your friends when they are absent, and indeed as often as you wish and for as long as you wish. For we enjoy this, the greatest of pleasures, all the more when we are absent from one another. For the presence of friends makes us fastidious; and because we can at any time talk or sit together, when once we have parted we give not a thought to those whom we have just beheld. 10. And we ought to bear the absence of friends cheerfully, just because everyone is bound to be often absent from his friends even when they are present. Include among such cases, in the first place, the nights spent apart, then the different engagements which each of two friends has, then the private studies of each and their excursions into the country, and you will see that foreign travel does not rob us of much. 11. A friend should be retained in the spirit; such a friend can never be absent. He can see every day whomsoever he desires to see.

I would therefore have you share your studies with me, your meals, and your walks. We should be living within too narrow limits if anything were barred to our thoughts. I see you, my dear Lucilius, and at this very moment I hear you; I am with you to such an extent that I hesitate whether I should not begin to write you notes instead of letters.--Seneca, Letter 55. Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with minor changes)

The political undertones of this letter are not hard to spot. An active life means a political life. And a political life means danger to oneself and one's friends in an age of empire with its arbitrary, paranoid power and quick changes of fortune. Asinius Gallus died alone, hungry in a cell. And so it seems wise to withdraw into a life of leisure [otio] and house-building when one has the wealth to do so. (Perhaps one could buy a football team, too.) The many will consider you fortunate [felix] if you make into old age. But Seneca is clear: hiding is not living. In fact, if understand Seneca correctly, the mere fact of such withdrawal, from fear of entanglement in political intrigue, is evidence of one's anxiety; and being anxious means one is is not flourishing. 

Seneca starts the letter by calling attention to his physical frailty and to his own decadent wealth (his 'exercise' is to be carried about in the fresh air by his servants). Even so, he reminds Lucilius that even in his weakened state he uses the occasion to be instructed by what he encounters as he apparently has habituated himself to do (treating what is good for him -- quod mihi posset bono esse -- as a starting point for reflection). So rather than enjoying natural beauty or beautiful sights, he reflects on other people's choices and how he can benefit from them (including architectural tips). Interestingly enough, the benefit can be something to avoid.

Before I get to the emotional core of this digression, I do want to address one potential worry. One may think that Seneca isn't really learning from Vatia's choices; that the encounter with the (lovely) remnants of his villa is just an occasion to pontificate on his pre-existing views. That cannot be ruled out, of course. But I think we can read Seneca as suggesting something different. That Vatia was admired by the many and treated as kind of wise is clearly for Seneca a clue that he was not living well. (Recall that Seneca has many grounds to discount the applause of the marketplace.) And this is what prompts him to recognize that anxious withdrawal is by definition incapable of securing flourishing.

As it happens, I have had to withdraw from all social life not just because of  the pandemic, but as regular readers know from my 'covid diaries' also because I am trying to manage my 'long haul' symptoms. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here;  here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). At the moment I suffer no major symptoms, unless I engage in (even minimal) social activities (or find myself in an environment with background noise or which requires any kind of cognitive multitasking). I swim daily, and suffer no pains. But as Grotius put it, "amongst the Things peculiar to Man, is his Desire of Society, that is, a certain Inclination to live with those of his own Kind." And while like many of my professional brethren I flourish in long hours of solitude reading and writing about philosophy, I also used enjoy the company of others (not the least my family).

And so now I am often mentally conversing with absent friends (alongside real email and whatsapp correspondences). Some of them have, much to my mortification, taken to including me in their bcc's. I am mortified that I will betray their secret by accidentally pressing replay all. This shows that some of my intellectual friendships are still too caught up in professional worlds of zero-sum advancement and angling for prestige and/or jobs. (We can't all have Seneca's independent sources of wealth.) But I have been really astonished by how many people have taken the time to share with me they sympathy and converse about shared sources of interest.

Of course, there is an ambiguity. A natural way to translate 'Amicus animo possidendus est' is 'a friend must possess courage [or spiritedness]." And given that Seneca has repeatedly suggested that such animo/spiritedness is worth cultivating, one can see how he might be suggesting  However, Gummere, taking his from immediate context, suggest (as noted above) 'A friend should be retained in the spirit.' And, if we follow Gummere's translation the sentence becomes a kind of allegory for the whole Letters and a plausible motto for any amicable correspondence. And clearly in context Seneca is suggesting that the best or least most pleasing friendships are constituted by physically absent friends [see: Magis hac voluptate, quae maxima est, fruimur dum absumus]. 

And it is not hard to see what Seneca has in mind. Such absent friends became like a Smithian impartial spectator, and correct our selfishness and self-absorption, and prompt in us useful reflections on our encounters with the world (recall the earlier passage in the letter). Our imaginary friends become prompts for philosophy (in the sense of permanent self-improvement). And I recognize the experience of imagining what a philosophical friend would say and thereby improve an argument or exegesis. (Some of you are in my mind as I write these paragraphs.)

I have to admit that my philosophical education is from Seneca's vantage point unfinished. I prefer real conversation to the imaginary one. And one of my great regrets is that I cannot point to a literary example of the joy of philosophical comradery in action, of the long hours trying to figure out an argument or position from many different angles in a non-competitive spirit of the moment where who we are is subsumed by a common pursuit  that does not efface our individual personalities but transforms them into a spoke of a turning wheel that is gaining speed. And, of course, this means that sometimes the conversation, as it were, derails.

Yet, as I noted, there is a chilling political undercurrent to the letter. Even without our knowledge of Seneca's end, it is dangerous to be friends with him who orbited imperial power so closely. I don't want to suggest that Seneca is warning Lucilius to back off (it probably is too late for that, anyway), because that would make the whole letter kind of self-undermining. But I do heis suggesting that the kind of intimacy he is proposing requires courage. And this courage is not just the vulnerability of intimacy -- although it is that, too --, but because there is also a genuine risk in philosophizing together. This risk is partially political, but also metaphysical; one might lose one's own sense of self or individuality once one starts inhabiting one's social life in imaginary conversations with others. It is no surprise that hearing imaginary voices and talking out loud to invisible strangers are often taken as signs of madness. And those of us most used to solitude learn quickly enough that it's best to guard what one says.

 

Seneca's Last Gasps; meditating joyful and brave thoughts (Letter 54)

1. My ill-health had allowed me a long furlough, when suddenly it resumed the attack. "What kind of ill-health?" you say. And you surely have a right to ask; for it is true that no kind is unknown to me. But I have been consigned, so to speak, to one special ailment. I do not know why I should call it by its Greek name; for it is well enough described as "shortness of breath." Its attack is of very brief duration, like that of a squall at sea; it usually ends within an hour. Who indeed could breathe his last for long? 2. I have passed through all the ills and dangers of the flesh; but nothing seems to me more troublesome than this. And naturally so; for anything else may be called illness; but this is a sort of continued "last gasp." Hence physicians call it "practising how to die." For some day the breath will succeed in doing what it has so often essayed. 3. Do you think I am writing this letter in a merry spirit, just because I have escaped? It would be absurd to take delight in such supposed restoration to health, as it would be for a defendant to imagine that he had won his case when he had succeeded in postponing his trial. Yet in the midst of my difficult breathing I never ceased to rest secure in cheerful and brave thoughts.

4. "What?" I say to myself; "does death so often test me? Let it do so; I myself have for a long time tested death." "When?" you ask. Before I was born. Death is non-existence, and I know already what that means. What was before me will happen again after me. If there is any suffering in this state, there must have been such suffering also in the past, before we entered the light of day. As a matter of fact, however, we felt no discomfort then. 5. And I ask you, would you not say that one was the greatest of fools who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished than before it was lighted? We mortals also are lighted and extinguished; the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side there is a deep peace. For, unless I am very much mistaken, my dear Lucilius, we go astray in thinking that death only follows, when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us. Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin at all, or whether you leave off, inasmuch as the result of both these states is non-existence?

6. I have never ceased to exhort myself with counsels of this kind, silently, of course, since I had not the power to speak; then little by little this shortness of breath, already reduced to a sort of panting, came on at greater intervals, and then slowed down and finally stopped. Even by this time, although the gasping has ceased, the breath does not come and go normally; I still feel a sort of hesitation and delay in breathing. Let it be as it pleases, provided there be no sigh from the soul.7. Accept this assurance from me: I shall never be frightened when the last hour comes; I am already prepared and do not plan a whole day ahead. But do you praise and imitate the man whom it does not irk to die, though he takes pleasure in living. For what virtue is there in going away when you are thrust out? And yet there is virtue even in this: I am indeed thrust out, but it is as if I were going away willingly. For that reason the wise man can never be thrust out, because that would mean removal from a place which he was unwilling to leave; and the wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity, because he wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him. Farewell.--Seneca Letter 54 Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with minor changes)

After many long letters, Seneca returns to brevity with a letter that becomes poignant in light of his own end. For a few years after Seneca wrote this, Nero sentenced him to suicide. And it is not clear that by obeying the sentence, Seneca really wills it himself and so escapes necessity. Compare the contrast with a case in which Nero had sentenced him to die, and that in order to escape the mad emperor's henchmen, Seneca had committed suicide. In the latter case, Seneca can be said to escape necessity in virtue of his own actions. Perhaps there is no real distinction here.

Seneca has set the stage for being remembered for his fearless (and dramatic) death.  If you deny that he could anticipate the future, it is worth noting that in this letter the plane of necessity and death are treated in temporal symmetric fashion. Either way, it is not clear to me why Seneca returns to this theme which he had discussed more fully in (recall) letter 24 (among other places).

When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with exercise asthma. But once diagnosed, it's been mostly under control except once: in the aftermath of my TIA (recall) in the Summer of 2013, my lung capacity collapsed mysteriously. My asthma medicine was changed, and since then it seems to have no impact on my life and not preventing a fairly active life-style. This last fact seems to disappoint the medical types which have attended to me in the aftermath of covid. (For my "covid diaries," see here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here, here; here; here; and here.) For, somehow they are all way more confident they can treat lungs than the spooky, cognitive problems I am dealing with.

I had classmates with debilitating asthma, and once (recall) nearly drowned as a kid, so I can imagine without great effort that an asthma attack could be a kind of practice in the what it's like of a last gasp. Seneca is explicit that physicians call the experience "meditating on how to die" [medici hanc 'meditationem mortis' vocant]. It's hard here not to think of those who claimed that philosophy is a meditation on death "Philosophiam esse meditationem Mortis"), which is often (but not always) associated with Socrates (Phaedo 64A). For a brief moment it looks like we have landed in the competition in the authoritative art of living between medicine and philosophy familiar from, say, the Symposium (including its comedy.)

But Seneca refuses the comic note, and he makes clear there is no competition but rather parallelism between art and philosophy. For, during his asthma attacks he practices another kind of meditation with silent exhortations [exhortationibus - tacitis scilicet] which seem to slow down the actual asthma attacks. The exhortations involve a kind of reminder to self that life is surrounded by death. 

The one time I have been in the presence of death -- my father's (recall) -- his last breath sounded like a deep snort of exhaustion not a gasping at all. But then again, he really was ready to die. Because his whole childhood had been surrounded by mysterious disappearances (recall), which turned out to be deaths, I wonder if he saw his whole life as a kind of lucky surplus and so made it easier to let go. I regret not asking him.  

Be that as it may, and as it happens, a lot of people familiar with my cognitive challenges since long haul covid has set on are encouraging me to take on meditation. (These are not just new age types, but also physicians and fellow long haulers.) Last week I went to my first public lecture. After twenty minutes I felt the onset of great fatigue. But I decided to stick it out by closing my eyes and pretending as if I was listening to the lecture from afar. I even asked a (modest) question, but half-way through the Q&A I realized I was not going to make it home without collapsing if I would stay longer. So I left. 

And if the medical specialists can't find anything -- this week I have lined up a number of appointments --, I have, in fact, toyed with trying out some of Seneca's exhortations filled with joyful and brave thoughts [cogitationibus laetis ac fortibus]. And if these work, I'll share my secret here, for free and joyfully.

Seneca (Letter 53), Long Haul Covid, and Impiety

I was suffering too grievously to think of the danger, since a sluggish seasickness which brought no relief was racking me, the sort that upsets the liver without clearing it. Therefore I laid down the law to my pilot, forcing him to make for the shore, willy-nilly. When we drew near, I did not wait for things to be done in accordance with Vergil's orders, until

Prow faced seawards

or

Anchor plunged from bow;

I remembered my craftsmanship [artificii] as an elderly [vetus] devotee of frozen water, and, clad as I was in my cloak, let myself down into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should. Whaat do you think I suffered [Quae putas me passum], scrambling over the rocks, searching out the path, or making one for myself? I understood that sailors have no  reason to fear the land [Intellexi non immerito nautis terram timeri]. It is hard to believe what I endured when I could not endure myself; you may be sure that the reason why Ulysses was shipwrecked on every possible occasion was not so much because the sea-god was angry with him from his birth; he was seasick [nausiator erat].--Seneca, Letter 53, Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with modest modifications) 

It seems likely that this letter was written during the last two or three years of Seneca's life, around AD 63, so, to be on the conservative side, when he was nearly sixty. I am just close enough in age to feel some himpathy for his scrambling over rocks in his cloak, while not obtuse to the comic nature of the scene. One can imagine the local villagers telling each other stories down the generations -- too bad there were no spyglasses or iphones to capture it -- about the fabulously wealthy, once powerful courtier and philosopher, famous for preaching "the incredible force of philosophy is to counter all the forces of chance" [Incredibilis philosophiae vis est ad omnem fortuitam vim retundendam], going onshore in panic and unsteadily.

Not unlike Aristophanes' hiccup, Seneca, who chooses to share the story so he is clearly not obtuse to the comedy of it all, realizes that our physical infirmity can undermine our dignity. Not to mention that Seneca may have originated the tradition of taking a new year's day dip in the sea. 

I do not mean to suggest here we're just in the realm of comedy. Seneca's impious naturalization of Odysseus's journey is not an isolated feature in the letter. For in context, the force of philosophy, especially in the hands of the wise [sapiens], is compared favorably to that of God (singular). The beneficial effects of wisdom are our own achievements, whereas God is, we might say, beneficiary of natural luck.

Before I get to the main point of the letter, I have to admit that the unsteadiness he describes at sea, hit a bit home this week. On Wednesday I taught my first in-person class -- fittingly on Book 1 of the Republic -- in over 17 months. I had divided the three hour seminar into three, giving myself and the students a break every 45-50 minutes. In line of the advise of the occupational physician, my department had lowered my work-load by cutting the student numbers in half. They also tasked the teacher of the other half to be my back-up, in case I could not make it to class. (For my covid diaries, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, and here). 

The seminar starts at 5pm, and after lunch I developed an awful headache just as I was finishing up my hand-out. I usually just improvise my seminars, letting the conversation take us where chance directs (with a few sights I tend to wish to visit along the way.) But I had decided on the hand-out to take some of the cognitive load off my brain during the seminar. So, as I lay in bed, I contemplated initiating the back-up plan. Luckily, the painkillers worked and by three, I decided to bike the work. There I scouted the room, and even looked for a place outside in the heat. It was an evening for Plato under a tree, but sadly I could not find a quiet enough spot.

The students all arrived masked, and they turned out to be excellent. I was reminded again that even with inexperienced students in an introductory course, a seminar-style discussion is a site for mutual learning. A student's question led me to see that Polemarchus' attitude toward inviting Socrates anticipates Thrasymachus' understanding of justice. 

Unfortunately, in the second hour, just after I had gone through the course requirements, I felt my head go light (as if my sugar had dropped), and my legs went unsteady. In a moment of self-aggrandizing pity, I thought of the magicians that died on stage. Then I remembered Seneca's unsteady legs, and was comforted. Luckily, in my course plan, this was just the moment I had settled on a group assignment without my participation. So after quickly instructing and dividing them, I left the class room to get some fresh air and (against all my principles which forbid coffee after 5pm) an espresso. By the time I eased back into the class-room, I noticed I had not been missed and my head had settled.

My occupational physician has kind of settled on trying to convince me not to accept succor from medical science. But not to get too dispirited because while I am clearly not recovered, I am improved relative to some date months ago. More subtly, she tries to remind me that while my symptoms keep recurring -- weird memory loss, random headaches, what I call head-fatigue, lapses in concentration --, my recoveries of each seem fairly rapid.

And indeed, I managed to lead discussion in which we collected and analyzed the findings of the group assignment.  Because my students are so splendid, it was easy. But near the end I realized my brain was working at half speed. Good enough for the day. And not for the first time, I am reminded how lucky I am that, despite all the evils of the modern academy, I have landed in such a joy-producing occupation. (Of course, we'll see how many students show up for second class!)

There is a lot of interesting philosophy in letter 53. For example, Seneca insists that sometimes we know when we sleep that we sleep. And that there is an asymmetry in how we experience physical and mental/psychic pains.

But here I want to focus on the main point of the 53rd letter, which is Seneca's insistence that philosophy should be in some sense all-consuming (in context really, all conquering). "philosophy says to all things: "I am not going to receive at this time what was left over to you, but you will have that which I have rejected."" ['Idem philosophia rebus omnibus: non sum hoc tempus acceptura quod vobis superfuerit, sed id vos habebitis quod ipsa reiecero'.] This claim is out of fashion for three reasons.

First, it goes against the popular idea that philosophy is the mother of the sciences, who become mature (or at least adolescents) when they break off from philosophy. Now, we tend to think of philosophy as the diminished remainder, of what is left over, from the more successful, more progressive, and better funded sciences. This is familiar enough from the recurring crises of identity within philosophy which claims for itself (not entirely convincingly) expertise in conceptual analysis in one decade, in inferential practices in another decade, in analyzing arguments in another decade (or two), in modal thinking in another decade, and so on (yes, I plead guilty for having peddled synthetic philosophy). 

Second, it goes against the increasingly powerful idea that there should be a work-life balance, or a proper integration of work-life. And this reflects the idea that somehow doing philosophy professionally is in need of containment. And those of us who recognize the mad, publication arms race in the context of limited jobs, may well come to agree that someone should impose limits or we will be all consumed by trying to publish and refereeing the attempts to publish. 

Third, the very idea that philosophy is a way of life that can benefit us is taken to be archaic. And in so far as someone should be busy with how to live, and how to ground intellectually our experiments in living, it is thought this is best left to religion (we hasten to add, Eastern or Western) or to popularizing psychologists, who can draw on the best scientific insights. (I would mention our historical rivals, the poets, but our culture has let them wither.)

It is worth noticing that in so far as one accepts the modern intellectual division of labor, in the complex world of our open society (with heavy government involvement), this only makes more urgent that there should be a site of disciplined reflection on how to live collectively and individually. Rather than being embarrassed by wisdom, or relegating it to footnotes, or ceding it completely to mystics, philosophy should be inviting to those that seek paths to wisdom. Luckily the roads to wisdom cannot be patented or be turned into a trade-mark or turned into private property. As Seneca implies throughout the Letters, philosophy is our commons.

The activities that give us joy, community, and energy should not be limited. If we need to be protected against overworking in philosophy, perhaps we should re-organize how we construe the content of our work? Yes, Seneca's unsteady stomach and legs and my headaches are a reminder that there are physical preconditions to joyful activity that may be fragile along multiple dimensions. If you want to preach revolution, you may add the many unnamed slaves in Seneca's entourage, and the precariat at my own university to those material preconditions.

Let me wrap up. As regular readers know, I am myself not convinced that Seneca is right that philosophy can conquer uncertainty. And, Seneca's idea that philosophy should "rule" our lives is easily mocked. Yet, during the months I spent in my sickbed this year, I realized that such mockery is itself a sign that not all is well. That behind the mockery there is no insight, that nothing grows in its meaningless void. Our lives are relatively short, do not delay, "let us, therefore, rouse ourselves, that we may be able to correct our mistakes" and each take our baby-steps in our perhaps occasionally intersecting paths toward wisdom and let these shape our lives.

 

 

On Being Praised by Students, (Seneca Letter 52)

How mad (dementia) is he who leaves the lecture-hall smiling simply because of the clamor from the ignorant (clamores imperitorum)!--Seneca, Letter 52. Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with modest modifications) 

In Letter 52, (by appropriating some remarks of Epicurus,) Seneca describes four kinds of students of philosophy. The first are autodidacts, they find their "way to the truth without any one's assistance, carving out their own path [via]." Socrates, Al-Farabi, and Ibn Rushd are fairly explicit this describes (true) philosophers.

The second kind are a species of heterodidacts -- a term I borrow from a moving and subtle essay by Agnes Callard --; these need the gentle guidance of a teacher. But once they have right direction, they follow willingly. Of course, (recall, say, Letter 30) in Seneca, such a guide/teacher is simultaneously an exemplar, something he emphasizes throughout the letter. Seneca hints that he aspires to be though as a member of the second class. (I return to this below.) 

The third kind is also a heterodidact, but this kind needs what we might call tough love or "who can be forced and driven into the right path," (qui cogi ad rectum compellique possunt). Interestingly, Seneca stress the point by using 'coactore,' that is, one who compels often a tax-inspector. So, the teacher is here compared to someone who extracts wealth and indirectly returns something greater (the proper path, truth) to the unwilling student. 

The opening of Seneca's 52nd letter suggest that most of us need such tough love because we tend to be very inconstant (Fluctuamur inter varia consilia; nihil libere volumus, nihil absolute, nihil semper.) And, in fact, we are extricated from our inconstancy by education (and Seneca plays on the idea that extraction, elevation, and education share a similar root in Latin).

And, to echo Socrates, where is the fourth? Seneca implies some students confuse their desire for entertainment with the path to wisdom. And among these many wish to be flattered. And, in turn, the students flatter their teacher by their adulation. It's tempting to recognize in Seneca's remarks Socrates criticism of Agathon and Aristophanes, and the more general problem of demagoguery. And on some days this would be the moment to discuss the insidious ways Deans and program coordinators incentivize the fourth kind of student in the way they frame, word, and use student evaluations and promote valorisation or public facing activity by their faculty. The fourth kind of students may be credentialed, but are intrinsically non-didacts. 

Now, being a good gentle teacher (of the second kind of student), that is being at ease with one's vulnerability, is no easy matter. But as Seneca hints, helping the third kind of students overcome their own weaknesses and extract wisdom (ad sapientiam se non perduxit sed extraxit) is much more difficult for these students (and by implication for the teachers).

There is an interesting question, left hanging, if the same instructor can teach the second kind and third kind of teacher at the same time. To return to Callard's essay, which is excellent on the interactive nature of true teaching, it would like speaking to two kinds of souls at once with divergent effects and, in turn, receiving their feedback in one's own teaching (and instruction). 

I was led to the thought in the previous paragraph when I reflected on Seneca's suggestion he might be counted among the second kind of student. At first, I thought he was engaged in a false modesty -- 'don't confuse me with the natural or self-actuating wise' --, but then I wondered if the same sentence couldn't be read as flattery of Lucilius (who, we have learned, often needs tough love (recall Letter 49 and no small amount of flattery). It's not impossible that the four kinds of students are ideal types, and that in reality we often exhibit features of each (or most).

One reason why I thought Seneca might be engaged in false modesty here is that while he warmly recommends reading and studying the "ancients" as friends in our heterodidactic journey, fundamentally for him we must choose our teachers among the living. Now this might be due to the fact for Seneca true teaching is being the right sort of lodestar or exemplar in integrity and heterodidacting (those "who teach us by their lives...who tell us what we ought to do and then prove it by practice, who show us what we should avoid, and then are never caught doing that which they have ordered us to avoid.") And so certain kind of book-learning is out. But it also conveniently eliminates other options, except those few at hand.

In this context Fabianus Seneca mentions as a proper exemplar in living memory. Fabianus seems to have courted, and more importantly cultivated, a proper philosophical audience, namely one capable of and becoming capable of self-control (modeste). (Seneca implies young men are least capable of this.) But, as is clear from Seneca's description, Fabianus' audience members were not merely passive receptacles, but (as in Callard's descriptions) active co-constituters of joint learning.

When I read Seneca's letters my thoughts often wander off to my own teaching. And I was about to write something here about my apprehension about returning to the classroom after my long, covid-induced absence (and the relative lack of safety precautions by my employer) and to what degree I would be able to guide anyone at all, when it occurred to me that I was ignoring the surface fact that the conceit of the Letters is that these are (well) letters. And so that in some sense they are intrinsically a contribution to a kind of heterodidact teaching in which the interaction of the teacher and student is both partially imagined and intrinsically delayed--a bit like a very bad Zoom connection.

And, of course, in so far as Seneca's Letters are meant to be read by unknown students and even, as he himself often suggests, by those of us in posteriority (recall, say, Letter 21), the work of imagination (by the implied author/teacher and implied student/reader) and delay is only made harder. And, of course, the real author does not really allow his readers to judge independently from his self-presentation the character of the implied author.

My interest here is not in Seneca's purported hypocrisy (a favorite evergreen in folks writing about Seneca). But rather that like a painter he projects a whole complex universe of true education and teaching onto his letters and so simultaneously flattens the dimensionality of that world into one we can write and discuss. And he is so good at presenting this flattening of this interaction between student and teachers onto the written surface, that we easily forget (qua reader) that his (imagined) projection is, in fact, not alike to our own engagement with his work. And not for the first time, I realize that when Seneca describes the true nature of the skill involved in education he is simultaneously engaged, behind the scenes as it were, in a kind of enchanting artifice. And he leaves it to use decide whether such magic is an essential ingredient of true teaching, or its negation.  

Seneca on Freedom (Letter 51)

I have set freedom as my goal [Libertas proposita est]; and I am striving for that reward. And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any necessity [necessitati], to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms. And on the day when I know that I have the upper hand, her power will be naught. When I have death in my own control, shall I take orders from her?--Seneca, Letter 51, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

When, in a moment of sadness, I decided to return to Seneca, I was hoping for wisdom. My first response in reading Letter 51 is disappointment. The letter understands itself as a polemic/litigious [litigavimus]; and it is clearly written by a man out of sorts, in deep turmoil. We are informed near the start of the letter that he left the luxury resort town, Baiae, the day after he reached it. More importantly, for an author, he can't even keep straight who he has been reading "Messala, – or was it Valgius." And his inner turbulence is matched/echoed by the description of the near omnipresence of volcanoes, "many regions belch forth fire" [cum plurima loca evomant ignem]. 

We don't have to be Freud to discern Seneca is aware his time is nearly up (see also the quoted passage above suggests). There are lots of hints in the letter that he is holding up the modesty of Scipio in political defeat/exile as exemplar to himself. And the reader is left to wonder in what sense Seneca understands his own political retirement as leading to suicide or death. There is, in fact, an interesting historical question, hinted at by Plutarch, whether Scipio committed suicide (admittedly Livy gives no hint of it).*

We know that Seneca found it very difficult to give up his luxury. For some this marks him as a hypocrite. I don't think I am engaging in himpathy when I say that I find more interesting the fact that his inability to live up to his ideals does not make him change his ideals; and his struggles with adhering to his ideals -- the rapid succession of arrival and departure from Baiae are comic and tragic at once -- allow him also to be instructive even persuasive about the challenges to achieve them. The best witnesses against vice are not the saintly preacher, but (as most rehab centers recognize now) former alcoholics. 

And yet, above I quote the more philosophical passage. Is freedom really a kind of inner state or, better yet, a disposition? A disposition that allows one to be immune from even necessity (that is, death). I recognize that immunity from external causes is an attractive thought during a pandemic. 

When I connect the threads of the letter, it's clear that Seneca is trying his hand at inner exile (political and emotional), and aware he is failing. And failing badly; his travel habits and his inner emotional life (those bursting flames) tell another story.+ This gives the start of the letter -- "Quomodo quisque potest" translated by Gummere as 'everyone does his best'; I think I prefer 'each according to his abilities'  -- a double-edged sword. He is falling, and it gives his teaching a harsh quality. 

It is not easy to write these lines, recognizing my own teaching fails. And yet, it is difficult to feel compassion for Seneca, the stern lecturer of the worldly-successful Lucilius; Seneca, the exorcist of pleasures.  

Looking back at the sentence before the one quoted at the top of this post,** what's lacking is not Seneca's desire for pleasure or his fear about his political fate. No, what's missing in the description of Seneca's inner exile is the acknowledgment of his sadness or, if it that is too modern, of his disappointments his frustrated ambitions. This is mirrored in his treatment of Scipio's downfall/ruin [ruina], which is centered on Scipio's management of his manly honor/nobility [honestius].

Of course, the modern desire for psychological realism bumps up against the ancient rules of decorum. It is too easy, perhaps too lucrative, to turn Seneca into self-help or compassion with his sadness; he is quite clear that "if any vice rend your heart, cast it away from you; and if you cannot be rid of it in any other way, pluck out your heart also."

I wanted to stop there, but I noticed on re-reading that this evisceration of the self is a kind of second-best (perhaps third-best) therapy. In fact, Seneca suggests that in order to destroy the vices, passion needs to be set against passion ("Above all, drive pleasures from your sight. Hate them beyond all other things,"). To eliminate (or strangle [strangulent]) the pleasures, they, or their objects, must be hated; and to habituate such self-betterment, this killing off of bad temptations, location matters. 

And just before I press 'publish,' and, think how Christian Seneca sounds, I ask myself why is he reading "Messala...or Valgius?" These are, after all, in addition two significant authors, also two great political survivors of the turmoil of the late republic and early empire. Messala, in particular, was adept at adapting to changed circumstances.

I don't mean to suggest that we should read Seneca's use of freedom in republican terms here. But rather to remark that if freedom is a disposition that allows one to be immune from all circumstance (etc.), it does not follow that one has to be passive in the face of changing fortunes and retreat into an untouchable (and sadness denying) inner citadel. And while it is foolish to think one can escape death (necessity), one may well be able to influence its circumstances and other goods of fortune. I linger on the thought; maybe Scipio is an anti-exemplar here.

It would be a sublime comedy if the very text that is assumed to teach a form of resignation, the killing off of last remnants of pleasures, is really a manual for political survival by a man still hoping for reversal of fortune. Oddly, this cheers me up.   

 

 

 

On Crooked Timber.

The last two months have been challenging for me, hence my lack of blogging. They aren’t limited to losing my advisor. But what I have seen running throughout many of these challenges is a kind of a deep psychological that I will call wounds of the heart.

A wound of the heart is an emotional hurt that generates intense, seemingly unbearable psychic stress and that can create long-term damage to one’s personality due to overpowering negative moral emotions, like resentment and hatred, and that may last for the rest of one’s life. They are typically caused by some act by one’s close friends, family, or community. The wounded person believes the act signals that the offending group bears him or her bad will, and that the group does not love or support the wounded person in the way he or she had counted upon in the past. It can overwhelm the wounded person’s agency, leading them to lash out and creating a new harm, and perhaps wounding the hearts of others. When multiple parties to a relationship have wounds of the heart, that can spell the death of the relationship, even if the relationship continues pro forma.--Kevin Vallier The Wounds of the Heart

Because one of my entries into the history of philosophy was by way of Isaiah Berlin, I have always associated his quotation from Kant that "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" with an important truth. To this day the core idea informs my own skeptical liberalism.

But as always the story has wrinkles.

So for years I shared Ingrid Robeyns' sense, appropriately shared at the mother of all philosophical blogs, CT, that Berlin's translation improved on the original, Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. I still do. However, it is not often remarked that Kant added a footnote, to this very sentence; and it is worth noting it, too:

The role of man is very artificial. How it may be with the dwellers on other planets and their nature we do not know. If, however, we carry out well the mandate given us by Nature, we can perhaps flatter ourselves that we may claim among our neighbors in the cosmos no mean rank. Maybe among them each individual can perfectly attain his destiny in his own life. Among us, it is different; only the [human] race can hope to attain it."*

There are really two fine issues here: first, that we may be part of a larger family of planetary denizens. This is an idea that excited Huygens and Newton. And from Kant's pre-critical writings we know (recall) that Kant was much impressed by Newton's ideas on this point. And Kant assumes that, once we get into the habit of  this, we will adopt a perspective in which we are judged by such aliens. Maria Pia Paganelli has suggested -- in commenting on a similar idea in Adam Smith -- that this can be traced by to Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. It's plausible this also influenced Kant because Kant's earlier Universal Natural History is clearly shaped as I argued (based on a suggestion by Martin Schönfeld) by Fontenelle's work. So, Kant's cosmopolitanism here is truly cosmopolitan. I assume this is known among Kant experts, but the thought always delights me. 

Second, in the note Kant articulates the thought that that any attainable future worth having is a collaborative or shared project. I can think no better way of characterizing the liberal project in that it simultaneously holds that we should assume the unreformable weakness of individuals and that as humanity we're in it together. This is why, the more I reflect on it, the more I recognize that global, maybe cosmic (yeah for Star Trek!) federation is the liberal political destiny. 

This morning, in a wistful, apprehensive mood,  I returned to Seneca Letter 50. The letter is really about the comic-from- without-maddening-from-within realization that the more we run away from our problems, and disown them, the more we find them not just sneaking up on us, but defining us:

For what else are you busied with except improving yourself every day, laying aside some error, and coming to understand that the faults which you attribute to circumstances are in yourself? We are indeed apt to ascribe certain faults to the place or to the time; but those faults will follow us, no matter how we change our place.

And yet, I was in no mood to be preached to by Seneca that the way forward is a regimen of self-improvement. My mind drifted back toward's Vallier's post quoted above. As the reach of life has shrunk during this pandemic, and in my solitude, I more easily and directly encounter evidence of how my past wounds create new harms; I re-read, and I recognize myself in the self-portrait he draws. Kevin writes of 'soldiering on.' I wince at the bellicose nature of the phrase, despite seeing the tenderness in the rest of Kevin's words. The soldiering on reminds me of the bit of the part of Seneca -- preparing for death -- I like least.    

Without realizing it I had read on in Seneca. And there, I was surprised to read (in  Richard Gummere's 1917 translation), There is nothing that will not surrender to persistent treatment, to concentrated and careful attention; however much the timber may be bent, you can make it straight again.  [Nihil est, quod non expugnet pertinax opera et intenta ac diligens cura; robora in rectum quamvis flexa revocabis. Curvatas trabes calor explicat et aliter natae in id finguntur, quod usus noster exigit; quanto facilius animus accipit formam, flexibilis et.]

    Of course, Seneca must believe that self-improvement is possible, I think.

But, as I re-read I realize that Seneca thinks this, too, is a collaborative project: "we begin to mold and reconstruct our souls before they are hardened by crookedness" ["ante animum nostrum formare incipimus et recorrigere quam indurescat pravitas eius]. In Kevin's vocabulary, we soldier on in a platoon. Of course, the larger context of the Letter suggests that Seneca thinks we do this under the guidance of a mentor. 

I then remembered Kant. And now looking at what I have written, I am struck by the thought that I have been eavesdropping on a great debate between the two wings of cosmopolitanism: disagreeing about the means, but both claiming that we're in this together. My gloom dissipates. 

 

 

On the Compression of the Past and The Distracted Student (Seneca Letter 49)

It was but a moment ago that I sat, as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion, but a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts, but a moment ago that I lost the desire to plead, but a moment ago that I lost the ability. Infinitely swift is the flight of time, as those see more clearly who are looking backwards. For when we are intent on the present, we do not notice it, so gentle is the passage of time's headlong flight. 3. Do you ask the reason for this? All past time is in the same place; it all presents the same aspect to us, it lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss. Besides, an event which in its entirety is of brief compass cannot contain long intervals. The time which we spend in living is but a point, nay, even less than a point. But this point of time, infinitesimal as it is, nature has mocked by making it seem outwardly of longer duration; she has taken one portion thereof and made it infancy, another childhood, another youth, another the gradual slope, so to speak, from youth to old age, and old age itself is still another. How many steps for how short a climb! 4. It was but a moment ago that I saw you off on your journey; and yet this "moment ago" makes up a goodly share of our existence, which is so brief, we should reflect, that it will soon come to an end altogether. In other years time did not seem to me to go so swiftly; now, it seems fast beyond belief, perhaps, because I feel that the finish-line is moving closer to me, or it may be that I have begun to take heed and reckon up my losses.--Seneca, Letter 49, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

This may the first letter in which Seneca suggests the possibility of learning from students. And in his frustration he reminds us who share in this vocation, of the moments of frustration when there is no teaching by student, or teacher. Seneca leaves no doubt that at times it is the student's misdirected gaze that is to blame for such failures. 

Seneca's angry, even vain response is comic from one perspective: he blames the student for his bad interests, berates Lucilius for his impoverished intellectual tastes. Has Seneca forgotten that it is our job to cultivate these? 

But I don't laugh because I recognize the frustration. The indifferent or bored student is a minor wound compared to the cuts we feel when we encounter the enthusiastic blathering of the talented but misguided ones. These shortchange both of us. 

Suddenly, I remember my moments of weakness: the reading group with my PhD students that I stormed out of; my inability to disguise my impatience for another student's infatuation with digital payments. A whole litany of teaching fails appear fresh in my mind elbowing each other aside, crowding in on my awareness. Compressing my life into a flat dimension of inarticulate powerlessness. 

Initially, I couldn't write about this long-winded letter with its military tropes; its unapologetic reminder that slaves are mere instruments to the owning class; and Seneca's by now all too familiar diatribes against certain topics of study. Seneca's gift for subtle succinctness has deserted him.

One need not be psycho-analytic that inarticulate powerlessness is the condition of the infant-child. The teacher regresses. On re-reading Seneca's letter, I discern it is more artful than I realized, because the infant-child is not just powerless, "At our birth nature made us teachable;" we start out imperfect, but perfectable [Dociles natura nos edidit, et rationem dedit imperfectam, sed quae perfici posset.] 

I recognize that I could only start to write about this letter once I related to it. I dislike myself for this; my scholarly pride likes to think I can write about the unrelatable, too.

There is a moment in childhood when one forgets all the early memories, where the past isn't just flattened but effaced. I wonder if that is a condition of our teachability.

Now, that I am reaching an age where the compression of the past is a familiar fact of life, I also notice that in being past not all moments respect the homogeneity of time. Some stand out like the itchy skin after mosquito bites; I return to them often unbeknownst to me until I recognize i am dwelling on them.

I look at the abstract list of topics Seneca demands his digressing (devia) student to argue (disputa) with him about: "justice, piety, thrift, and that twofold purity, both the purity which abstains from another's person, and that which takes care of one's own self" [de pudicitia utraque, et illa cui alieni corporis abstinentia est, et hac cui sui cura.] Seneca can be a bore.

And just as I wish to be mesmerized by the metaphysical puzzle of the inequity in time's experience, I linger on that two-fold purity. Pudicitia can also be translated as modesty or chastity; both would have sound off. Even so, pudicitia's roots are in shame or being shamed (pudet). 

There is a form of shame, a sense of shame, that can if it is treated tenderly lead to abstaining from violating others and, to use modern jargon, self-care. I wonder why I was incapable of learning this before.

On Hitz's Lost in Thought

For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.

If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings. All intellectual life, no matter how ultimately sophisticated, originates in the human questions arising in and behind ordinary life. Scholarship is exciting in its own right, but it means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life. So, too, scholarship is owed back in return to ordinary people, in forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life.

Anyone seeking a good human life benefits from learning in all of its breadth and depth. Nor need one work in a university or attend one to cultivate the virtue of seriousness. Zeal for the fundamentals in life is fueled by aspiration, by imagining forms of human life that we wish to inhabit or become. Our intellectual culture prizes destruction over edification, a thrill of superiority over deep encouragement, and the reinforcement of factional loyalties over common ground. Yet any thoughtful person, not to speak of a writer, artist, critic, or journalist, can seek out examples, living and dead, historical and fictional, of human beings who have strained every nerve to seek more, better, finer, nobler ways of living.

In this book I have been forced to use mostly examples of high achievers in the realm of the intellect: Einstein, Gramsci, Goethe, Augustine. That is because these are the modes of intellectual life one can easily find in a library—the high achievers are worthy of books. One of the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture is that we forget that the invisible life has all the human splendor of the visible one, and often more. I have had in mind all along, and have appealed to where possible, the humble bookworm, the amateur naturalist, the contemplative taxi driver. If you, like me, are naturally drawn to achievement, collect examples of ordinary thinkers—human beings whose splendor is known only to a few, their family, their neighbors, their coworkers. Settle back in awe from time to time, as I do, in thinking about the vast treasury of thought and experience that will never be available to us.

Let us remind ourselves of the broad scope of human enterprise as well as the depths available to anyone with a bit of time to think. Let us give free play to the human intellect and the human imagination, in an attempt to ground all that is in our hearts in what matters most.--Zena Hitz (2020) Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, 202-203

Lost in Thought is that rare book that is manifestly better, more interesting and more compelling, than the essays (recall here; and here) that gave rise to it. It is also a polemical book, polemicizing against the contamination of the intellectual life by the vices of a "spectacle-ridden" culture. As such, it is a book that hopes to restore, even rebirth, a way of life that it is attacked not just from without (which Hitz mostly ignores), but also from within by its ersatz friends. In particular, some of the most bitter, and cogent, polemical attacks are on fellow academics, especially the "elite professors" (200) who, in an imperial context, are seduced by "prestige and status" (10),  who engage in "cruelty," (9) and who justify their wealthy lifestyles in terms of their instrumental value to society (201-202).

This polemic is situated in the interstices of a veritable gallery of intellectual (and sometimes also Catholic) saints, who are the subject of near perfectly executed vignettes. And while the book is very moralistic, the morals are preached lightly and with self-deprecating humor.  Before I engage with her polemic, it is worth noting that part of the fascination of Hitz's argumeny is that it is framed by an autobiographical conversion narrative. It is especially interesting to me because I was a (very) partial witness to a stage of her journey; we overlapped a bit, as PhD students, at The University of Chicago. But that's for another time.

The passage quoted above is from the epilogue of Hitz's book. Her contrast between the false, and fleeting goods of the spectacle-ridden culture, which always are zero-sum and so conflict ridden, and the enduring if not eternal, shareable treasures of inner life re-activates a contrast familiar from the Stoics and Augustine. I mention this not to undermine the diagnosis -- which is wholly on target --, but to caution against the thinly disguised strain of nostalgia that runs through Hitz's argument (this is why she uses the language of 'restoring' (197ff; see also p. 167)). The quest to preserve a site for human dignity and true learning is always with us, part of the human condition.

Because I agree with so much in Hitz's book, it's taken me awhile to figure out my sense of unease with it. This post is an attempt to clarify this unease. And I want to note two features of her account that trouble me. First, Hitz is no friend of scholarship. I quote the relevant passage again: "[scholarship] means nothing in a world where there is no first-order reflection, no ordinary thinking about human nature or the structure and origins of the world. Higher study is pointless if literature or philosophy or mathematics or the nature of nature has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people or with paths of understanding one might follow in daily life." 

It is important to be clear on what Hitz is not doing here. She is an eloquent critic of the tendency to subordinate education to moral or political ends; she calls this the "false god" of "opionating," (193)/"opionization" that is, "the holding of a viewpoint" or  the "reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions" (p. 167). She is critical of all political and ethical programs that are tempted by this. This is false education. 

So, Hitz's attitude toward scholarship is not that it must serve some direct political or moral end. In addition, we must distinguish what Hitz calls 'learning' from scholarship. She highly values learning for its own sake because "human beings are essentially knowers, or lovers, or both" (112). But scholarship is a form of learning that somehow (we are never told how) dissociated from the original impulse. It is quite clearly a perverted form of learning.

That is, Hitz wants to resist the idea that scholarship, and excellence in scholarship, is self-justifying. It must, in some non-trivial way, be integrated into the life-world of what she calls "ordinary" human lives. This is why she is attracted to agents and representations of agents (ordinary and extraordinary) whose depth consists in part of a rich and dignified intellectual inner life, but who are engaged in what we may call, humane works (e.g. Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Augustine). And it is to Hitz's credit that what works will count as meaningful can be a wide variety of (possibly conflicting) political and social activities.

It is not entirely clear why Hitz rejects scholarship for its own sake (other than its elitism).  Perhaps her argument is consequentialist-democratic in that she treats it as ultimately selfish ("pointless if...has ultimately nothing to do with the human good of ordinary people"). Yet, we are not told why the joy of the scholars -- they seem like ordinary people, too, up close -- should not count. 

I believe her more fundamental argument is this: she thinks scholarship for its own sake gives rise to a certain disease of the mind, or a vice, that is characterized by the loss of joy in truth, or what the "ancient monks" call acedia (147). She is right to resist the common translation of 'sloth'; I prefer “a lack of care.” Acedia is distinct from the escapism that, say, Adam Smith thinks is a danger of intellectual life, but it is part of the same species as the 'torpor' which Smith thinks is the effect of the repetitive, work in extensive division of labor.  Notably, the only, authoritative mention of Aquinas in the book is on the nature of acedia (147).

Hitz does not explain why scholarship must give rise to acedia. But she clearly thinks that in so doing it generates the conditions that are conducive to "the pursuit of spectacles." (147) Perhaps, she thinks that the behavior of the elite professors, who are purportedly devoted to a life of scholarship, but glory in cruelty (etc.) is sufficient evidence for her case. But I believe this is a selection effect caused by the incentive structure of the academy, and the way our gaze is oriented toward spectacle and so misses the scholars worth emulating sometimes right in front of us.*

I do not deny that scholars recognize the danger of acedia. Second, our tendency to indulge in esoteric, competitive games and puzzles, are part of our response to it. Let me give a historical example. In the early modern period, the republic of letters had a tradition in which major mathematical and scientific breakthroughs were both announced, and partially hinted at, through anagrams and other puzzles. So, for example, when Galileo saw something unusual nearby Saturn in 1610, he sent out letters with an anagram (here's a fun introduction to the story).

What Hitz ignores is that the otherwise lonely scholarly life is itself organized around competitive emulation in which credit is apportioned in virtue of achievement and excellence. And this competition is practiced and structured in a lot of ways. Hitz mistakenly assimilates this economy to the better known spectacle culture. That is no surprise, because the credit economy of the republic of letters is embedded, perhaps always dangerously so, in a wider institutional economy which is organized along the production and maintenance of prestige hierarchies (which, in turn, are a feature of, and support, our olicharchic culture). This wider institutional economy gives rise to spectacle ridden culture Hitz decries. 

But competitive emulation among equals is the mechanism by which acedia is held at bay. Hitz's distaste for competitive emulation is clear throughout the book not just because she can't find anything to admire in (say) sporting excellence (all the references to sport or negative). But it is exemplified by her analysis of a comment by 'Lenù" (a character in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels--which receive an extended treatment). Lenù, who has just published her own novel and sees it in the bookstore, is quoted as follows:

But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts, which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity? (158; emphasis in Hitz.)

The emphasis is in Hitz, but not in Ferrante's original. And I agree with Hitz that what she emphasizes is very important in the passage. But the effect is that Hitz largely effaces the existence and significance of competitive emulation ("which no one would ever do better than me, not even Lila if she had the opportunity") Yes, Hitz acknowledges the significance and existence of competition on the next page (159), but she can't find a good place for it in her analysis. In fact, in general Hitz qualifies competition with negative adjectives ('brutal,' 'grinding,' ''cutthroat,' etc.) and analyzes it in terms of examples in which it degenerates into harm and spectacle.

So, despite her fondness of exemplars, this is why 'emulate/emulation' are near absent in her vocabulary; the exception proves the rule (viz "should we emulate the pure uselessness of Aristophanes’ Socrates, choosing intellectual projects that will be certain to provide no one with any good whatsoever? (p. 188)--the answer is clearly no. This echoes a nuanced analysis of the Clouds earlier in the book worth re-reading.)

There is no denying that competitive emulation risks the dangers of the spectacle. But even then it can be (although need not) also excellence in action. And sometimes it is both at once (poetry competitions/slams and wimbledon finals, etc.). This hybridity, and the danger of degeneration repels a certain kind of extreme purist. Of course, a lot of competitive emulation is incapable of ever becoming a spectacle because it holds no interest to those unwilling to try to understand it. 

That is to say, I admire Hitz's desire to promote "forms of outreach that respect the role of a free intellect in a good human life." This is our common ground. But while I am happy to agree with her criticism of universities; I do not share her criticism of scholarship even where it is often too complacent about the conditions that give rise to it. True scholarship owes nothing to anybody; its allegiance is to truth and to the standards of excellence (including beauty) that constitute it.