USUPhilosophy

SCHAUMBURG, IL—In an ultimately futile act some have described as courageous and others have called a mere postponing of the inevitable, existentialist firefighter James Farber delayed three deaths Monday.

Full story from The Onion here.

I’ve been reading some old and great books in preparation for a week-long Fides et Ratio seminar at Thomas More College next week.  It has been great.  Augustine, Albert the Great, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Francis de Sales, St. Teresa of Avila, etc.  The seminar is great, and I wish more academic conferences were run this way.   15 people sit around a table.  No prepared presentations, just open discussion.  We spend a week together, and it is pretty intense (all day and into the early night each day).

Anyway, one of the readings is ‘On the Incarnation’ by St. Athanasius.  The short introduction by C.S. Lewis is worth the price of admission.  He presents a wonderful little argument for reading old and great books, and how reading them can help us avoid error.  I thought two passages were worth quoting at length, but you can read the whole introduction (and the book by Athanasius, if you want!) here.

“THERE is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

…

“None of us can fully escape this blindness [of our own contemporary assumptions], but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

So you just graduated from college with a philosophy degree.  Now what?  You’ve been living in an educational bubble that has allowed you to live the life of the mind, but now practical concerns are pulling you away from the cherished task of contemplation.

The relationship between the contemplative life and the practical life has always been vexed.  Aristotle describes the difficulty in Book X of his Nicomachean Ethics:

“But [a contemplative] life would be too high for man; for it is not in so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to our composite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exercise of the other kind of virtue. If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparison with human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us; for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”

The difficult that Aristotle finds is that our most natural desire (men by nature desire to understand) is strangely something of an unnatural desire, for fulfilling this desire seems to require that we be something that we are not – divine.  In other words, to satisfy this natural desire we must needs go beyond our composite nature.  This introduces a problem – how do I live a life that is both practical and contemplative?  At the end of the day, I think Aristotle aims at some kind of a balance here, but it is not at all clear how to work that out.  He goes on to contrast the “perfect happiness” of contemplation with the kind of practical happiness that “befits out human estate”, and seems to try to strike a balance but I don’t think ever quite manages to clearly negotiate the tension.  Instead, Aristotle leaves us at the end of his great work on the practical life with a great argument for why contemplation is the best possible (or is it impossible?) life for man.

It is tempting to believe that one can live the “life of the mind” only in the academe.  And so many liberal arts students graduate from college and think graduate school.  You can’t imagine setting aside the life of the mind for the all-too-practical life of a business person or some such thing.  But yet the prospects for a career after graduate school are exceptionally grim.  So what should you do?

Well, this article suggests that it is just wrong-headed to think that a life of the mind cannot exist outside the academe.  Is there a proper balance available out there?  For those of you out there working in the “real world”, share your experiences.  This is an issue that will face nearly all of our graduates.

The Zeno Effect is a new (to me) quantum physics effect that re-enchants the ancient Zeno Paradox.  Zeno, the greek mathematician, suggested that an arrow in flight could only be seen at a single position at each moment in time.  The lack of observable motion in the instant meant that it was not moving at all.

The fabulously brilliant computer nerd (before electronic computers), Alan Turning, demonstrated that a quantum system could be observed with sufficient frequency to freeze the evolving quantum system into a stationary state (even though it is an evolving system).  The Quantum Zeno Effect has been proposed as the method by which an advance brain can freeze-frame its state for analysis of the present moment.  Here is a section from the Wikipedia article on the Quantum Zeno Effect:

Significance to cognitive science

The quantum Zeno effect (with its own controversies related to measurement) is becoming a central concept in the exploration of controversial and unproven theories of quantum mind consciousness within the discipline of congitive science.  In his book, “Mindful Universe” (2007), Henry Stapp claims that the quantum Zeno effect is the main method by which the mind holds a superposition of the state of the brain in the attention. He advances that this phenomenon is the principal method by which the conscious will effects change, a possible solution to the mind-body dichotomy. Stapp and co-workers do not claim finality of their theory, but only:

The new framework, unlike its classic-physics-based predecessor, is erected directly upon, and is compatible with, the prevailing principles of physics.

Needless to say, such conjectures have their opponents, serving perhaps to create more furor, rather than less, for example, see Bourget. A summary of the situation is provided by Davies:

There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities.…The case for quantum biology remains one of “not proven.” There are many suggestive experiments and lines of argument indicating that some biological functions operate close to, or within, the quantum regime, but as yet no clear-cut example has been presented of non-trivial quantum effects at work in a key biological process.

While this last objection may no longer be valid, the significance of the Zeno effect in determining the rate of quantum decoherence in biological systems remains unknown.

Here is the full article:    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_effect

Think about it for a moment.

My grades are in, so I have officially changed hats from teacher to stay-at-home Dad.  (I might add that being a parent of young kids has only deepened my view about the teleological striving in human nature).  This post and video are totally unrelated to philosophy, but I think the new Toyota “swagger wagon” ads are funny takes on those of us who find ourselves tooling around town in minivans (a few of the other ads are linked at the end of the video):

So look for me ‘rolling hard through the streets and the cul-de-sacs’ in my Toyota minivan this summer with my two (soon to be three) future Philosopher Queens in tow, and know that I’ll still be rocking Thomas Aquinas along with Thomas the Train.