All aboard
The Spring '24 CoPhilosophy Xpress will (finally) depart the station soon.
Here's a nice Zoom-facilitated conversation with Socrates Express author Eric Weiner. [Thanks to my collaborator Ed for sharing]. We'll be reading and discussing his latest book’s early chapters next week in CoPhi (my name for Intro to Philosophy, borrowed— like so much— from William James)… if we can dodge the latest foreboding forecast.
I've enjoyed Weiner's previous books, in particular his happiness travelogue The Geography of Bliss (2008). We read it in an early iteration of Philosophy of Happiness, encountering a message reiterated last semester: “Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.” Maybe "the greatest source of happiness is other people" (Sartre's "hell" and the wrong other people notwithstanding).
It’s obviously false, by the way, to say that life affords “no exit.” That’s a theme we’ll address later in the semester with Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard, John Kaag’s Sick Souls, Healthy Minds and his anthology of WJ’s work Be Not Afraid of Life, and Robert Richardson’s Three Roads Back…
In Socrates Express's Introduction, Weiner mentions The Story of Philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant (1926). That was the first philosophy book I recall reading. Like Weiner's, my curiosity was piqued, and sustained even in the face of my Mizzou undergrad prof Alexander von Schoenborn’s haughty scorn for The Story (he who would later compare my philosophy papers to T.S. Eliot’s poems. And I still don’t know what he meant. But I do love that line in Four Quartets about the end of all our exploring…)
And here I am today, anticipating another semester's opportunity to transmit the philosophy virus to a fresh crop of student subjects. Herr Doktor Professor vS’s generous prognostication that the profession would make a place for me turns out to have been correct, to my great gratitude. The Rheinhold, Fichte, and Heidegger he taught us didn’t quite take with me, but he inspired and motivated. Like John Lachs after him. Would I ever have met Lachs, John Compton, Michael Hodges, John Post, and the rest of my Vandy cohort without Alex’s encouragement? No, flatly. Always thank your mentors for their help up the ladder (Alex’s metaphor for Plato’s metaphor of the cave).
I remember sitting in that cinder-block office in the building formerly known as the GCB (General Classroom Building), hearing those cryptic catalyzing words of support from my mysterious and charismatic teacher back in ‘79, as if it were yesterday.
Weiner's first chapter skips ahead (past Socrates et al) to the Roman emperor/stoic Marcus Aurelius. Weiner says he and the emperor share an aversion to early-rising. But Marc's morning meditation inspires me, very much a morning person (I rarely fail to rise before dawn, when I most like to post my blog Up@dawn)...
"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."
That puts things in the right perspective, no matter how big a mess others may be making of their precious privilege. It reminds me to do better, to be a good meliorist--someone committed to doing what he can to make things better, and to be happy doing it. The emperor is thus for me a patron saint of the dawn.
And as Weiner admits, mornings set the tone for the day. For the life. Having a good morning is the best way I've found to get on with the work (at its best indistinguishable from play) of being human.
Another patron saint of morning was Henry David Thoreau, who Weiner and we will get to later. He concluded Walden:
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
So here's hoping the sun melts the snow and ice by Tuesday and we can finally get on with the dawn of our sluggish-to-start semester.
