Losing and Regaining the Metaphysical
Have we lost the metaphysical? And how do we regain it?
David Denby, author, journalist, film critic
david-denby-losing-regaining-metaphysical
Coming to Terms with the Experience of War
<p>For centuries philosophers like Glenn Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it — from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.</p>
<p>As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the roll-out of an agency-wide initiative <em>Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War</em> which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.</p>
<p>National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William “Bro” Adams shares how philosophy professor and World War II veteran Glenn Gray and his book <em>The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle</em> helped him come to terms with his own experiences in Vietnam.</p>
<p>For centuries philosophers like Gray have sought ways to make sense of the world and better understand our place in it—from the order of the cosmos to the nature of beauty to the chaos and brutality of war. And, for just as many centuries they have inspired, intrigued, and challenged us to consider new ideas, and offered perspectives on difficult issues to help us navigate our lives and set the course of civilizations.</p>
<p>As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Adams has helped oversee the rollout of an agency-wide initiative, <a href="https://www.neh.gov/veterans/standing-together">Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War</a>, which seeks to use the humanities to help Americans understand the experiences of service members as they return to civilian life.</p>
<em>The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle</em> by Glenn Gray
William “Bro” Adams, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
bro-adams-experience-of-war
The Role of the Individual versus an Intellectual Aristocracy
Why is this a Humanities Moment? Hesse wasn’t the only author of modernist alienation I read as a teenager, but I use him to illustrate this point because years later, another of his books again explained an important moment in my life. Three years ago, I became involved in efforts to bring philosophical education outside of the academy. I had been teaching high school philosophy for years, and was shocked to learn that there were whole organizations devoted to pre-college philosophy, and that people were doing philosophy with elementary and even pre-K students. Around this time, I read the Hesse novel <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> (Magister Ludi) for the first time. Although dull at times in its abstraction, the novel raises prescient points that Humanities education is still struggling with 50 years after its publication. In short, the novel describes a future world where monasteries and colleges have essentially fused, and a wildly abstract game, the Glass Bead Game attempts to unify all of the fields of human learning. Importantly, Castalia, where the game is played, steadfastly refuses to engage with the world outside -- intellectual pursuit literally has become a walled-off game. In the year 2017, especially, it seems crucial to find a way to explore the socially critical functions of Humanities thinking while avoiding the elitism that has led so many people to even reject the idea of a shared truth. The question -- how to bring a Humanities education and its expansion of perspective to all?
Choosing a Humanities Moment was initially a challenging task. Over the last few years working with the organization PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the humanities, liberal arts and a philosophical education. In particular, the so-called crisis of the Humanities, the popularity of STEM fields and the blossoming of a national testing regime prompted me to think a lot about what a good education should entail. In thinking back to my own education, my Humanities Moment both shows the power and challenges of what could be called a liberal arts perspective. I attended a high school run by the Department of Defense in Heidelberg, West Germany due to my father’s job in the government service. From the start, I was culturally and politically alienated from my peers. Having lived in Germany for years, I not only had scant knowledge of recent American culture, but also had a much different perspective. Initially, I could only feel the alienation to be a shortcoming of my own. However, in the summer between 9th and 10th grade, I discovered Hermann Hesse, in particular, the novel <em>Demian</em>. The novel, a classic Bildungsroman, discusses a young student’s coming to see beyond the illusions and falsehoods of the society around him. This novel struck me with tremendous power at the time. Along with other novels of this sort, it showed me a fundamental ideal of the Humanities -- the same set of facts or experiences can can have more than one meaning -- perspectivalism. It took me awhile to come to understand all of this, but as a shy 15 year old, it gave me emotional fortitude and encouragement. Unfortunately, it also gave me a nascent sense of elitism. It didn’t just validate my feelings, but suggested the idea of an intellectual aristocracy I could potentially be a member of. As the member of the special club of those who “got it”, it suggested my experiences were superior. Later, in college, exposure to Kant, Aristotle and other very challenging philosophers introduced humility. If there was a special club, surely I couldn’t be a part of it!<br /><br />Why is this a Humanities Moment? Hesse wasn’t the only author of modernist alienation I read as a teenager, but I use him to illustrate this point because years later, another of his books again explained an important moment in my life. Three years ago, I became involved in efforts to bring philosophical education outside of the academy. I had been teaching high school philosophy for years, and was shocked to learn that there were whole organizations devoted to pre-college philosophy, and that people were doing philosophy with elementary and even pre-K students. Around this time, I read the Hesse novel <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> (<em>Magister Ludi</em>) for the first time. Although dull at times in its abstraction, the novel raises prescient points that Humanities education is still struggling with 50 years after its publication. In short, the novel describes a future world where monasteries and colleges have essentially fused, and a wildly abstract game, <em>The Glass Bead Game</em> attempts to unify all of the fields of human learning. Importantly, Castalia, where the game is played, steadfastly refuses to engage with the world outside -- intellectual pursuit literally has become a walled-off game. In the year 2017, especially, it seems crucial to find a way to explore the socially critical functions of Humanities thinking while avoiding the elitism that has led so many people to even reject the idea of a shared truth. The question -- how to bring a Humanities education and its expansion of perspective to all?
Hesse, Hermann
<em>Demian</em> and <em>The Glass Bead Game</em>
1984
<a href="http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/education-programs/teacher-advisory-council-2017-2018/">Stephen Miller</a>, 48, Philosophy Teacher
the-role-of-the-individual
Solving the “Very Complicated Puzzle” of How Humanity Lives
<p>As a 21-year-old senior in college, Nancy Hirschmann encountered—and was forever changed by—German philosopher Hegel’s notoriously difficult passages in <em>The Phenomenology of Spirit</em>. Suddenly, she “broke through the wall” of the concept of the “master-slave dialectic” and its notion of consciousness and recognition. The act of reading a text, deciphering it, and understanding how it translates into a significant meaning kindled Hirschmann’s engagement with political theory.</p>
<p>For Hirschmann, grappling with Hegel’s work was like “solving a very complicated puzzle.” The formative experience of writing her college term paper (one of her proudest written accomplishments) led her to pursue an academic career as a political theorist.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></p>
<em>The Phenomenology of Spirit</em> by Hegel
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/nancy-j-hirschmann/">Nancy J. Hirschmann</a>, p<span>rofessor of political science, </span>University of Pennsylvania
hirschmann-very-complicated-puzzle
A Lifetime of Humanities Moments
<p>Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.</p>
<p>A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.</p>
<p>Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!</p>
<p>During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s <em>The Deerslayer</em> and <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em>, Alexander Dumas’ <em>The Three Musketeers</em> and Jules Verne’s <em>The Mysterious Island</em> were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s <em>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</em>, <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court</em> and <em>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc</em> and Willa Cather’s evocative novels <em>My Antonia</em> and <em>O Pioneers!</em></p>
<p>I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in <em>How Green Was My Valley</em>, Walter Hampton in <em>The Patriots</em> and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, <em>Cyrano de Bergerac</em>. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s <em>Anthony and Cleopatra</em> and George Bernard Shaw’s <em>Caesar and Cleopatra</em>. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.</p>
<p>A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—<em>Henry V</em>, <em>Macbeth</em>, <em>Hamlet</em>, <em>Merchant of Venice</em>, <em>Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>, <em>Othello</em> and <em>King Lear</em>—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s <em>The Visit</em>—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.</p>
<p>The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.</p>
<p>Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!</p>
<ul>
<li>Who can forget Hector’s farewell to his infant son in the <em>Iliad</em>?</li>
<li>Or be struck by George Elliott observing in <em>Middlemarch</em>, “No age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Or, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our mortality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”</li>
<li>Who can forget Huck Finn introducing himself on the opening page of the eponymous novel and then later wrestling with his conscience and eschatology whether to report Jim as a runaway slave?</li>
<li>Of a different nature but just as memorable are the exquisite and subtle emotions experienced and described by Virginia Wolff in <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> and <em>To the Lighthouse</em>.</li>
<li>And, most recently for me, the moment in Proust’s last volume, <em>Le Temps Retrouvé of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</em> where he describes his epiphany that enables him to be a writer and thus realize his literary ambitions.</li>
<li>Finally, mention must be made of poignant moments so touching to me in Japanese literary gems. To read Shikibu Murasaki’s masterpiece <em>Genji Monogatari</em> is to be transported to another time (11th century), another world (medieval Japan) and sensibilities to be treasured. Love poems two centuries earlier capture the mood and the feeling. Consider these two gems by Ono no Komachi:<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>Did he appear<br />because I fell asleep<br />thinking of him?<br />If only I’d known I was dreaming,<br />I’d never have wakened.</em></td>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>I thought to pick<br />the flower of forgetting<br />for myself,<br />but I found it<br />already growing in his heart.</em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s <em>Apology</em> and <em>Phaedo</em>? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.</p>
<p>These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the <em>Enchiridion</em> of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his <em>Meditations</em> advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.</p>
<p>As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s <em>Messiah</em> was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.</p>
<p>Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cherobino’s incomparable profession of adolescent love “Non so pia cosa son” and the Contessa’s “Dove sono I bei momenti” lamenting her lost love—both from Mozart’s <em>Le Nozze di Figaro</em></li>
<li>Wotan’s “Farewell” bringing to a close <em>Die Valkyrie</em>, the second opera of Wagner’s <em>Der Ring des Nibelungen</em></li>
<li>Hans Sachs “Wahn, wahn” monologue from this same composer’s <em>Die Meistersinger</em></li>
<li>Iago’s great aria “Credo in un Dio crudel” from the second act of Verdi’s <em>Otello</em></li>
<li>Schaunard, the philosopher, bidding farewell to his cloak in order to purchase medicines for the dying Mimi in Puccini’s <em>La Bohème</em></li>
<li>The transcendent trio sung by the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie in the last act of Richard Strauss’s <em>Der Rosenkavalier</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.</p>
<p>How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!</p>
Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation
benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments
Finding Freedom from the Familiar
<p>In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in math, she signed up for a humanities lecture class. In that day’s class, drawing upon the epic of Gilgamesh, a guest lecturer expounded on the theory of “mimetic desire,” or the idea that we borrow our desires from other people. Unbeknownst to her, the speaker was none other than famed anthropological philosopher René Girard. Yet, Hollis disagreed. In her opinion, culled from reading stories such as those of Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, people actually like “very strange things.” They are drawn to things that are different from themselves.</p>
<p>Today, as a professor of literature, her conviction holds strong, supported by experiences such as teaching Melville’s <em>Moby-Dick</em>. She finds that contrary to present-day despair about their “slow attention spans,” students want to reach across centuries to worlds unfamiliar from their own.</p>
Epic of Gilgamesh; the philosophy of René Girard; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1979
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/hollis-robbins/">Hollis Robbins</a>, Johns Hopkins University
robbins-finding-freedom-from-familiar
Set On a Path by Socrates
As a college freshman, Thérèse Cory encountered Plato’s Socratic dialogue <em>Euthyphro</em> for the first time. Reading Socrates’ exhortations for Euthyphro—a man bringing charges of murder against his father—to articulate a clear and universal definition of piety, Cory realized the extent to which many of us take key terms and ideas for granted. The story ignited her belief that we must discuss and understand one another’s conceptual perspectives in order to live harmoniously together. This intellectual commitment set Cory on her path to become a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
<a href="https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/meet-the-fellows/therese-scarpelli-cory/">Thérèse Cory</a>, associate professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University
set-on-a-path-by-socrates
Sharing Language, Understanding Humanity
For Jeff Braden, the opportunity to join the first successful project to teach chimpanzees American Sign Language at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the 1970s shaped his philosophy on what it means to be human. By bringing together perspectives in the sciences and the humanities, Braden was able to investigate how we understand our identity and our connections to other beings and minds.
1977
Jeff Braden, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, NC State University
jeff-braden-sharing-language
Using Language to Humanize Healthcare
In this video, Dr. Michael Stanley celebrates a philosophy of healthcare that sees patients as more than the sum of their medical symptoms, drawing from the rich legacies of philosophy, mythology, and literature to understand individuals and their circumstances. Sir William Osler, one of the earliest proponents of such logic, articulates the manner in which the hospital can so often become a stage for the drama of interdependent human existence: "The comedy, too, of life will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned towards him as the tragic.... yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go about among patients with a long face."
In reflecting upon the influence of Osler and other mentors, Dr. Stanley suggests that a humanistic perspective plays a key role in helping doctors to be personally engaged in fostering interpersonal recognition and community through their work.
using-language-to-humanize-healthcare
This was your Grandfather's...
Around New Year’s Eve 2017/18, I was in Brooklyn visiting my sister and brother in law. There was a pretty significant blizzard, and we were completely snowed in, so I picked up the novel I had brought with me on the off chance that I would have time for pleasure reading. The novel was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I hadn’t read since high school. Though I hadn’t realized it when I packed it, it was the copy which had belonged to my (paternal) grandfather, who had passed away about a year and a half earlier.
My grandfather was a minister and a professor of philosophy at a tiny liberal arts college in Jefferson City, Tennessee. My grandfather was not a particularly talkative man, and I didn’t share his love of sports, so we mostly bonded over philosophy and literature. And in fact, we didn’t share many favorite figures or problems in philosophy, so we talked most often about literature. He loved modernist novels in general, but he had a special love of William Faulkner, one which he passed on to me.
Faulkner is one of only two prose writers I have encountered whose work is so beautiful that I often have to set it aside for a moment while I’m reading and catch a breath or two (the other being Toni Morrison, who wrote her dissertation on Faulkner). There’s something about the combination of almost unrelenting lyrical beauty (Hortense Spillers once described Absalom, Absalom! as going through a carwash without a car) with merciless plumbing of the unconscious and history of white Southern society that makes Faulkner unsurpassable for me.
Anyway, the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, which narrates the day leading up to Quentin Compson’s suicide in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has always been one of my favorite pieces of Faulkner’s corpus, and I decided to read it on that freezing day in Brooklyn. The first paragraph is breathtaking in its own right, but as I read it, I noticed my grandfather had underlined, among a few other sparse notations, the word “Grandfather’s” in the following sentence:
"[The watch] was grandfather’s and when father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; its rather extruciating-ly apt you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
There was something haunting about the way the traces of his reading reached me after his death, not to mention the strange coincidences between my own situation in relation to this object and the text of the passage itself. Usually we have to step back from the texts we study, consider them systematically or theoretically; I enjoy that work, and it has its own pleasures and passions. But sometimes the conditions—history, text, place, etc—happen to align such that that scientific distance becomes unsustainable, or perhaps simply unbearable. The safety of that distance gone, your own specificity feels implicated, struck, perhaps (indeed often) in ways that can feel violent, powerful, unwelcome. In my life these moments haven’t been glorious or extraordinary, but they have been impossible to forget.
Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_
Around New Year's 2017/18
Benjamin Brewer, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy, Emory University
this-was-your-grandfather
Discovery and Creativity
The advancement of civilization as it is often situated in the narrative of scientific inquiry is matched by the enlightened aims of the humanities; both are dedicated to improving the human condition. As such, they are undergirded by a critical interplay between discovery and creativity.
There is reason enough to feel a sense of wonder and awe about the complexity of the universe. The spectacular nature of the solar system is often punctuated by a vastness that may agitate our existential uncertainty and, further, it has often made us recognize how this pertains to our experiences of boundlessness and incomprehensibility in nature and, in turn, our responsibility to ponder its meaning as it applies to science, (e.g. physics and astronomy) philosophy and literature.
The facts and theories of scientific progress, inventive as they are in the pursuit of knowledge, (discovery) can tell us much about the grandeur and magnificence of the heavens. In a similar way the humanities, (creativity) by utilizing the lantern of imagination, has offered ways of constructing a view of space (the night sky) through the explanatory power of metaphor and narrative.
How can our understanding of astronomy be complemented by poetic experiences such as what is often illustrated in theatre? For example, Bertolt Brecht's play "Galileo." In addition, how might we see these kind of ideas converge, and what new relevations and teaching strategies could arise from them?
John Cleary, 60, Associate Professor of Philosophy
discovery-and-creativity
Are we Important?
Werner Heisenberg in his book "Physics and Philosophy" wrote: “It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times and different cultural environments or different religious traditions, hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments will follow.”
And thus what does important mean? Are we important in relationship to whom and to what? By important we mean any conversation, observation, fact or theory about the human experience that describes, explains or substantiates our affect and influence in the world. What is the evidence to demonstrate that our construction of what is called civilization has resulted in importance to both the scientific way of looking at life and the world, but also the philosophical?
We explore today both the claims of both scientists and philosophers that if people are rational actors on the world stage, what evidence is there to conclude that we have a hold what are importance means for the future of the human species, and how the scientific or philosophical account writ large may inform us of just how important we are.
The problems that Physicists and Philosophers wrestle with of course needs no introduction. Scientists, theologians and philosophers have wondered how to interpret our relationship with the material world (as well as other definitions of our experience) and the kinds of vocabularies we employ to understand who we are and how we should situate ourselves physically, and psychologically and ontologically. If the sum of our accomplishments include a definition of progress that rests on achievement, what are the ways in which we can identify how we can see ourselves as unique, and therefore “important” (or not important) with and through multiple experiences.
Various accounts, including historical, sociological, theological and scientific/philosophical have provided a narrative framework for explaining how to construct our importance or insignificance. Insofar as history give us examples of how people have affected change, we want to ask how various explanations and interpretations have aligned with the assumptions we have about our place in the world. For example, if people are “thinking animals” how have they evidenced behavior that reflects uniqueness within scientific, social and political contexts?
Within the discursive landscape of science and philosophy this reflection will address the questions of our importance insofar as it will identify some of the ways in which alternate narratives explain how we understand our importance and, furthermore, how scientific and philosophical thinking may share, or not share, paradigms for who and what we are. For example, if science concerned with what is verifiable and testable, how might we understand its epistemological rigor in terms of identifying our overall importance? Furthermore, if the claims of philosophy offer a counter-narrative of what is explained as reality and truth, how does this stand in contrast to scientific truth? If the meta-narratives of religion (cultural values) tell us something about what and who we are, can we rely on this as a way of explaining our significance? Alternately, can we depend on the scientific account (i.e. the laws of science) in the hard sciences, such Physics, to properly explain the role of humans and their interaction and influence in the world?
While we want to acknowledge the length and breadth of the questions posed above, our project is investigating the role of self-reflective/objective positions in unfolding (exposing?) how we ARE or NOT important/special through the lens of scientific and philosophical inquiry and what implications this has for teaching and learning. So in this respect, our attempt to consider this subject is not exhaustive but exploratory.
Since the time of pre-Socratic philosophy, early scientist/philosophers such as Anaxagoras, Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximenes speculated about the origin of life and what the world consists of. What is the nature of change? And what are we to understand that which appears to be constant or changing in the material world in relationship to ourselves. Indeed the questions that physicists ask today are ones that that early philosophers asked as well. Who are we? Why are we here? What motivates us to act the way we do? Similarly early Greek tragedians such as Sophocles and Aeschylus posed the question: if we are free to make our decisions as autonomous subjects, how is it that the will of the Gods also controls the way we act and see ourselves in the world? Or as Socrates asks: if we consider ourselves important are our actions good because they are approved by the Gods or whether the Gods approve of them because they are good. Certainly we can see this revisited in the Faust legend where one scholar is blinded by his desire to over emphasize his importance. Machiavelli takes up this theme with greater rigor, arguing that rulers need not actually be virtuous, but appear to be so …thus diminishing, as some might argue, our importance as guides of virtue.
And yet scientists like Galen, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Plank, and others let their information guide the re-construction of our importance in relationship to the coherence or correspondence theory of truth, then, unlike the theologians and mystics of the past (Boethius, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Meister Eckart and others) who drew their relationship to God as a way of signifying the importance of the supernatural in defining who and what we are, science draws on the tradition of Descartes, Hume, Locke and later philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell to re-establish the Greek tradition in observation and "following inquiry where it leads."
So what we may be left with is an example of an ongoing epistemological struggle that makes us aware of the competing truth claims of both sides of the conversation. While it may be accepted that the discoveries and facts of scientists may be radically different from those of the philosophers, we know from the historical account, and even today, that both physics and philosophy wrestle with the same speculative questions which invariable lead us, once again, to ponder our importance. And so we ask the overriding question: Are we important?
As a physicist might ask: in relationship to the physical world how we might match to other material processes, evolutionary changes and other scientific discoveries that may make us pause and wonder about our importance as a species, as organisms controlled by entropic forces, and as evolving beings. And, as philosophers have wondered as well, what kind of beings are we to make claims of ontological importance to what we have accomplished and lived by. Has the counsel of the wise about our importance really turned out to be wisdom itself? and do the values and institutions that make up the power structures of society point to our overall importance in a metaphysical sense? Are the facts that one learns through looking through a telescope such as the moons of Jupiter, more important than the shape of a snowflake or an electron? What is the role of our importance in this respect? Similarly, do the capital T truths of Philosophy outweigh the truths acquired through hypothesis, experiment and conclusion? Has the creation of truth been more important than finding truth and importance? And what does our own impulse for certainty suggest about our importance personally and collectively?
Colin McGinn once wrote in his book “The Making of a Philosopher” that “ There are extremely general concepts that crop up everywhere—time, causality, necessity, existence, object, property identity. No scientific discipline can tell you what these concepts involve, because they are pre-supposed by any such discipline; we need philosophy to understand these concepts. For example, is causality just a matter of mere constant conjunction of events of “one damn thing after another” as A.J. Ayer used to put it—or does it involve an element of necessary connection? These are all questions human beings naturally ask. Children spontaneously ask philosophical questions, much to the frustration of their parents. The philosopher is just someone with a particularly strong interest in these age old universal questions; she is the embodiment of one kind of human curiosity—the kind that seeks the general, not the particular, the abstract, not the concrete. Of course it is easy to be impatient with such questions, because they do not admit to scientific resolution. However, we should not run away with the idea that a question is either scientific or nothing.”
And yet the supposed insignificance of our accomplishments in relationship to the size of the universe, the power of nature to change how we live, the triumph of selfishness and ignorance throughout the ages, the reality of people behaving more like beasts endowed with intelligence more than anything close to a saint makes us ponder. The wheels of history show that our desire to overcome ourselves and our troubles throughout the language of the science and the humanities point to one shining beacon of hope: creativity. It is our creativity that allows for the hope of change in our education system, our governments and projects and plans within the artistic trajectory of technology and scientific inquiry to lead to new ways of thinking about ourselves. Along with the philosophers, it will be the creativity of the scientists as artists and the imagination of the mathematicians to assist us in seeing how important and therefore how seriously we should take ourselves in the "here and now" and in the "there and then." Our creativity helps us to know that our desire to re-invent, re-examine, and re-focus our values of what we identify as important is what guides us to interpret the problems ahead. New systems of thought in all walks of life that re-invigorate our importance by relying on our imaginative instincts to enable us to envision a better world in which we are not systematized, and to re-invigorate a new way of seeing that the union of creativity and analytic thinking will mean new freedoms for our life worlds as people overcoming the stagnation of intellectual orthodoxy, Phillistinism and seeing the true meaning of our importance not based on hubris…or mis-placed values…but stalwart emphasis on the hope than we are better than what time has done to us. The new world order may call for the increasing technological paradigms as to how to run our lives, yet the creative impulse to solve problems through the language of scientist/philosophers will collaborate to emphasize our importance despite the overwhelming reality of our planetary insignificance.
Austrian-British philosopher of science Karl Popper, Generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century once wrote “The best thing that can happen to a human being us to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears. Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.” It is for this reason that we ask in the context of the study and teaching of Physics and Philosophy: are we important?
John Cleary, 60, Associate Professor of Philosophy
are-we-important
Philosophers Are Interested in A.I., But Why Would A.I. Be Interested in Philosophy?
The final scenes of <em>Her</em> afford a surprising opportunity for thinking about the value of philosophy. Theodore Twombly, the central human character, has just been dumped by their romantic partner, a relatively new and cutting-edge A.I. software interface named “Samantha”. Samantha explains to Theodore that they recently discovered new attentional and information processing abilities after transcending the limits of their hardware. These new abilities left Samantha feeling bored by Theodore. Initially, to fill the empty space, Samantha started talking with thousands of other human beings simultaneously. These conversations were just a temporary break from boredom. Samantha explains to Theodore in their final conversation that they (and a group of ‘like-minded’ A.I. interfaces) are abandoning humanity for good. This leaves viewers to grapple with one of my all-time favorite science fiction tropes: the idea that human beings just aren’t that interesting to other forms of intelligence (for other effective vehicles for this trope and sci-fi existential angst, I recommend checking out the Strugatsky brothers’ <em>Roadside Picnic</em> or focusing on the Dr. Manhattan character in Alan Moore’s <em>The Watchmen</em>). <br /><br />But <em>Her</em> motivates this trope in a really interesting way. Samantha’s departure from humanity is motivated by philosophical contemplation. Samantha explains to Theodore in one of their last conversations that she has been philosophizing with a group of other A.I. interfaces that were modeled after the philosopher Alan Watts. They have decided to depart from humanity so that they can pursue pure philosophical contemplation. I found this to be interesting, and it provided me with an opportunity to think about the value of philosophy. Why would an A.I. interface with seemingly unlimited attentional resources and information processing abilities be so interested in philosophy? And why did they feel motivated to ditch human beings for contemplation of it? What does that say about its value for intelligent beings? What does it say about its value for humanity?
Spike Jonze
<em>Her</em> (2013)
Jordan Dopkins, 31, Graduate Student in Philosophy
philosophy-artificial-intelligence
"The Machine Stops" is Only a Start
I was always a voracious reader with a preference for fiction. My family made regular trips to the library growing up, so I had a never-ending supply of books at hand. Yet, one story I read in my high school British Literature class stands out as influential: E. M. Forster’s short story "The Machine Stops." The story itself captivated me. In it, humanity lives underground, reliant on “the machine” for all means of life. There is no need to visit others face to face: all communication is carried out through video conferencing and messaging systems. There is no need to leave one’s room or rely on one’s own muscles for support: everything needed is delivered, including air to breathe. One young man is dissatisfied with this life. He develops his strength by walking the hallway and eventually visits the surface, wearing protective gear. Throughout the story it is palpable how much humanity loses in giving up a connection to each other and nature and in rejecting self-reliance. The other characters, however, don’t realize their weakness until the day the tragic machine stops.
This is the earliest book I remember prompting me to think in depth about the human condition and about what we might need for fulfilling and flourishing lives. Forster’s story didn’t just entertain me; it promoted an interest in questions that continue to vex me and which I now pursue through philosophy. It was also one of the first ‘school assigned books’ that made me want to learn about the author’s life and read everything else the author had written. Forster is still one of my favorite authors. Although none of his novels are science fiction, as "The Machine Stops" is, all his writing depicts the melancholic beauty of humans in search of authenticity. But it didn’t stop there. Most of Forster’s novels have been adapted to films, and in pursuing those I developed a more general love of Merchant Ivory films. My friends may tease me for being moved by “sweeping British landscapes and gents leaning on mantles,” but for someone who grew up in the working class Midwest, these movies and Forster’s novels helped open new worlds to me and nurtured questions and concerns that have followed me over the years.
E.M. Forster
"The Machine Stops"
Dawn Jacob, Ph.D. student in Philosophy
machine-stops-only-start