In my late teens, I had a pointless argument with one of my friends, while sitting in a school minibus on a daytrip to learn about the geomorphology of the Surrey Hills. Who, we debated, was the more important American singer-songwriter: Bob Dylan or Billy Joel? Dylan, said I, because his lyrics are more meaningful. Joel, said my friend, because he has sold more records. That only goes to show, I said, that Joel appeals to a more popular audience, not that his songs are more important. It goes to show, my friend said, that his songs are important to a greater number of people. No, I insisted, for those people his songs are enjoyed along with many other songs by other artists, whereas for Dylan’s fans his songs matter more than anyone else’s ever will. No, he replied …
Continue reading “Special”Stasis
This week, I have been thinking about Dante Alighieri, who died seven hundred years ago in September 1321, after contracting malaria while travelling from Venice back to Ravenna, where he lived in exile. In 1300, he had been caught up in one of those violent Florentine factional conflicts that erupted periodically, a fate that was to befall Niccolò Machiavelli two hundred years later. In Dante’s case the White Guelph party, of which he was a member, were thrown out of power by the Black Guelph party, working in collusion with the King of France’s brother. Dante was travelling back from Rome, after an unsuccessful diplomatic mission to the Pope, when he heard the news of his banishment, and he never again set foot in the city of his birth. In Canto XVII of Paradiso, written fifteen years later, he makes this prophesy to his younger self: Thou shalt by sharp experience be aware / how salt the bread of strangers is, how hard / the up and down of someone else’s stair.
Continue reading “Stasis”Habitual
As a child, I was encouraged to cultivate good habits and discouraged from acquiring bad ones. An example of a good habit might have been brushing my teeth each night before I went to bed; an example of a bad habit might have been eating too much sugary food. Another good habit was taking regular exercise; another bad habit was smoking cigarettes. From a child’s perspective, good habits always needed to be cultivated – that is, they needed regular work and attention – because they were not things that one would have done instinctively. Given the choice, plenty of sugar and no toothpaste would seem far more enjoyable. Likewise, the appeal of bad habits called for an effort of resistance, since they held out the promise of immediate gratification, whatever worries one might have about long-term harms. I learned that nurturing the right habits is hard work, requiring us to swim against the flow of pure contentment, against our natural predilection for easy pleasures.
As an adult, I have come to regard this approach as too simplistic. For sure, it matters that we make good choices about daily health and hygiene, but it matters more that our habits – both of behaviour and thought – are truly ours, that is, that they are chosen by us rather than adopted unreflectively. Habitual ways of thinking and acting are bad for us not just when they lead us into foolish or unhealthy actions, but also when they are acquired without thoughtful consent. Just as the smoke from someone else’s cigarette can damage our lungs, so too the passive acquisition of habits can damage our character.
Continue reading “Habitual”Migrative
At the start of this year, my aunt died. A couple of months previously she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday. I did not know her well because she lived most of her life in the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan. I first met her in my mid-teens when she returned to the Britain for a visit, her first trip back in thirty years. In her seventies and eighties, she returned a few times to see old friends and to visit her sister, who is my mother. I remember her sense of humour, for example, asking advice of my daughter, then in her early teens, on whether she should get a navel-piercing or a tattoo to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. She told us some entertaining stories about her escapades in London in the 1930s. It turns out that young women in her day used similar tricks to charm their way into bars and get drinks bought for them when underage as they do nowadays. In the early 1940s she met, fell in love with, and married a Canadian soldier, who was later injured fighting in Italy. At the end of the war, she emigrated from her home in South London to Canada, disembarking the boat at Halifax and moving to Rouleau and later Moose Jaw, where she spent most of her life, and finally, five years ago, to a retirement home in Medicine Hat.
Last week, as I was walking along the main road that runs south from Borough Market, I saw a blue plaque fixed to the wall, memorialising the birthplace of John Harvard. Like my aunt, he travelled from Southwark to North America, although he went three hundred years before her, and not as a war-bride but as a minister of religion. Unlike my aunt, he died young, aged thirty-one and is mostly remembered now because in his will he left some books and a few pounds to establish a small college in Massachusetts.
Continue reading “Migrative”Doing philosophy down in the docks
According to Alfred North Whitehead, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
When I was a student, I thought this to be a harsh verdict on Aristotle and every other major philosopher who came after him, as if precedence in time implied precedence in rank. I also found it to be an unintentional but nevertheless amusing parody of many philosophy books and papers that I read, in which the amount of space devoted to footnotes or endnotes appeared almost equal to that allocated to the main text. Some philosophers seemed content to be the authors of series of footnotes. Later, I came across the sentence which immediately follows that quoted above, where Whitehead continues, “I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them”. Now the remark made more sense: it is the richness and variety of Plato’s philosophical interests which impresses, more than his proposed solutions to the many puzzles that he, through the voice of Socrates, draws our attention to.
Continue reading “Doing philosophy down in the docks”