on this day in 2003, philosopher, metaphysician, and beekeeper Richard Taylor walked out of life
Taylor served on a submarine in WWII and was so taken by Schopenhauer’s views on melancholy that he eventually pursued the oath of philosophy himself. Taylor argued, pace the determinists who reject personal agency as an illusion, that in some cases, no confluence of antecedent conditions is sufficient to cause our subsequent action. In other words, we are, indeed, what we take ourselves to be: namely, beings who sometimes act with free agency. But Taylor held that it was not necessary to reject general determinism for this to be true and that the essence of free will rather consisted in action performed out of rational deliberation.
This compatibilist position may sound like, in a sense, pulling a rabbit of free will out of the hat of a deterministic universe, but this is inevitable as long as the 3rd person, physicalist ontology is assumed as a prior and the conclusion intends to remain faithful to data of our immediate experience. To avoid the acrobats entailed in trying to salvage the validity of self-evident experiences from a cosmological paradigm that is inimical to them, it would, obviously, be necessary to discard or substantially amend the former to the point that the operative paradigm harmonized with our existential experience. But until that time, Taylor’s solution is as good as any.
David Foster Wallace drew on Taylor's 1962 essay "Fatalism” to write his undergraduate thesis on fatalism in American literature.
Taylor was internationally renowned as a beekeeper. He kept up to 300 hives at a time and set forth his apiculture techniques in the form of several books, including The Comb Honey Book and The Joys of Beekeeping.
“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
poet and literary critic Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born on this day, 1885
Ernest Hemingway observed, in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."
Pound was a seminal figure in the development of Imagism, a literary movement stressing precision and economy of language. While in London, working as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as Eliot, Hemingway, and Joyce. He was credited for the 1914 serialization (ie the publication in regular installments) of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.
“The temple is holy because it is not for sale”
Pound blamed the bloodbath of WWI on finance capitalism and this led him to expatriate to Italy where he lent his voice in support Mussolini’s fascist regime, arguing that Anglo-American war profiteering was the primary cause of international conflict.
“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Joseph Campbell walked out of life on this day, 1987
Campbell was a mythologist and scholar of comparative religion credited for developing the theory of the “monomyth” and “hero’s journey” as an archetypal structure underlying myths from countless cultures and time periods, a view which he advanced in his best-known work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). In essence, the theory sprang from Campbell’s belief, influenced by Jung, that humankind enjoyed a psychic, though unconscious, unity.
Campbell argued that myths serve four distinct though related functions:
Mystical/Metaphysical
kindling in the individual a sense of participation in the 'mystery of being'
"Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion.... The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is."
Cosmological
explaining the form of the universe
myths render coherent and intelligible the physical phenomena that surrounded and affected their lives, like the movement of planets and the change of seasons.
Sociological
myths that legitimize and ground the existing social order in prehistory
Ancient societies had to maintain social order if they were to survive at all and tying them to a mythic history served a powerful legitimizing function it on. René Girard later corroborated Campbell’s views on this through his stipulated definition of myth as “a story that serves to conceal the scapegoat mechanism.” Girard contrasted myth to revelation, in which the scapegoat mechanism was laid bare for all to see.
Pedagogical/Psychological/Hodological
the myth as a guide through stages of life
Myth allows for the individual to identify moments in the passage of his own life with archetypal the themes.
Campbell on “follow your bliss”:
“Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked.
…
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the categories of being and non-being. Those are categories of thought. I mean it's as simple as that. So it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it's doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being. If it isn't, well, it's a lie. So half the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts. Those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts. And so, they're lies. Those are the atheists.”
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.
today is the birthday of John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826).
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
Adams was a politician, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding Father who served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801.
Adams was a Federalist and often clashed with Franklin and Jefferson over diplomatic relations with France, Adams preferring to foster closer ties with England.
Adams never owned a slave and declined on principle to use slave labor, saying,
I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in such abhorrence, that I have never owned a negro or any other slave, though I have lived for many years in times, when the practice was not disgraceful, when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character, and when it has cost me thousands of dollars for the labor and subsistence of free men, which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes at times when they were very cheap.
People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity
Human nature with all its infirmities and depravation is still capable of great things. It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to a excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. . . . But their bodies must be hardened, as well as their souls exalted. Without strength and activity and vigor of body, the brightest mental excellencies will be eclipsed and obscured.
excerpted from a letter to his wife, Abigail.
Adams retired to his farm in Quincy after serving his presidency, from where he remained on frequent correspondence with his successor and former rival, Thomas Jefferson. Here on July 4, 1826, he whispered his last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier.