Posted in from the dark room, from the reading room, philosophy, photography, science on October 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »
From Brian Broom’s Meaning-full Disease –
Goethe showed science a new approach…..of seeing the whole world symbolised in a flower, an animal, a pebble, the human eye, the sun; and to construct the world from
this flower
this pebble
that is to create anew and to investigate things not by analysing, but by placing them in the context of the whole.
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on October 1, 2007| 4 Comments »
Robert C Solomon writes a lot about love in his book “The Joy of Philosophy“. In particular he argues that love is a virtue.
I am going…to defend what we now call romantic love, erotic love, as a virtue – indeed as an exemplary virtue. I want to defend what one might call enthusiasm as a virtue, the enthusiasm born of love’s attachments being the most obvious example.
and, later
The passionate attachment of one person for another is a virtue.
To love another, and to be enlivened by that love, to live a better, richer life because of that love, for love of another to be the source, the fountainhead of an enthusiastic, passionate engagement with life…….that’s the challenge. I don’t think we talk enough about this kind of love these days. In Professor Solomon’s terms we tend to think about love rather more “thinly”……we reduce it to something less than it can be.
As he says, love creates love –
Love tends to build on itself, to amplify with time, to find – through love – even more reasons to love.
Whilst it might be true that an unexamined life is not worth living, it’s even more true that a loveless life doesn’t feel worth living.
Love (or loving) itself is the virtue, a virtue so important that rationality pales in significance.
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on September 30, 2007| 18 Comments »
Some books you can gobble down quickly like fast food, but some just need to be sipped and savoured. I’ve been carrying around and reading The Joy of Philosophy by Robert C Solomon (ISBN-13 978-0-19-516540-1) for the last two or three weeks. Got some strange looks from people on the train who could only see the first part of the title…….”The Joy Of” (bet they never worked out the next word was “Philosophy”!).
I really enjoyed this book. You know how sometimes you read a book and it seems to open doors for you? Suddenly you see or hear something differently and the world and the way you experience it has changed forever. I played with an idea for a story once. I called it “Quantum Days” because I wanted to explore the phenomenon, that we all experience, of those days when something changes and its so dramatic, or so significant, that the world is changed for us so completely that we feel now we’ve moved to a new level (like electrons jumping from one level to another in the atom – quantum jumps). Well I will get round to writing the rest of that story one day. Quantum Days can come about from reading something though. Occasionally there’ll be an “aha!” moment and your world will be changed. This is one of those books for me.
The central thesis of the book is contained in it’s subtitle on the front page – “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life”. Throughout the book Professor Solomon uses a very interesting language device – the juxtaposition of “thin” and “thick”. For him, “thin-ness” of thinking is limited, reduced, somewhat sterile thinking. In particular it’s that form of rational thinking which deliberately attempts to be dispassionate.
my revolt against logical “thinness” is very much a celebration of the passions in philosophy and the richness they provide.
It’s amazing how in medicine as well as in philosophy (and I suspect in science too) the passions, or emotions, are frowned upon. There’s a belief around that “the truth” can only be discovered by the dispassionate, the disengaged, the distant, but Robert Solomon argues strongly against that. In fact he argues for the central importance of a passionate life. He doesn’t use the language of “subjective” versus “objective” but that debate fits well with his. I’ve always been amazed that anyone can think the subjective can be left out of health care (or even “controlled for”). The subjective self (an at least partially socially constructed self) can never be taken out of our experience. It’s just impossible to have an experience which isn’t coloured by, framed by, and reacted to by, the self. That’s why who the doctor is, is important in a consultation. Yet I’ve never seen a single research study in medicine which identifies and/or describes the therapists who are actually entering into the encounters with the patients. Sorry, I digress……..but that’s just one of the many trains of thought this book set off and running for me.
He questions the traditional notion in philosophy that a dispassionate thinking about life can lead to a “good” life
A virtuous life might be something more than becoming the congenial neighbour, respected citizen, responsible colleague, and affective zombie that many philosophers and contemporary moral pundits urge us to be.
Oh yes! I love that phrase “affective zombie”! Here’s more….
I do want to raise the question of whether mere proper living, obedience to the law, utilitarian ‘rational choice’ calculations, respect for others’ rights and for contracts, and a bit of self-righteousness is all there is to a good life.
What he is arguing for is a life of passion, an emotional life. What does he mean by emotions though? How does he understand emotion? Well, he definitely does not think we can fully understand emotions by studying brain chemistry, nor by psychoanalysis, or, I suspect, the research conducted into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Why not? Because he proposes (and this is one of his radical ideas for me) that we best understand emotions by not focussing on individuals but on relationships, behaviours, actions and society.
….an emotion is not a disposition: it is, first of all, an experience and a way of being-in-the-world
and, later,
it is the context and the social environment that make most emotions intelligible
and
an emotion is not so much an element or item “in” experience as it is the ordering of experience
I could go on……I’ve written down many quotes from this book. What is exciting for me about this thought is that it embeds the experience of emotions so firmly, so inextricably into the contexts of the world in which we live and it gives them a central role in our attempt to make sense of our lives and to act rationally and deliberately in life.
He writes a lot about love but I’ll explore that in a separate post. Let me finish this one with two more quotes from this stimulating book.
.
.
.
Emotions are strategies
.
.
.
I’m giving that space so you don’t miss it. Think about this. Are emotions the ways in which we effect change and make an impact on the world? Are emotions actually actions? What does happiness do? What does love do? Anger? Grief? This is a potentially liberating but also empowering perspective.
We too often opt for victimisation or cynicism, the products of our overactive faculty for blame and our extravagant sense of entitlement, or we take refuse in pessimism. But there are better ways to think about life…..
It’s the heroes not zombies argument. Instead of thinking that emotions just happen to us and that our experiences just happen to us, this perspective gives us the opportunity for a much more active and creative engagement in life.
Posted in life, philosophy, science on September 30, 2007| 13 Comments »
I’ve always had a bit of a passion for science. But what does that mean? What is science? There’s a lot of talk these days about anti-science, as if it were some kind of political party or team to be opposed, or about bad science, which, strangely, tends not to be a discussion about either the philosophy of science or about more or less effective methodologies. In fact, people do tend to apply labels to the experiences of life and those labels, unfortunately, more often stop thought than promote understanding.
So, let me say what I mean when I use the word science. My understanding of what science is owes a lot to the philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. He said there were three ways to think about experience – science, philosophy and art. You can read more about that here. He said science was thinking about function. That makes a lot of sense to me. A scientific approach to a phenomenon is one of curiosity, one of wonder; it’s driven by a hunger to understand. Specifically, it’s about a hunger to understand how something works – whether that be the brain, evolution, or the weather. Indeed it’s about a way of trying to make sense of some aspect of the world. There are two important consequences to the Deleuzean definition for me – one is that science is only one way of thinking about the world, and the other is that it is the main way to think about how something works.
But there are other factors to consider when thinking about science. Popper’s famous principle of “falsification” really hit the mark too. The scientific method is not one of proving things; it’s one of attempting to disprove things. In brief, what Popper said was that we form a hypothesis (an explanatory theory of something) and then, as scientists, we conduct experiments to try to disprove that hypothesis. The more we fail to do that, the stronger the hypothesis becomes. In other words, good science is a process of never ceasing to doubt. A good scientist never says he or she has worked everything out and there’s nothing more to be discovered here. A good scientist must be humble, open-minded, curious and never cease to wonder. When you read the writings of a scientist who claims to be the holder of The Truth, or who claims to be absolutely certain of their position, beyond doubt, you know you’ve found a scientist who’s lost the plot. Scientists aren’t gods. They are people. When they get hooked on certainty conversation with them becomes uncomfortable or even downright unpleasant. That’s not a function of science though, because a scientific approach necessitates a perspective of doubt which should humble.
There’s another quality which is often mentioned in relation to science. One definition I read, (and I confess I can’t right at this moment remember where!), was that science is the study of what can be measured. Well, I’m not entirely comfortable with that definition but I can see where it’s coming from. It’s impossible for us to lead a value-free life. Everything we think and experience and do and influenced by our values. In the scientific approach, there is a tendency to value the physical over the non-physical and that’s what tends to lead to a view that science is about what can be measured. For example we can easily measure the physical dimensions of red patch on the skin of a patient with eczema but we can’t measure their itch, and we can’t measure their emotional experience of their eczema. If we dismiss what can’t be measured we dismiss the experience of eczema (as Cassell would call it, the “illness”) and focus only on the physical changes which are measurable (Cassell again – the “disease”)
So, let me say again. I’m passionate about science. Why? Because I am insatiably curious! I love to explore and discover. I love to understand the world, my life and the people I meet. I know that understanding is an eternal process. It has no stopping point. It’s never finished. It has no conclusion. So, for me, science is a way of understanding life better. That said, philosophy and the arts are equally important ways of understanding the world and each will shed a very special light which the other ways of thinking won’t.
I am equally passionate about philosophy and the arts.
I titled this post “Good science” because I want to highlight a positive conception of science – insatiably curious, constantly developing, continuously humble, practised with an intention of building our knowledge and understanding.
Posted in life, personal growth, philosophy, science on August 31, 2007| 1 Comment »
A couple of posts yesterday got me thinking about this whole “gut feelings” or “intuition” thing. First off, on the Petri Project, “No guts, No glory”, discusses the work of Gerd Girenzer, who has just published “Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious”. Apparently, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” was based on Girenzer’s ideas. He’s shown that the apparently “rational” approach of making big lists of pros and cons before making a decision can lead to worse decisions than following your gut instincts. I particularly liked this quote –
One should also not overlook that in science itself, you need intuitions. All successful research scientists function, to a degree, on gut instincts. They must make leaps, whether they have all the data or not. And at a certain moment, having the data doesn’t help them, but they still must know what to do. That’s when instinct comes in.
Then on Christopher Richard’s wonderful SlowDownNow site he’s written “Creativity, the slow way where he writes about Guy Claxton’s “Hare Brain Tortoise Mind”. Apparently, Guy Claxton has coined the term the “undermind” for that mental function of slow knowing, or intuition. Christopher is so right when he says –
I appreciate science. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. But the scientific way of thinking now dominates how we think about everything. We have become myopic. Mathematics and science are the most valued subjects, but the arts are now second-class.
There are many ways to know something. Rationalism is good and has its place but there’s a kind of approach to science these days that seems to say that all that matters is what can be measured. Well, love, passion, well-being, health, meaning, purpose, beauty, aesthetics…….I could go on…..are not quantifiable. Yet they matter to us. We make our choices using more than rational thinking (and, don’t make the mistake of saying the alternative is “irrational” thinking). Intuition, aesthetics, and emotions all come into play, along with logic, in trying to lead an examined, worthwhile life.
Science, however, shouldn’t be limited to what can be measured. I think Deleuze had it right – science is a way of thinking – a way of thinking about function. Science helps us to understand how things work. But we also need to think about concepts, percepts and affects. It’s not “anti-science” to be clear about the limits of science.
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on August 22, 2007| 1 Comment »
Christopher Richards who writes slowdownnow said that the book that got him thinking about the whole slow idea was “Leisure. The Basis of Culture”, by Josef Pieper. So I got myself a copy – a lovely hardback edition published by Liberty Fund with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. I really enjoyed doing a dissertation at school (several decades ago!) on T.S. Eliot so finding an introduction by him was a special treat. Josef Peiper was a Catholic Philosopher (which is not something that would usually appeal to me!) and his writing can be both elegant and difficult. But this little essay certainly provoked my thinking.
He makes the point that leisure, not work, is the basis of culture, and a fully human life. He also makes the point very, very clearly that leisure is not the same as idleness. It’s not about doing nothing, slobbing around, or just passing time. It’s about being fully engaged with the world in a non-active, non-doing way.
Whilst Max Weber said “one does not work to live; one lives to work”, Pieper instead reminds of Aristotle who said
We work in order to have leisure
(In fact, the direct, literal translation of this quote from Greek to English is “We are unleisurely in order to have leisure”)
In our frantic, Getting Things Done, To-do list obsessed society, this seems an incredible statement. But the Greeks had it right I think. They had two main “arts” – the liberal arts (ars liberales), and servile work (ars serviles). Work doesn’t sound so great when you add the adjective “servile” does it? But that captures so much of our experience in modern society. For many people, work is just something they have to do, but which is so demanding and consuming that when they are not working they are totally unable to experience leisure.
Pieper points out that leisure is……
a mental and spiritual attitude – it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.
and, that it is…..
an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy’, but letting things happen.
This description is highly reminiscent of meditation and it’s no surprise that Pieper frequently refers to the activity of contemplation as a way of experiencing reality.
I can see why this essay provokes self-questioning about the all-consuming busy-ness of current lifestyles. It reinforces for me the importance of one of the key groups of virtues is around “Calm” – for me, I’ve identified the three virtues of Slow, Silence and Tranquillity under this umbrella. This is not an argument in favour of doing nothing in life, it’s an argument which turns our priorities on their heads, stressing the absolute importance of leisure. I agree with Aristotle – we work in order to have leisure (and, I guess, many of us work to enable others, too, to have leisure)
I particularly liked his holistic description of leisure.
The point and the justification of leisure are not that the functionary should function faultlessly and without breakdown, but that the functionary should continue to be a man – and that means that he should not be wholly absorbed in the clear-cut milieu of his strictly limited function; the point is also that he should continue to be capable of seeing life as a whole and the world as a whole; that he should fulfil himself, and come to a full possession of his faculties, face to face with being as a whole.
OK, not the easiest sentence to read, but you get the point, don’t you? This is what life is about. This is what being a hero is about. To fulfil yourself, to be in full possession of your faculties and to be at one with life and the world. It strikes me that zombies aren’t fulfilled and although they might work or be idle, the one thing they cannot experience is leisure.
Posted in life, philosophy, science on August 16, 2007| 5 Comments »
Arthur C Clarke proposed three “laws” or principles about prediction –
There’s a lot of noise these days about “anti-science” – I find this a strange term actually. It’s about as useful as “anti-art” or “anti-philosophy”. “Science” is not a discreet entity. It’s a way of thinking. Deleuze really clarified this for us. He said science was a way of thinking about function. That’s a good summary in my opinion. I enjoy science because it helps me to understand how things work (sometimes!). Deleuze went on to point out that philosophy was a way of thinking about concepts and art about percepts and affects. These great human endeavours – of science, philosophy and art – give us very different ways to think about our lives and the world we live in. Each way of thinking can potentially be illuminating. But it isn’t a competition. The one way of thinking takes nothing away from either of the others.
So when distinguished but elderly scientists claim that “science” is under attack, I fear they’re misguided. What they probably mean is that their world-view is being challenged. Scientists should challenge each other. They should continuously enter into rational debate with each other. But science (thinking about function) is only one way of understanding experience. What’s the science of love? What’s the science of poetry? What’s the science of Shakespeare? Yes, you can take a scientific approach to any of those subjects but there are better ways to understand love and literature.
Health is an interesting case. It’s actually hard to understand. We know when we’ve got it and when we haven’t, but what is it actually? Science can help us to understand a lot about health by helping us to find out how organisms function. But philosophy and art can also help us to understand health, because health is an idea, a concept and an experience too.
So when “scientists” dismiss experiences which they can’t make sense of, it is worth while considering what they have to say, but it’s important not to make the mistake of thinking they are telling the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. There’s more to life than understanding function and there’s more to life than we currently regard as possible. We, the human race, progress by not accepting that something is impossible. Progress involves discovering that much more is possible than you previously thought. Daniel Gilbert writes about this very nicely in his Stumbling on Happiness. He says when imagining the future we are always limited by what we know now. Futurologists tend to imagine versions of the present rather than the radically different futures which actually transpire.
I love life at the edge of discovery. It’s like magic.
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, psychology, science on August 5, 2007| 4 Comments »
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathon Haidt. ISBN 978-0-099-47889-8.
This book is by a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia. The book’s subtitle is “Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science”. I read it because it was one of three books about happiness discussed by Jean Kazez here. I really enjoyed it. His writing style is easy and at times humorous. He discusses the understanding of happiness from the perspective of ancient Buddhist and Greek thinkers and in the light of findings from cognitive science and the more recent positive psychology.
He makes a good case for the idea that happiness in the result of several factors – some genetic (the given of the physical functioning of an individual brain), some situational (the conditions of life) and some behavioural (the choices we make, the actions we take). I’ve not really considered the first of those before. I guess I’ve thought that things like happiness, depression, optimism and pessimism are all learned phenomena that emerge from the experience of the events which happen in an individual’s life and the sense that individual makes of those experiences, the stories they tell themselves and others about their life. Recently though, both with certain patients in my practice and with what I’ve been reading in that crossover area between neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, I’ve been coming to understand the more complex and intimate links between the body and the mind and between the physical and the subjective. So it makes sense to me that as we don’t all have either a body or a mind which functions exactly the same way as anybody else’s that experiences of positive and negative emotions will be present to different degrees in different people. What he refers to as a person’s “affective style” emerges from the interplay of approach and avoidance behaviours which is influenced both from their genetic make-up and their early life experiences. I find that a helpful concept.
He shed a light on quite a few other issues for me. I like this phrase –
…those who think money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop
He then goes on to explain the different effects of spending money on objects as opposed to spending it on quality time and activities with loved ones.
He distinguishes pleasures from gratifications – a pleasure is a sensory and/or emotional delight. It’s transient and if repeated too often the brain adapts to the stimulus and the amount of pleasure drops (you might like ice cream but eat too much of it at a sitting and the pleasure payback fades). A gratification is an activity which fully engages you, draws on your strengths and allows you to lose your self-consciousness. Gratifications improve your mood for longer and you don’t tire of them in the way you tire of pleasures.
He comes down in favour of positive psychology and its emphasis on understanding your strengths and playing to them, linking this to the older idea of acquisition and development of virtues. What goes along with this is his emphasis on taking actions rather than passively sitting waiting for happiness to just float past.
It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. (Charlotte Bronte)
I liked what he had to say about goals. I often find that talk of goal-setting lacks something but I found it quite hard to put my finger on why. Here’s the explanation. First from Shakespeare –
Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.
And from the scientific perspective he describes “effectance motive” – we are all driven to make things happen. We get more pleasure from striving towards our goals than we do in achieving them.
His conclusion is this –
Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait.
And he recalls Tolstoy to point to the areas where we need to get the conditions right –
One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love…..
Through love and through work (in the broadest sense, not work just as employment) we can be engaged with others and with the world and we can experience the joy of making things happen, drawing on our strengths, building our characters, and experiencing meaningful lives.
Posted in from the reading room, health, philosophy on June 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Interesting article on ScienceDaily today about a physicist postulating the existence of non-particles. It’s one of those mind-bending thoughts that physicists are so good at – maybe not everything is made of particles? Maybe there’s something else? “Non-particles”?
The line that really caught my attention was this –
a theorist who restricts their imagination to merely the likely possibilities probably isn’t trying hard enough.
I totally agree. This is true in life as well as physics. If you only think about the kinds of things you’ve already thought about you’re either stuck in a loop or you’re restricting your view.
The area of clinical practice in which I work is Homeopathic Medicine – as a doctor in the National Health Service, in Scotland’s only NHS Homeopathic Hospital. Some people ridicule homeopathy because they say there is “no plausible mechanism” to explain how it can work. But two thirds of the patients we see at the Homeopathic Hospital have already failed to have their pain, wheeze, depression, whatever, relieved by the best “Evidence based” treatments, but get relief after treatment with homeopathic medicines. It might be hard to accept that a treatment we can’t explain can have a useful place within the Health Service but the daily reality is that it does. So, I say to other doctors or “scientists” who dismiss this form of treatment, learn from the physicists…..
Try harder, imagine the unlikely as well as the likely.
Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life, philosophy on June 14, 2007| 3 Comments »
Here’s a quote from The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad
Supposing one were a conqueror – what would one win? The world? A little peace of mind? A name? Immortality? Oneself? Power? Women? There were times in Jonas Wergeland’s life when he felt there was only one thing worth striving for: health. To be fit and well.
What do you think? Do you agree with Jonas? What do YOU think is worth striving for?
Heroes Not Zombies 