Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Quiz June 29

Let's all try to post by or before Tuesday each week, to give ourselves a better opportunity to reflect on one another's reflections before class.

PW 5-9 (A bonus chapter this week, to capture J-J Rousseau in both our texts)

1. What do long days of slow walking do for you, according to Gros?

2. What did Rimbaud need, to walk and make progress?

3. How do walkers "possess" the world?

4. What is "chatter," and what does it do?

5. In his later years what was Rousseau walking to find?


  • Do you agree that slowing down actually stretches and expands your perception of time? If you could, would you throw away all your clocks? Is the constant monitoring of ticking time one of civilization's great boons or greater disasters? Or both?
  • Comment: "Anger is needed to leave, to walk." 48 (My comment: that's insane!)
  • Does "walking as flight" (52) necessarily imply a pedestrian version of running away? 
  • "When you walk you soon become two." (56) Is this just the old Cartesian dualism rearing its head again, for a French intellectual? Isn't walking just as apt to create a perception of unity rather than duality?
  • Is there anything wrong, philosophically, with walking not in silence but with earbuds?

  • "The mere sight of a desk and chair was enough to make Rousseau feel sick..." 65 Do you ever feel that way? How do you respond? How do you feel about standing and treadmill desks?
  • "He liked nothing so much as going for long walks, to kill the days." 66 Isn't this inimical to the true spirit of peripateticism? (Thoreau said you can't kill time without injuring eternity...)
  • "...at sixteen or even twenty you carry no burden but your cheerful hopes... It is the walk of happy daybreaks, the resplendent mornings of life." 70 Beautiful sentiment, but did YOU feel that way at age 16 or 20? Do you suppose human nature has changed since JJR's time, in this respect?
  • "...homo viator, walking man - the natural man, one not disfigured by culture, education, art... before books or salons, before society or paid labour." 73 Are these cultural developments univocally disfiguring? Or would you lay more of the blame at the feet of, say, auto manufacturers and bad urban planning?
  • Don: In “Slowness,” Gros says, “It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar, and that “the lesson was that in walking the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness.” Why in “Solitudes” does he say, “When I am walking I always observe myself, egg myself on?” This sounds like a more competitive striving to achieve the goal rather than enjoying the moment. Do you agree or disagree and why?
    Dean: Do you feel like we should slow down, as a society, or does the hustle and bustle equal productiveness?
21-Aristotle in a Periwig: The Culture of the Enlightenment
1. Who called Plato's Republic "nonsense"?

2. What term for a new moral perspective did the 3d Earl of Shaftesbury coin?

3. Where was "the Athens of the North"?

4. What single principle keeps civil society dynamic and expanding, according to David Hume?

  • The Enlightenment was the Age of Locke, says Herman, but it was the empiricist/rationalist synthesizer Kant who gave us the slogan "Sapere Aude" - Dare to know, be wise, use your reason, think. Was Locke daring enough? Does his primary/secondary quality distinction hold up? 366
  • Was the 18th century unfair to Plato?
  • How can we "be sure we're not just living an endless dream (or a nightmare, as in the movie The Matrix"? 366 Why does it matter?
  • Why did "enlightened" people tolerate the African slave trade for so long?  369
  • Do commerce and capitalism make people better? 370
  • Comment: "Love may fail but courtesy will prevail." Kurt Vonnegut
  • If the 18th century was all about politeness and polish, refined personalities and smooth manners, what is the 21st century about? If we've regressed on this front, why? 371-2
  • What would Voltaire say about Brexit? What would de Tocqueville say about Drumpf?
  • What's your view of progress? Has civil society evolved, is it evolving? What might usher in the next Dark Ages?
  • Do you thirst for "opulence" and a more "splendid" life? Does your cooperativeness depend on that, and on your perceived self-interest? 381
  • Do you look as favorably as Herman on free markets as inseparable from freedom in general? 382
  • Has Herman omitted anything important in his accounts of David Hume and Adam Smith?
  • Don: Locke argued that we are not born with any innate ideas or knowledge about anything. Everything we know, we have to learn from outside ourselves. The mind is (in Locke’s most famous metaphor) a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Do you agree or disagree? How does this affect the nature/nurture discussions?

22-Starting Over: Plato, Rousseau, and Revolution
1. Who told Rousseau that he'd "lost the habit of walking on all fours"?

2. Rousseau calls our truer, better selves what?

3. When did Kant interrupt his daily post-luncheon walk?

4. Who called Rousseau "the insane Socrates"?

  • How would you respond to Rousseau's essay contest question about the link between the arts and sciences and human goodness? 387 Do you see any truth at all in the myth of the noble savage? 
  • Does the institution of private property limit or expand our freedom? 390
  • Is the daily 9 to 5 routine a "bleak cave of capitalism"? 391 Is education as we pursue it now a way out, a way to enlightenment, progress, and happiness? Or is it merely another enabling and reinforcing "chain"? 
  • "Every patriot hates foreigners"-Why doesn't this statement alone suffice to discredit patriotism, and JJR's approval of it to discredit him? 393
  • "We can be either individuals or citizens, but not both." 395 In the light of modern history is there any inoffensive way to unpack that statement?
  • Do you see any important differences between Rousseau's General Will and Kant's Categorical Imperative? 396
  • "JJR loved humanity more than he liked human beings" 397 - hasn't this always been true of most ideologues and reformers? 
  • Isn't compulsory taxation to fund public education and other social goods a form of "forcing people to be free"? 
  • Don: Plato glorified Sparta, he saw only what he viewed as its ideal society, but what do we really know about Spartan society. Might it have been viewed more realistically and less romantically by individuals who had to live within it? Would North Korea today be an example of a Platonian Ideal society?
Don's ?s
WATCH: The Is/Ought Problem; LISTEN:Peter Millican on Hume's SignificanceMelissa Lane on Rousseau on Civilization (PB); Hume & the philosophy of good taste (HI); Hume (IOT); Hume the greatest philosopher? (IOT)
An old post-Rousseau and Kant (10.4.12)

We discussed Jean-Jacques Rousseau in class yesterday. He was an emotional thinker with a romantically-inflated opinion of human nature and the “noble savages” who would have embodied it in a hypothetical state of nature.
What’s most interesting to me about him is that his Emile so arrested the attention of Immanuel Kant that he allowed it to disrupt his daily walking routine “for a few days.” Nothing short of seriously-incapacitating illness would do that to me. Apparently Kant was typically the same way, except for just that once.
Kant could get very upset if well-meaning acquaintances disturbed his routines. Accepting on one occasion an invitation to an outing into the country, Kant got very nervous when he realised that he would be home later than his usual bedtime, and when he was finally delivered to his doorstep just a few minutes after ten, he was shaken with worry and disgruntlement, making it at once one of his principles never to go on such a tour again.
So what’s in Emile that could so dis-comport a creature of such deeply ingrained habit? A generally-favorable evaluation of human nature, and a prescription for education reflective of that evaluation. Kant thought highly enough of Rousseau’s point of view to hold us all to a high standard of reasoned conduct. We should always treat others as ends in themselves, never as mere means to our own ends. We have a duty to regard one another with mutual respect.
Yes, fine. But what precisely in Emile kept Kant off the streets, until he was finished with it?
Don’t know yet. But I love a good mystery. I’ll look into it. Could have something to do with other characters in the story. “Rousseau discusses in great detail how the young pupil is to be brought up to regard women and sexuality.” Now maybe we’re getting somewhere.
Or not. Rousseau’s observations regarding women sound pretty sexist and ill-informed, nothing Kant (as a  relatively un-Enlightenend male) wouldn’t already have shared.
Maybe it’s what Emile says about freedom that so arrested Kant? “The will is known to me in its action, not in its nature.”
Or religion? “It is categorically opposed to orthodox Christian views, specifically the claim that Christianity is the one true religion.” Maybe.
That’s very promising. Kant’s Copernican Revolution etc.
I wonder if the mystery of Kant’s lost walks could be related, too, to another of fellow-pedestrian Rousseau’s books, Reveries of the Solitary Walker?
That may not be a clue but it’s a definite inspiration for my own Philosophy Walks project, still seeking its legs.
BTW: we know Rousseau had a dog. Did Kant? If so, wasn’t he neglecting his duty to walk her?
An old post, 9.5.14
Walking to work





There's a lot more to David Hume's philosophy than we get from Arthur Herman. Hume on miracles (bbc video)...

How Bacon & Rousseau expired (Simon Critchley video)... Rousseau's account of his perilous encounter with a Great Dane, in Reveries of the Solitary Walker:  “Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.”


Russell on Rousseau (audio) - "This conception of being 'forced to be free' is very metaphysical... was Galileo 'forced to be free' when the Inquisition compelled him to recant? ...Hegel, who owed much to Rousseau, adopted his misuse of the word 'freedom,' and defined it as the right to obey the police, or something..."
Hume & Rousseau, 3.23.16

If you missed it:

Closest Thing to a Wonder Drug? Try Exercise Walking

...The recommendations for exercise are 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity for adults, or about 30 minutes each weekday.


Too Much Democracy? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Explains What Really Worried Plato

Arthur Herman speaks (on CSPAN)...

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