Before internet memes were memes, really, there was a viral video, of sorts, from the Legend of Zelda cartoon. It was a super cut of all the times Link said his catchphrase: “Excuse me, Princess” to Princess Zelda. There are only 13 episodes, and they are not very long, but, as you can see below, Link manages to work in his catchphrase near constantly.

In other words, this is not one of those cases where my memory deceived me into thinking something was a common occurrence, and really, it only happened once or twice. No, Link really did say this grating catch phrase all of the time.

I am reminded of this catchphrase, though not the grating and sarcastic tone in which it is delivered, whenever I read Rene Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine. This is because much of their correspondence, especially the part that I include when teaching my regular early modern course, involves excessively profuse and over-wrought apologizing to each other for what they are sure must be their own fault in misunderstanding what the other one has said. Other times, the apologies come in the form of ironically framed prefaces to his neo-stoic pep talks, because, for much of the correspondence, Elisabeth is struggling with severe melancholy:

I ask your Highness very humbly to pardon me, for I cannot feel sorry for her indisposition when I have the honor of receiving her letters. I always note in them thoughts so distinct and reasoning so firm that it is not possible for me to convince myself that a mind capable of conceiving them is lodged in a weak and sickly body. Whatever the case might be, the knowledge that your Highness demonstrates of the illness and of the remedies that can overcome it assures me that she will not fail to have the skill required to employ them.

Descartes to Elisabeth, Egmond, June 1645

In slogan form, Stoicism is about mastering your passions, rather than letting your passions be your master. I am not drawn to Stoicism, myself, though briefly summarizing why would involve me caricaturing the view in a way that would raise the ire of its adherents (or, rather, my making snarky jokes about stoicism wouldn’t raise the ire of stoicism’s more faithful adherents, but, well…you get the idea).

The principle advice that you get if you ask a stoic is, “have you tried…not being so melancholic?” (Ok, I did a bad job of not summarizing Stoicism in a way that would perturb its adherents, but I think we all saw that coming). And if you’ve ever actually been anxious, nervous, depressed, etc. you know that this is not a winning strategy; as does Elisabeth:

But I confess that I find it difficult to separate from the sense and the imagination those things that are continuously represented to them in conversation and in letters, so that I do not know how to avoid them without sinning against my duty. I know well that in removing everything upsetting to me (which I believe to be represented only by my imagination) from the idea of an affair, I would judge it healthy and would find in it the remedies as well as the affections which I bring to it. But I have never known how to put this into practice until the passion has already played its role. There is something surprising in misfortunes, even those that have been foreseen, of which I am mistress only after a certain time, my body becomes so strongly disordered that several months are necessary for me to restore it, and those months hardly pass without some new subject of trouble. Besides this, I must govern my mind with care, giving it agreeable objects, for the least laziness makes it fall back onto those subjects, all too readily available, which afflict it.

Elisabeth to Descartes, The Hague, 22 June 1645

When they get into the heart of the discussion, Descartes has three simple rules that are supposed to help anyone achieve contentment, regardless of everything about their circumstances: 1) use your reason to determine what must be done (or not done) in all the events of life; 2) have a firm and constant resolution to execute all that reason advises you to do without letting passions and appetites turn you away from following reason’s advice; and 3) bear in mind that every good you do not possess is entirely outside your power (and thereby eliminate your desire for it), “[f]or there is nothing but desire and regret or repentance that can prevent us from being content”. Elisabeth points out that this seems to be less universally applicable than Descartes, and Seneca—who they are building their discussion around—suggest:

It is for this reason that I do not yet know how to rid myself of the doubt that one can arrive at the true happiness of which you speak without the assistance of that which does not depend absolutely on the will. For there are diseases which destroy altogether the power of reasoning and by consequence that of enjoying a satisfaction of reason. There are others that diminish the force of reason and prevent one from following the maxims that good sense would have forged and make the most moderate man be subject to being carried away by his passions and less capable of disentangling himself from the accidents of fortune requiring a prompt resolution.

Elisabeth to Descartes, The Hague, 16 August, 1645

Elisabeth has a good point which I will somewhat unfairly paraphrase as being that Descartes’s advice is sort of…useless? She is nice about saying this, but, let’s be honest: his overarching advice is as they say…not so good. Because while she says “hey some people are entirely debilitated from the use of reason and others have diminished ability to fully use reason”, we might instead say, “literally no one is fully governed by reason, so what even is the point of those rules?”

Now, the exchange they have is a really interesting discussion of their readings—Descartes’s refinement and her criticisms—of Stoic ethics. Her prodding leads Descartes to write the Passions of the Soul, in which he offers more worked out defenses of his views on the mind-body union and questions like what can you say about these compelling concerns regarding the influence of the body and its passions on the mind? So, if you want to know more about what Descartes thinks, please read this correspondence, and read the Passions.

But, he also seems to back off of the view that you can just think your way out of what we’d now call depression without fully acknowledging that he is giving up on his initial position (strictly speaking, he says he wants to limit his strong claim to people who have haven’t entirely lost the use of their will, but denies that people in her second category are deprived of the ability to achieve happiness). Ultimately, before the conversation shifts to physics and Machiavelli, Descartes is going to more-or-less “recommend carefreeness to [her] Highness” (or refrain from withdrawing that recommendation), and Elisabeth continues to point out some of the obvious problems with trying to be carefree when you already aren’t.

These essays I’ve been writing have, inadvertently, but unsurprisingly, had a lot of content related to mental health. Some of it has been tangential, and some of it has been fore-fronted, as with this essay, which has taken me a long time to finish. Some of that has been garden-variety distraction, and some of it has been ironically topical (not too severe of melancholy, but I think, this year, it’s not too hard for anyone to identify some sources, or recognize that you don’t even need specific sources as it were).

I can get very melancholic in November. The days are short, it’s cold, it’s dark, last year it was especially lonely (every possible variety of having Thanksgiving plans canceled occurred, leading me to foreswear plan-making for months after). It’s also the anniversary of my dad’s death. Thankfully, it is not November, and has not been for some time. Which is probably why I’m finally able to finish writing this essay. I’m not having a rough time at the moment. But, reading the exchange, I find it infinitely easier to sympathize with and see things from Elisabeth’s perspective, rather than Descartes’s.

Back in November, when, it was dark, and felt dark, the advice that was helpful to me was not to try to be carefree, or to use my reason to determine what was to be done or not done. The advice I needed was bake a pie over zoom with a friend (that’s not all the advice that I needed, it’s just one major component I can share succinctly here). I wasn’t going to come up with that advice myself, but I surely wasn’t in the category of fully debilitated reason that Descartes would have said was outside the scope of his pronouncement. I just would have employed reason poorly.

Fortunately I got that advice, and other good advice. I had some tantrum-y melancholic days. There was much that was hard about this past 14 months. But I’ve reconnected with people that I had lost touch with. I’ve made new friends and had to be more intentional about how to stay in touch with others. And, I’ve also made pies, and shared them with friends.

It is important to remind ourselves that it is an enormous accomplishment just to have made it through the past 14 months still standing. So, remember that you (by which I am really reminding myself) should be positively proud of any further accomplishments.

Now one way I’ve been enormously unfair to Descartes here, is that I’ve continually suggested that no one would want to receive the advice he was giving Elisabeth while they were struggling with melancholy. But that’s partially me projecting. While it is impossible to scrape away all the layers of formalities and etiquette alluded to at the outset and divine exactly what was on everyone’s mind really, my best reading of the correspondence is that the correspondence itself is lightening her mood. She writes about being excited to see him and hear from him, and not wanting him to pass through the city without visiting, etc. So, even though she fervently thinks his advice is incorrect, she doesn’t seem bothered to be getting it. Instead, she seems to be quite eager to receive the letters telling her to (again, I am being slightly unfair) reason her way out of her depression and anxiety. To my mind, that’s parallel to the social amelioration/restorative effect I got from pie-baking and sharing with friends. But maybe Descartes would suggest it differs importantly because they were engaged in philosophical disputations? I’ll leave that for your consideration, and just end with sharing a song I listened to more times in the past 14 months than I have listened to any other song in my entire life, probably:

This one is going to be slightly shorter than usual, but my hope is that it will help get me back in the habit.

If you are familiar with the question of whether a tree, falling in the forest, when no one is around, makes a sound, that question is frequently associated with George Berkeley, whose philosophy of idealism—meaning that everything is composed of ideas—is frequently presented in its least plausible and most absurd form. The least plausible and most absurd form of presenting Berkeley’s view begins with other people’s view on which there is a world in your mind, and a world “out there” and Berkeley wants to erase the world out there. It is not just that sounds and colors are merely products of your mind, but shapes, and all of the physical properties of things, and in fact, the whole tangible world. Basically everything is in your mind. This, Berkeley says, is just common sense! It’s the view that everyone has until philosophers come along and mess things up!

Framed this way, Berkeley seems like some sort of clown or fool, because, no one would think he could say this with a straight face.

As an aside, I did not anticipate writing about trees as much as I’ve wound up writing about trees.

In Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, which is an often maligned (see above), but exceptional, piece of philosophy (it has come to be one of my favorites after teaching it many times), Berkeley uses the characters of Philonous (essentially his own mouthpiece) and Hylas (standing in for various other views, and essentially trying to defend the existence of material substance) to popularize the arguments for his views. He tries to show that the arguments that led people to think color and sound were just in the mind will extend to other qualities, and that material substance is an incoherent postulate, and so on, and one can certainly come away with the picture described above. At one point Philonous says he is willing to rest his whole case on whether, essentially, Hylas can imagine a mind-independent tree. This is sometimes called Berkeley’s Master Argument.

When you teach and/or research historical figures’ views you often find yourself serving as their marketing and promotions department, even if you don’t believe the views in question. “Look,” you say to yourself (or your blog audience), “I spent all this time trying to make sense of it, so I may as well see if I can get someone else to see it in its most plausible light.” And that description from the outset? That is not its most plausible light.

If I were Berkeley’s PR department, here is how I would run his messaging: Berkeley believes that the world is comprehensible to us. This is the key idea. The world we occupy? It is not beyond our ken. So, go to a window and look at a tree. You are capable of comprehending that tree! But for this to be true, the world has to be made up of things (trees, chairs, tables) that are the sorts of things you can comprehend. And for that to be the case, they have to be thinkable. Like, when you know that tree is outside your window, you have to be able to think of that tree! What does that mean? Well, according to Berkeley, it either has to be the stuff of thought, or intrinsically similar to the stuff of thought. If the trees that are “out in the world” are unlike the trees we can see and imagine, then we are deeply divorced from “the real world”, and “the real world” cannot be known. But, see, that’s the view that would be silly, Berkeley says. Obviously we can know that there are trees and tables and chairs! How else are we able to sit down for dinner, and farm orchards and so on. So, if the only way we could know that there really are trees is for them to be like the trees “in our minds”, there you go: idealism!

So it’s not that he’s starting with that other picture and erasing a bunch of stuff. It’s that he’s saying, the world you know and love? If it is comprehensible, it must be something you can think about (that’s how “comprehensible” works! You can’t understand things unless they fall within the scope of your understanding.

(If you want a picture to replace “erase a bunch of stuff” maybe have the ideas go forth from your mind and help populate the rest of the world? It’s still just a picture, so it’s not like, the right way to assess whether the view is good or bad, but it’s at least an upgrade from the eraser picture)

Berkeley’s argument (especially the sketch I’ve presented here) for sure isn’t conclusive (someone let me know when we find where all the conclusive arguments are being kept in philosophy). But, it’s just not nearly as silly as a lot of people tend to think. Berkeley’s main view is that the world is not beyond our ken. And his main case for it, that he lays out, is that he doesn’t see how you can even seriously maintain that you believe in trees that aren’t the sorts of trees that you or anyone else is capable of thinking about (I’ll grant that this one still feels like it’s cheating, but at least, now, I think, it’s easier to see where he’s coming from):

PHIL. […]But (to pass by all that hath been hitherto said, and reckon it for nothing, if you will have it so) I am content to put the whole upon this issue. If you can conceive it possible for any mixture or combination of qualities, or any sensible object whatever, to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so.

HYL. If it comes to that the point will soon be decided. What more easy than to conceive a tree or house existing by itself, independent of, and unperceived by, any mind whatsoever? I do at this present time conceive them existing after that manner.

PHIL. How say you, Hylas, can you see a thing which is at the same time unseen?

HYL. No, that were a contradiction.

PHIL. Is it not as great a contradiction to talk of CONCEIVING a thing which is UNCONCEIVED?

HYL. It is.

PHIL. The tree or house therefore which you think of is conceived by you?

HYL. How should it be otherwise?

PHIL. And what is conceived is surely in the mind?

HYL. Without question, that which is conceived is in the mind.

PHIL. How then came you to say, you conceived a house or tree existing independent and out of all minds whatsoever?

HYL. That was I own an oversight; but stay, let me consider what led me into it.—It is a pleasant mistake enough. As I was thinking of a tree in a solitary place, where no one was present to see it, methought that was to conceive a tree as existing unperceived or unthought of; not considering that I myself conceived it all the while. But now I plainly see that all I can do is to frame ideas in my own mind. I may indeed conceive in my own thoughts the idea of a tree, or a house, or a mountain, but that is all. And this is far from proving that I can conceive them EXISTING OUT OF THE MINDS OF ALL SPIRITS.

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

I have not forgotten about this site! I promise.

I have an essay about Elisabeth and Descartes corresponding about neo-Stoic ethics in progress, and I am working on an essay about what kind of wild time period it is when the best selling book is a dictionary. I’m even reading Montaigne to figure out if I have anything to say about Montaigne. Plus more!

For now, though, you can check out this panel I participated in where I talked with some folks about the philosophical foundations of science fiction, and where, even though it went very well, I messed up and said the wrong name when talking about a philosopher I was discussing at one point, so that’s basically the only thing I’ll ever remember about my contribution to the entire event:

Every day, lately, I wake up hungry to check my twitter feed. But, my twitter feed does not make me feel good. I am not unique in this. It is actually hard to find anyone I know who has what I would call a genuinely healthy relationship with the internet and social media (especially since we had to start social distancing).

I recently got a copy of Solutions (and other Problems) by Allie Brosh, who was hugely successful on the internet, wrote a best-selling book, and then decided not to be on the internet for several years, and then wrote another best-selling book, and so has returned to do like one or two interviews. She has maybe the healthiest relationship to the internet of anyone I can think of (which is to be offered the option of a position promising massive attention and adulation, and decline it).

Okay, so, I wake up, and I check my phone, and then proceed to keep checking it throughout the day. Why does the title of this essay claim that Scottish Enlightenment Philosopher Thomas Reid can help explain any of this? Well, Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind is an interesting book, and has a lot of really neat stuff going on, but the part I am thinking about today concerns Essay 3 (“Of the Principles of Action”) Part II (“Of Animal Principles of Action”) Chapter 1 (“Of Appetites”).

People in philosophy use the same terms in different ways all the time, so you never know at first what someone means when they introduce a term, even a familiar one. Fortunately, Reid helpfully tells us that he means “appetite” not in the super strict sense where some people limit it just to hunger, and not in the super loose sense where some people use it for any desire whatsoever, but for “a particular class of desires, which are distinguished from all others by the following marks.”

First, Every appetite is accompanied with an uneasy sensation proper to it, which is strong or weak, in proportion to the desire we have of the object. Secondly, Appetites are not constant, but periodical, being sated by their objects for a time, and returning after certain periods. Such is the nature of those principles of action, to which I beg leave, in this Essay, to appropriate the name of appetites.

EAP, 3.2.1 5

So, for Reid, appetites are desires accompanied by an uneasy sensation, and recur periodically. They feel bad when you have them, they go away when they have been fed, and they come back on the regular. These are animal principles of action, for Reid, because they aren’t special for humans: hunger and thirst (and, according to Reid, lust) are examples of such desires that we share with lots of animals.

Most of Reid’s discussion is concerned with assessing how actions motivated by these desires relate to virtue/morality, but I promised diagnosis of doomscrolling, and that is what I shall give.

Now, Reid astutely observes that we can totally mess up the way these appetites work. He says “I believe our natural appetites may be made more violent by excessive indulgence, and that, on the other hand, they may be weakened by starving.”

My understanding is that this is not the current cutting-edge model of how appetite regulation works, but the underlying insight that these natural appetites that function for homeostatic equilibrium and such can be totally set off kilter is an important observation, even if we are glad that we nowadays have a lot of more nuanced/refined scientific understanding of the actual mechanisms behind that.

What is most interesting, as I check my twitter feed, instagram, email, facebook, and so on, for the fifteenth time since I started writing this, though, is Reid’s observation about inventing appetites, ex nihilo.

Besides the appetites which nature hath given us for useful and necessary purposes, we may create appetites which nature never gave.

The frequent use of things which stimulate the nervous system, produces a languor when their effect is gone off, and a desire to repeat them. By this means a desire of a certain object is created, accompanied by an uneasy sensation. Both are removed for a time by the object desired; but they return after a certain interval. This differs from natural appetite, only in being acquired by custom. Such are the appetites which some men acquire for the use of tobacco, for opiates, and for intoxicating liqours.

EAP, 3.2.1 35-6

We can artificially produce appetites in ourselves, through training ourselves by repeated application of nervous system stimuli, which then leave us languorous when their effects wear off, leave us regularly wanting another fix, and are accompanied by an uneasy sensation.

Reid points out that this is distinct from building habits in the sense of just gaining facility or capacity to do things. This one is specifically accompanied by the recurring uneasy sensation relieved only through satisfaction of your desire for the stimulation. Now Reid is talking about getting yourself addicted to tobacco, opiates or liquor, but I say (flippantly) that that’s mainly because he didn’t know about twitter.

Reid concludes his discussion of these artificial appetites by saying “we ought to beware of acquiring appetites which nature never gave. They are always useless, and very often hurtful.”

I have one and a half objections to Reid, and they both relate to artificial appetites for personal hygiene.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel uneasy sensations accompanying the desire to brush my teeth and take a shower. Now you might say “that’s not because of an appetite, that’s because you actually need to clean up!” The reason I am counting this as one and a half objections, rather than two objections, is because I think the toothbrushing can be maybe be hand-waved away with the “that feeling is about whether your mouth needs to be cleaned”, but look: some people are morning shower people, and some people are evening shower people, and I think if those people reflect on it, they’ll realize their feeling that they need to shower on their “schedule” is not always tied to how clean they actually are, it’s more of an appetite in Reid’s sense.

Reid claims that this artificial appetite to perform daily hygiene is useless (I’ll just assume he won’t claim this is one of the hurtful ones). But that seems to overstate the case against it, at least a bit. It would be great if I could get myself to feel about daily flossing the way I feel about brushing my teeth twice a day. I would love to have an appetite for flossing!

Of course, this is all a distraction. Because this essay is about the appetite for doomscrolling. And on that front, Reid seems right. I’ve acquired an unhealthy habit to repetitively go through the unease-relief-unease cycle. The objections to Reid are fun considerations, but they don’t do anything to help with the main point of this essay: Thomas Reid had a good analysis of what’s happening with my relationship to social media.

Now the flipside of this is that Reid is also deeply invested in the view that humans are fundamentally social beings. He calls particular operations of our minds social when they “necessarily imply social intercourse with some other intelligent being who bears a part in them”. And for him this includes making promises, asking questions, asserting things (in contrast to seeing, hearing, and remembering, for example, which can be done in solitude). In Essay five (“Of Morals”), Chapter 6 (“Of the Nature and Obligation of a Contract”), Reid explains that these social acts of mind are part of the basic machinery we come stocked with, and he thought that you can’t construct them out of the solitary operations (which he saw as the default approach taken by many of his contemporaries).

If nature had not made man capable of such social operations of mind, and furnished him with a language to express them, he might think, and reason, and deliberate, and will; he might have desires and aversions, joy and sorrow; in a word, he might exert all those operations of mind, which the writers in logic and pneumatology have so copiously described; but, at the same time, he would still be a solitary being, even when in a crowd; it would be impossible for him to put a question, or give a command, to ask a favour, or testify a fact, to make a promise or a bargain.

EAP, 5.6 15

The idea that without these irreducibly social operations, we would be alone “even when in a crowd”, speaks to how crucial Reid takes sociality to be for human nature. So, while ordinary times might permit us to simply cut out our involvement with habit-forming social media, I think if we heed the overall picture Reid would give us, then, at least at this moment, right now, we have to hesitate, or at least add some nuance.

There is a tension in trying to pay heed to Reid’s advice—at least, in the specific scenario that we are enduring at this very moment—and that is that that giving up appetitive social media might lead to becoming an island of a person, given socio-physical distancing. And that’s unhealthy in a different way.

But, if it is not a good time to try to just quit the apps, I think Reid would still say it’s a good time to try and break the habitual relationship to them. I have friends that I connect with through them. I have friends whose children I am only able to know about by way of them (and you may think “gosh couldn’t you just keep up with those friends directly?” but I think, to be fair, my friends with kids don’t have time to write personal emails to every single friend of theirs who wants to know what is going on in their lives; they barely have time to post pictures and updates to instagram, so let’s not be too judgy about how people are keeping up with each other).

I can’t become Allie Brosh, I can’t even, realistically, aspire to my [uninformed, likely entirely imaginary ideal] of the Allie Brosh relationship to the internet. But I can probably find ways to diminish or defuse this artificial appetite, even as my current social needs can only be met through the same avenues that induced it in the first place.

On the other hand, if you liked this essay, please share, retweet, etc.

I am usually a little bit nervous on the first day of classes. It’s weird, because after the first year of teaching, when things went fine, I expected that feeling to…go away? But it comes back, every year. I just have this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach right before I start my first lecture, like, maybe I’ll just forget everything about how to lecture, or maybe I don’t actually know things about philosophy, or whatever, and so I have my weird tricks (like making sure I’m wearing my glasses so I look smarter, even though I mainly need them for reading things at a distance).

This year, obviously, is much weirder. Because there isn’t a traditional first day. Instead of that meaning I had less nervousness, it meant I was more nervous during the entire procedure of preparing my class (spread out over much of the summer) and then, while recording my lectures, and then during the day and a half between uploading the lectures and when students could actually view them, and then between when they became available for students to view (6:00 am on a Sunday) and when students might actually start viewing them (I don’t know, like 3:00 pm or maybe Monday afternoon). I was torn between sending the videos to people to get feedback and worrying that the feedback would be useful in a way that meant I would have to actually re-record the lectures.

Anyway, in my history of early modern course, we’re starting with Descartes’s Meditations (after a brief discussion of a poem by Cavendish to talk about my hobby-horse of early modern genre). So, in addition to being full of self-doubt (which has gotten a bit better since I shared my lecture videos with my mom, who seems to like them), I’m also thinking about the hyperbolic method of doubt.

Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, advocated what I usually introduce to students as a form of spring cleaning for your mind. This is a flawed analogy because spring cleaning is—allegedly—done every single year while the meditator suggests that this process should really only be done once in your life. It would perhaps be better if I went in the whole way on a Marie Kondo/Kon Mari method analogy, since, as I understand it, if you do that right, you only need to do it once, and also since, when you do regular spring cleaning you—and by “you” I mean “me, and almost everyone I’ve ever met”—typically hang on to a lot of stuff that you should get rid of. But when you go through the attic of your mind and use the meditator’s cleaning method it is more of a “rip out everything you can possibly remove and see what remains” approach.

So, I have taught the first meditation roughly seven thousand times (this is “hyperbole” in a different sense—or well, I guess in the same sense, but for a different purpose), and every single time, I have to make sure of several things: we distinguish Descartes (the author) from the Meditator (the narrator), we make it clear that this is just a preliminary stage of ground clearing before we re-establish a bunch of things that we know (the meditator is not a skeptic for very long!), and most importantly: at no point does the meditator believe that an malevolent deceiver exists! The deceiver (or “evil demon” as everyone will refer to this hypothetical deceiver, despite the absence of even hypothetical demons from the text itself), never has to be more than a whiff of possibility in order to do the work that the meditator needs, which is, roughly: be a source of doubt.

And here is where I realized something that I am sure someone else has, somewhere else, already noticed: the structure of the first meditation does a great job of echoing the feedback loop reverberation of self-doubt and anxiety. Which is, of course, something I’m focused on a lot lately. So, the following is a bit less of interpretation of Descartes and more of me noticing a weird parallel between the first Meditation and anxiety-induced self-doubts. In other words, it probably reflects more on me than on Descartes.

The meditator (who is definitely not shy of listing their own limitations and flaws), notes that they have been a lazy lump and had this huge project they’d planned to do and basically waited as long as possible to get started with it (a feeling I’m sure many of us can sympathize with), and says, “but look, I guess since I’ve dragged my feet for this long, I can’t just do an okay job, I have to try and make something genuinely lasting and worthwhile, and I have to do it all now, in the next six nights.”

So the first part of the project is for the meditator to notice that they have made mistakes in their life. And instead of taking the Julia Child/Mr. Rogers lesson from this, we are about to embark on a journey to the center of tearing ourselves down.

So, we start by focusing on actual real mistakes we have in fact made. Sometimes we believe false things. The example I use is the situation where you see someone across the street who you think you recognize and it turns out to be a stranger and you thought they were waving to you, but actually they weren’t and you are very embarrassed (not that this ever happens to me). Okay, but that’s just a small mistake and it’s easy to put that in a box and cordon it off. It’s not like I make big mistakes like forgetting whether I’m sitting or standing, or wearing pajamas to the office or whatever. But, worries are good at creeping in. So, you move to the dream hypothesis. “Sure, you don’t mess up by forgetting to wear clothes to the office, but sometimes you have nightmares where you forget to wear clothes to the office, and you can’t always tell when you’re dreaming.” Well now we’re really good and freaked out. And beyond that, if there were someone really powerful trying to deceive you, you’d probably be making mistakes all the time! The only way to be safe would be to refrain from believing anything.

What I hadn’t realized before starting to think about it just this week, is that the actual pattern of thinking that happens next is basically like textbook cognitive distortion of that not-such-a-big-deal mistake into catastrophic proportions, where you then allow your entire worldview to become consumed by hypothetical worries about fictional mistakes you have no actual reason to think you are making.

So, when I think back to how hard it was to actually get started on actually doing my video lectures for my online courses, it’s not that I thought an evil genius was determined to make my online course fail, just as the Meditator doesn’t believe at any point that there is an evil deceiver bent on tricking them about everything. For the Meditator, it is a cognitive exercise, to test the certainty of the beliefs they are depending on in order to determine what the foundations of science should be. But for me, it was this spiraled up anxiety about the ways everything could go wrong with my class this term.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t even have well defined worries about what would go wrong. It just mattered that the worry was there. And it didn’t matter that I didn’t believe the worry would happen. Like Descartes’s evil genius, this worry is so clever, it can get around its’ own non-existence. I’ve been focused on the issue of planning my class, because that’s something that I had to do, and which I froze up on for a while, and then was more stressed about doing than I wanted to be, as a result. But this is something that seems to happen to lots of people I know, with all sorts of things that we do in our lives.

And for me, while writing this essay, the part that was interesting (for me, at least) was noticing that the paralyzing worry didn’t need to be something you actually believed in. The process seems to be that just thinking about the possibility of some of these big worries really can freeze us up sometimes. And the solution to it doesn’t seem to be deciding that the worry is impossible. If this last seven months have taught me anything it is that I probably was far too confident about which things were certain to happen, and vastly undercounted which things were possible.

It feels like I should end with a note about how to defuse the paralyzing power of these lurking demons (fine I give, I’ll call them demons), since it’s not about convincing yourself they aren’t true (you don’t need to believe them for them to have power over you), or denying that they are possible (they might well be possible). But I don’t have that, really. In my case, it was the impending deadline that shook me free. I saw the start of the term looming and got myself to ignore the anxiety and worry that way. But, that’s not a general lesson. Deadlines are not a cure for anxiety. They aren’t even a reprieve. So, I don’t really have a conclusion to this essay worked out yet, but if I do, it’ll probably be a whole separate essay, rather than something I can just tack on here. I guess the main moral of this story is that preparing for this semester has really changed how I think and feel about the first meditation.

A definition from grade school that I learned and which has stuck with me was something like “a sentence is a group of words that express a complete thought.” This definition is a) perfectly serviceable for most grade schoolers, b) not so great if you want to capture how contemporary linguists and philosophers of language understand what makes something a sentence, and—most interesting to me—c) actually surprisingly workable if you adopt two specific early modern attitudes about mind and language. The first, which I won’t really discuss at length right now, is Rene Descartes‘s trick of using “thought” very broadly to refer to any type of mental activity. The second, which will be our focus, is John Locke‘s approach to thinking about the relationship between mind and language.

One of the works from which this blog takes its name is John Locke’s long, at times frustrating, but nevertheless interesting tome An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It contains some very exciting and prescient thought experiments like “what if you were locked in a room with a person you liked?” as well as some over discussed ones like “what if what looks green to me looks yellow to you and vice versa?” and some extremely underexplored thought experiments like “what if light is the result of fairies playing tennis against your eyes?” (The main upshot of that last one is to learn that tennis is a much older sport than I’d realized).

The third book of his Essay concerns our use of words, and (more or less) set the stage for how British philosophers (and European philosophers more broadly) wound up treating the workings of language for the 17th and much of the 18th centuries.

John Locke’s big idea was that people are able to use “Sounds, as Signs of internal Conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the Ideas within [their] own Mind[s], whereby they might be made known to others, and the Thoughts of Men’s Minds be conveyed from one to another.” (ECHU 3.1.2) Or, in other words, that when you speak, the words you say are displaying or advertising your ideas to others, because, in general, what’s going on in your mind is hidden from the rest of the world, so without words, there is no way to share it. It is sort of an incidental feature of this set up that we generate a way to talk about the world; a byproduct of the fact that many of the thoughts you wind up sharing with others are thoughts about the world. If we only ever verbalized our expressions of pain or emotional reactions, then, presumably, our languages wouldn’t contain a lot of descriptive, truth-oriented, world-focused content. I’ve written a bit about this elsewhere.

Central to this, though, and this is a big thing not only for Locke, but for many other early modern figures (though they have big disputes on how to make sense of the basic idea, as it often the case), is that we are fundamentally social beings. The reason we need this whole language apparatus for sharing our otherwise hidden thoughts with one another is that we were created “with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind” (ECHU 3.1.1). Language was thus given to us as “the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society” (ECHU 3.1.1).

Locke is buying into the Tower of Babel idea that, with a common language, we can form genuine social connections, and without a common language, not so much (hence, God, in the parable, punishing us with a “confusion of tongues” for our hubris).

Of course, there’s some comedy to the idea that the “tye” of society is a common language, if you watch how we interact with each other on, say, twitter or any social media (or if you prefer, thinking back to family gatherings at which politics are discussed). It would require a sort of supreme optimism to think that all that conflict is due to our failure to speak precisely the same language as each other.

At any rate, a simple way to phrase Locke’s big idea, and one that makes it sound both obvious and hard to deny, is that language is principally about communication (you may think this would be hard to deny, and I think if you phrase it this way, very few people would disagree, but people can still lose sight of this fact when working out their theories about language).

I spend a lot of time thinking about this thesis of Locke’s (I say “of Locke’s” but, obviously, he’s not the first to have this idea: a common feature of virtually every idea we encounter in the modern period), and more so, not surprisingly, over the last several months, during which there’s been drastic alterations to the ways I socially relate to every single person in my life, and corresponding shifts to how I have been communicating with them. From big things like not getting to go visit my new niece in person, because travel between where she lives and where I live stopped happening, to smaller things like changes in the frequency with which I video chat or phone call relatives (or how often I am invited to participate in video chat based birthday parties for family members).

I’m not an expert on mental health, but, it was not surprising to me (or, really, to anyone) when mental health experts started telling/warning us all about the strains that social isolation would start to take on us after even a short period of lock-down. Even most people who are accustomed to fairly introverted lifestyles are still used to periodically meeting up with a friend, or going out to the store/for a bite to eat real quick (or perhaps just having the option to do so).

On balance, these considerations are prima facie bad for Locke’s Big Picture. Locke says that we can still be fundamentally socially connected with each other, because we can still express our thoughts to each other (we even have video chat!) so, the basic ‘tye’ and instrument of social connection is in tact. Now, this is unfair to Locke because he didn’t say “the great instrument and social tye, and also there’s nothing else important to the well functioning of society” but, I think the difficulties we’ve all felt communicating with each other over the past several months, the fact that we get zoom fatigued, and so on, do mean that (as with basically any part of Locke’s picture), we’d need to update it and add nuance in light of our better understanding of the mechanisms involved. Just hearing the articulate sounds or seeing the words and recognizing that they stand for ideas in the mind of another person is not sufficient for the purpose Locke identified (or else, the lockdowns would not feel so isolating or lonely for us, I don’t think).

Today—apart from working on this blog post—I have work to do planning and prepping my classes. I really enjoy teaching, and the different classes I teach typically have very different feels to them. My intro to philosophy course is a large lecture-based class. I stand in the front of a 120 or more person room, and I get to try and spread my enthusiasm for philosophy to undergraduates, many of whom are taking the course to fulfill a requirement. My early modern philosophy course used to be small enough for a straight-forward discussion-based approach, but it is routinely over 40 students now, so it’s a bit too big for that (while still feeling too small for powerpoint slides and straight lecture, so I run it as more of a mixture). Both of these classes are going to be drastically different experiences this term. And I’ve been thinking a lot about how to design them so that they are still engaging to students, and still get the course content covered that I want to get covered.

Normally, in the classroom, when I talk to the students, I say things, I see their faces, and, at least on a good day, it feels like a meeting of the minds. Now, I could be wrong. Maybe that’s just optimism on my part. But it feels like I’m expressing what I’m thinking and it feels like they are picking up on what I’m putting down, and their homework, quizzes and test scores are good enough (give or take the folks who don’t show up, etc.) that it seems to be something that does happen at least some of the time. And that part is going to be missing this term.

I didn’t intend this post to be about teaching in particular—I actually thought I was going to wind up having a lot to say about the Lockean thesis and people engaging in intractable social media conflicts—but I am, usually, around this point of the summer, starting to look forward to stepping in front of a room full of students where I will be able to see whether I’ve managed to get them excited about philosophy.

But this isn’t just about my job not being as much fun; this is about Locke’s claim about our fundamentally social nature, and the role of language in permitting us to exercise our social selves. Clearly language isn’t sufficient (or, rather, language via zoom isn’t sufficient, or, rather, at the very, very, least just the use of language via zoom, without us adapting to the new zoom paradigm isn’t sufficient), but it is, super plausibly, necessary. Imagining these last months without the lifeline that is phone/social media/video chat, is a nightmare, no matter how much zoom fatigue I acquired. Imagining the fall without remote teaching would also be a nightmare, no matter how much I dread completing my course redesigns.

And since I can’t figure out where this rumination falls on the optimism to pessimism scale, I’ll just end with the quoting the poem that it keeps reminding me of, Donne’s “No Man is an Island”

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

No Man is an Island, John Donne

Like many pet owners, I frequently talk to my dog, in a language she doesn’t understand, offering reasons she cannot appreciate, to try to get her to behave in ways that may or may not benefit her, but certainly would benefit me.

“Scully,” I say, “can you please just wait quietly for like ten minutes, until this episode is over, and then we’ll go for a walk?” My pleas are about as successful as you’d imagine they would be.

A few hundred years before I adopted a dog who ignores my attempts at reason, there was a prolific and impressive philosopher named Margaret Cavendish, whose writing spanned a number of different genres: essays, treatises, plays, fiction, poetry. Around seven years ago during a talk by Deborah Boyle, I learned about one of my now-favorite poems, which I usually tell people about by calling it “a reverse Giving Tree“. It is a poem consisting of a conversation between an oak tree and a man cutting the oak tree down, fittingly titled: “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him downe“

Man:

But here, Poore Oake, thou liv’st in Ignorance,

And never seek’st thy Knowledge to advance.

I’le cut the downe, ’cause Knowledge thou maist gaine,

Shalt be a Ship, to traffick on the Maine

A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him downe.

The poem begins with the tree asking, more or less, “hey, what’s the big idea, you chopping at me with that axe?” and then ultimately, consists of the man repeatedly attempting to sell the tree on the upside of being chopped down and converted to lumber, over the trees stable, unwavering, fairly straightforward and clear avowals that it, in fact, prefers not to be lumber.

When I heard about this poem, it quickly fell into the category of things I just couldn’t shut up about. I looked it up, I posted about it on my facebook page, I still use the flimsiest pretexts to bring it up. It’s a very gripping idea, to me. So much so that I usually focus entirely on the part where the tree is explaining how silly the “but wouldn’t you love to be a boat” pitch is, and don’t really attend to the end of the poem, where Cavendish tries to articulate some sort of summary statement about humans and what makes us unique.

There’s a lot of obvious stuff going on in the poem, even if you don’t have much background on Cavendish or the time period. The tree is making the case for the utility of the nature without industry/artifice, i.e. nature as it is (provides shade, fruit, etc.), while the man is trying to make the case for the improvements possible with ingenuity and labor (build a boat, see the world). The anthropomorphic twist, where the sales pitches are being made either to the tree or by the tree adds a dimension to it beyond just “is nature better as it is, or can we improve it”, by drawing our focus away from assuming the value has to be value for us. And knowing a bit about Cavendish (like her criticisms of sort of progress being pursued by the esteemed scientists of her day) or thinking about how it relates to the historical context, can certainly enrich or deepen our understanding of what’s going on.

But the close of the poem has the oak claim the advantage of contentment (something that was considered to be what we might call the “victory condition” in a variety of classical ethical theories: your goal was to attain a stable sort of contentment), and this is conceded by the man. The rest of creation gets to be content, because, being merely sensory beings, they lack the (divine) ambition of curiosity. As I am reading the last exchange with the oak, Cavendish seems to be suggesting, through the man’s closing dialogue, that our rational minds are discontented because we seek to fully understand nature, which is a, more or less, insurmountable task. Our rational minds will not rest until we understand things completely, like gods, but since this is impossible, we are, basically, fundamentally, built to be discontent inquirers.