Sol

Erwin Blumenfeld, Spring, 1930.

The responsibility of believing

Unfortunately, many people today seem to take great licence with the right to believe, flouting their responsibility. The wilful ignorance and false knowledge that are commonly defended by the assertion ‘I have a right to my belief’ do not meet James’s requirements. Consider those who believe that the lunar landings or the Sandy Hook school shooting were unreal, government-created dramas; that Barack Obama is Muslim; that the Earth is flat; or that climate change is a hoax. In such cases, the right to believe is proclaimed as a negative right; that is, its intent is to foreclose dialogue, to deflect all challenges; to enjoin others from interfering with one’s belief-commitment. The mind is closed, not open for learning. They might be ‘true believers’, but they are not believers in the truth. 

Believing, like willing, seems fundamental to autonomy, the ultimate ground of one’s freedom. But, as Clifford also remarked: ‘No one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone.’ Beliefs shape attitudes and motives, guide choices and actions. Believing and knowing are formed within an epistemic community, which also bears their effects. There is an ethic of believing, of acquiring, sustaining, and relinquishing beliefs – and that ethic both generates and limits our right to believe. If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right.

Daniel DeNicola, You don't have a right to believe whatever you want to.

Domingo no mundo (58)

Marcel Dyf, Rivière en Provence, 1983.

Condenar os homens, não a obra.

There are generally two forms of absolutism; ‘dichotomous thinking’ and ‘categorical imperatives’. Dichotomous thinking – also referred to as ‘black-and-white’ or ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking – describes a binary outlook, where things in life are either ‘this’ or ‘that’, and nothing in between. Categorical imperatives are completely rigid demands that people place on themselves and others. The term is borrowed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological moral philosophy, which is grounded in an obligation- and rules-based ethical code.  

In our research – and in clinical psychology more broadly – absolutist thinking is viewed as an unhealthy thinking style that disrupts emotion-regulation and hinders people from achieving their goals. Yet we all, to varying extents, are disposed to it – why is this? Primarily, because it’s much easier than dealing with the true complexities of life. The term cognitive miser, first introduced by the American psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984, describes how humans seek the simplest and least effortful ways of thinking. Nuance and complexity is expensive – it takes up precious time and energy – so wherever possible we try to cut corners. This is why we have biases and prejudices, and form habits. It’s why the study of heuristics (intuitive ‘gut-feeling’ judgments) is so useful in behavioural economics and political science.  

But there is no such thing as a free lunch; the time and energy saved through absolutist thinking has a cost. In order to successfully navigate through life, we need to appreciate nuance, understand complexity and embrace flexibility. When we succumb to absolutist thinking for the most important matters in our lives – such as our goals, relationships and self-esteem – the consequences are disastrous.

Mohammed Al-Mosaiwi, The danger of ablsolute thinking is absolutely clear. 

Da marketização da Universidade

It strikes me that a real problem with the university system is that, intellectually, it is becoming the only game in town. Scholars have no other place to go, scientists few, and even as university departments themselves become less and less concerned with ideas, almost anyone whose work is in any way related to the life of the mind — artists or journalists, for instance — becomes more and more likely to have to spend at least some time employed by one. These two phenomena are related. The best thing that could happen to universities would be to face a little competition.  

It’s helpful to remember that universities have faced effective competition before, and benefited from it. Most 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers had nothing but contempt for universities, which they saw as corrupt, pedantic, moribund, and medieval; they preferred to write for the general public. The modern university was a bid for renewed relevance. Similarly, in the mid-20th century, it wasn’t the French academic system but nonuniversity groups and institutions like Georges Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie (which was not a college), the Existentialists, or even professional psychiatrists like Jacques Lacan, who invented much of what we now think of as French theory. In each case, the real innovators were much closer to artistic and journalistic circles — which are now, ironically, themselves being drawn into the university — than to academe. But it can hardly be said that academe did not come out better for the competition.  

One reason is that there was a lot of money floating around. It wasn’t hard for maverick intellectuals who might otherwise end up in the post office or rural schoolroom to find at least enough money to live on. Perhaps the easiest way to begin to de-bullshitize academic life would be to do something about the current precarity of intellectual life.  

In fact, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is one of the most compelling arguments in favor of a policy of universal basic income. One common objection to simply providing everyone with the means to live and then allowing us to make up our own minds about how we see fit to contribute to society is that the streets will immediately fill up with bad poets, annoying street musicians, and vendors of pamphlets full of crank theories. No doubt there would be a little of this, but if 40 percent of all workers are already engaged in activities they consider entirely pointless, how could it be worse than the situation we already have? At least this way they’d be happier.

David Graeme, Are you in a BS job?

Domingo no mundo (58)

Kees van Dongen, Sur la dune, 1927-30.

Mau feitio

Considero a literatura uma coisa essencial e acho que, se ela não é essencial, não deve ser manifestada.

Hilda Hilst, Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem.

Há meio século a bater em retirada

Bom. A questão do ensino secundário toca-nos muito de perto. [...] Há quem exija diplomados capazes de se entregar imediatamente a carreiras técnicas de formação rápida: o país está necessitado de químicos, de físicos, de mecânicos... Há quem o deseje para que os seus filhos se promovam socialmente, quer dizer... para que atinjam uma situação superior à atingida pelos seus pais ou para que se mantenham na destes. Há, por último, uma minoria que aspira a um ensino secundário formativo em sentido amplamente humano, a um conjunto de estudos que confira aos estudantes uma visão do mundo completa e suficiente.

Os primeiros defendem um ensino secundário especializado quase desde o princípio; consideram-no como uma propedêutica para estudos superiores. Os segundos, um ensino secundário simples, que facilite a ascensão sem grandes esforços mentais. Os últimos, hoje batidos em retirada, são partidários de estudos difíceis e aparentemente inúteis.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista; crónica de 1965.

Outros tempos

Making students cry is definitely out of bounds now (accusations of bullying would instantly follow). But as a survivor of this regime (as I believe, in different ways, we all were), I would make two observations. First, I think for me it was an appropriate way of recognising how difficult the things I was now being asked to do were, and just how much it made your head hurt to try. They were tears of frustration at one’s own inability to run before one could walk.  

But second, it wasn’t bullying in any real sense because we all knew that she was on our side, and was pushing us as hard as we could to think better and harder. One of the ways that came over was in just how much time she made for us. Our essay supervisions were scheduled for an hour but often lasted for twice that long (how irritating that was for the person timetabled next I cant imagine!). We went on it seemed until we had argued through everything there was to argue… as if her time was yours, as if her real aim was to get you to get your head around the problem, unsettling and tear-jerking as that might be.

Mary Beard, aqui. 

Domingo no mundo (57)

Império Mughal, Senhora sob uma árvore, 1760.

Vida: modo de usar (6)

The Stoics thought that there are two aspects of human nature that should be taken as defining what it means to live a good life: we are highly social, and we are capable of reason. Therefore, to ‘live according to nature’, as they advised us to do, means to apply reason to the improvement of the human polis. In turn, the way to accomplish the latter is to improve one’s judgment (the faculty of prohairesis, which distinguishes us from any other animal species), and to exercise the four cardinal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.

 Skye C. Cleary & Massimo Pigliucci, Human nature matters.

A type of written confession

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Diaries also allowed their authors to meditate regularly on personal failings - a type of written confession in a protestant world that had rejected the need for a catholic priest to mediate sins. Or the diarist could count his blessings, and give thanks for births or marriages or seek consolation for illness and death. In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence. In short, they reflected the intensely introspective and anxious, self-examining religiosity of the seventeenth century, particularly (though by no means exclusively) among the 'hotter sort' of protestants, such as the presbyterians, independents, baptists and quakers.

Sobre os diários do século XVII, aqui.