Preliminary: I started writing this post immediately after day five of one of my Fall 2023 classes, where I felt, whether it was real or not, that my class fell a little flat for my students after four great sessions. I was motivated to write this to help reflect on what happened, and perhaps gain some insights. But with so many long-delayed writing attempts, I quickly felt the need to go further and further back. This doesn’t make for good writing. But I’ve been writing relatively little for so long, and writing is a skill that must be practiced. So I need to start somewhere, even if that somewhere is bad.

Here I am, teaching philosophy at a community college in downtown Chicago, in the fall of 2023. I have been teaching here since 2007, since I was 28 years old, when I was “just a baby” one of my elder colleagues jokingly reminisced yesterday. I am firmly, hopefully, mid-career, with at least as many years ahead of me in these halls as I have behind me before I retire.

My teaching career has evolved in different arcs, often overlapping, related to my approach to teaching, my non-teaching service duties, my relationship to my colleagues, my beliefs, my personal life, my studies, my writing habits, my sense of well being. These all affect how I am teaching, and my teaching affects most or all of these.

Every year of teaching has had great affirming days, and frustrating, career-doubting days. I’ve finally learned how to roll with those moments and not let them define me one way or another. That took me awhile.

But some years have been better than others. Years four through seven, I’m guessing, were perhaps a golden arc for me. I’d been teaching long enough that I felt confident and capable with what I’d been doing, but still excited, stimulated, and challenged by the work. But then I entered some worse years, as things going on outside of the classroom took more of my attention. I spent less and less time thinking about teaching and philosophy, and more and more time thinking about other professional and personal challenges. Professionally and personally, I experienced my worst years from 2017 to 2018. And while I met my wife and improved my personal life magnificently in that latter half of 2018, a string of professional challenges kept my attention and passion away from the classroom and philosophy. A sabbatical was supposed to be a break, and it was, but I came back to immediately fill the position of department chair. This too was a very challenging three year period through 2022, steering the department through the pandemic, and institutional strife from other causes both within and external to the department. That period was punctuated last summer with my wedding, which, while delightful and wonderful, also did not provide much opportunity for rest and academic preparation. The last academic school year of 2022-23 was not one where I could come back with my full attention, I learned, but was more like an extended exhale.

So while I was becoming a happier and more full person between 2018 and the present, I also knew that I wasn’t doing everything I could to be the kind of teacher and philosopher I want and need to be in order to feel like a complete version of myself.

But I’ve been “recovering” from the worst times long enough. This year feels new and ripe, with an opportunity to throw my energy back into my career and my students’ experience. I’ve spent what feels like productive time reflecting on my teaching, adjusting my methods, throwing out or reshaping some teaching innovations (or fads?), extracting what lessons I could and moving on.

Rounding out week two, I have been very satisfied with my classes. Students seem excited too. I’ve received some delightful e-mails already, had a couple great interactions with students outside of class, and was even gifted a dozen freshly-laid duck eggs.

Class discussions have seen wide participation. Students have been excited, creative, authentic, and productive in their comments. If the atmosphere remains like this the majority of the semester, it will be a great semester.

But today, I missteped a few times. I did not say anything inaccurate or offensive, to my knowledge, but rather the tempo was off. My attempt was to drive the discussion directly into the text. But I spent too much time in both classes setting up the intro, and not enough time getting to the meat. Maybe I did not know how. Maybe I was so fascinated by the beginning of the text that I simply invested too much time, saving too little room for the end and main thesis. This is a habit I’ve had in the past. What does this do for the student’s experience? Do my more advanced students get bored and frustrated? Do my less advanced students take the wrong message? If we don’t get to the main argument, does it erode the intellectual atmosphere of the class?

These are my questions. And although I’ve run out of time today to write and process this, I do not want to abandon this habitual problem with my teaching. In fact, I might consider improving this habit to be my main goal of the semester.

Now, if I can exhibit any level of writing discipline, I will return to this topic for Part II within a week.

A friend of mine will be hearing about the future of his cancer treatment in the morning. It came on without warning. We found out in June, and he knew a couple weeks before. It is just hitting me tonight, and I’m ashamed that it took an hour staring at a wall and drinking a couple beers.  I’m on the verge of tears.

It is a rare sort of cancer, especially for a man in good health in his late thirties. But it is severe. From what I gather, his life, along with those of his wife and two boys, have been flipped upside down.

Funny thing is, I’ve never actually met him in physical space. My relationship with him and some others have been entirely through playing online games. We’ve gathered dozens of times in the last two years with our other digital friends to band together as a team and beat back challenging obstacles. In game, his name was Anodyne, which is sadly ironic right now. He only chose the name because the time it came to choose one, he looked around, saw the word printed on a bottle, and went with it.

Anodyne has been a steady handed, dependable leader. And a good guy, who navigated some issues in our group maturely and effectively when nasty politics or social statements came up with some other people we played with. And sometimes, when we were strategizing or joking on voice chat, I’d hear his kids or wife quickly conversing with him. I’d hear about them, and he talked about coming to Chicago on a family vacation in August of this year. We talked about the breweries that I’d introduce him to.

Since this has began, his wife has maintained a blog that informs friends and family of all the updates. It doesn’t pull punches. It is careful, factual, kind, without appeals to religion or joy. Nor does it sink into despair. I’ve never spoken to her, but I can tell from her writing that she and Anodyne are a good fit. Compassionate. Direct. Focused. Honest. And calm. All in the midst of chaos. With Ano, it was always digital chaos, where failure meant a delay of minutes. With her, the chaos is infinitely real.

I’ve never known someone digitally like some of the friends I’ve made in the past couple years. We met almost exactly then, October 2016, when we were randomly assigned to the same 15-person team by the leadership of our hundreds-strong guild. In a way, that online world is an escape for me. A world in which the shitty parts of the real world don’t exist. A world in which I am a powerful wizard, fixing the big problems of a different world, providing the firepower while other people protect and heal me. We’ve encountered a never-ending march of world-threatening tyrants, and I summoned a staccato of magical time-explosions right in their faces, and the world was saved, again and again. With a dedicated team. I am unambiguously effective in that world, working with some great people.

In a way, these people are not the real world for me. They are part of a different world. But this situation, and people who I’ve grown closer with through these games, make the point clear that this is very much part of the real world. The escape is an illusion, and/or almost everything we do and think is an escape of some sort. Because what Anodyne is going through right now means more for “in real life” than basically anything that I know right now.

Today is the first official day of sabbatical, and I will make it a point to write at least a little bit every day. The summer was good. Not terribly productive, but not unproductive. I took some much-needed time to recover from the school year and my school persona, read a lot of books, continued my violin lessons, made good progress in running, saw many music shows, and had a long visit with my family. Now it’s time to write.

Some disorganized thoughts on the sabbatical project, “The Ethics of Growth.”
I don’t know if it is new, but the major goal of the book is to explore a version of ethics that I don’t think is very common in ethics.

In most ethical systems, some definition of “the good” or “the bad” is needed. Simply saying, “To be good means to be kind to each other,” simply begs the question as to what is meant by “kind.” Do we mean gentle? Sometimes, a bit of sternness and rigidity is the best way to help another, and being too gentle can sometimes lead to disaster. So, we want to examine the repercussions of different definitions of “good.” A few examples, stated very simply:

For Plato, “The Good” for people and cities meant “justice,” and justice meant a certain kind of harmony.

For Aristotle, “The Good” meant pursuing one’s happiness, which included living among friends and cultivating one’s virtues.

For Kant, “The Good” meant a human’s will that strived to do good, and a universal rule that could be followed in any situation.

For Mill, “The Good” meant happiness, and happiness meant pleasure.

I think there is something fascinating about each of these definitions, and others. Part of this year’s project is to explore both more modern versions and versions of this from other parts of the world.

My own ethical system therefore draws on some of these other systems, but mine has an emphasis on growth. In it’s simplest formulation, it holds that “the good” is best understood as growth, and “the bad” is best understood as decay. However, there are many caveats to this, because on its own, this formulation is rife with problems. Perhaps my first goal in the weeks ahead is to describe and respond to these caveats. Here are just a few of the things I’m talking about:
–I am not simply talking about biological growth. There is, for example, the growth of ideas, knowledge, diversity and complexity. Too much biological growth hinders other types of growth.
–There are different kinds of growth, and they are not equal. Some things that look like a lot of growth can actually contribute to more decay. Growing a business and an industry can seem good to those who benefit from that growth. But industrial growth can lead to environmental decay. This isn’t to say that all industrial growth is bad, either: there is a lot of industrial growth that has allowed for growth in many dimensions. As a small and obvious example, computers and the internet have given us great potential to exchange ideas, to educate ourselves, and to positively affect the world on a much larger scale than was possible prior to these innovations. But, of course, computers and the internet have also been used for the opposite affect: spreading misinformation, manipulating opinions, sabotaging knowledge. And these actions should still be considered “bad.”

More tomorrow…

The Need for Reliable Habits

My 9-month sabbatical technically runs from August 2018 to May 2019. But with three-month summer breaks on both ends of that, it is practically a 15-month sabbatical that started as soon as I submitted Spring 2018 grades.

I have accomplished some things that took a lot of work and discipline, but the deadlines were always imposed by an institution, the same institution also imposed a lot of useful structure, and the stakes–both positive and negative–were always high. I have had a few summer breaks where my ambitions were high, but I have never used them well. So there is certainly a possibility that I waste away a lot of time this year.

To make the best of this time, I have thought a lot about the cultivation of my habits. I have nearly turned Aristotle’s theory of virtue-building into my personal non-theistic code. The basic idea is that rather than focusing on goals and accomplishments, I first consider what habits are needed to work toward those goals, then go about focusing on the cultivation of those habits until they are firm and require relatively little effort to maintain.

What Habits Should I Cultivate?

Most of my habits in the past few months have been alright in some areas, and problematic in others. On the one hand, I am very satisfied with my habits of violin practice. Coming up on the first year anniversary of my first lesson, this is something that has had a lot of ups and downs. But since early March, I have had consistent practice and have improved a lot. The violin habit is a model for what my good habits should be: it was not institutionally imposed. Although I had a violin instructor that could often tell when I wasn’t practicing, I could have walked away or stopped practicing at any time without any real consequence. My chief motivation was simply to work on cultivating my skills, and that was enough. Thinking back on how I began, the causes of my failures and the causes of my successes, serves as my chief model for how I can build good habits at this stage of my life.

Writing: My biggest project over sabbatical is to write a draft of a book. Unfortunately, my writing habits of the past year have been very poor this past year. In fact, this blog post is one of the longest things I’ve written in the past six months, second only to my sabbatical proposal. That was an 8-page single-spaced document that came out like an explosion over the course of two or three hours with a few hours the next day of review. But that sabbatical proposal was not evidence of a habit: merely evidence that I can write a satisfying draft of a few pages if I put my mind to it. It’s not the sort of writing that will get me to a 200 page draft though.

Reading: Although my primary project is to write, reading lots of difficult books is essential to that goal. And I should be spending much more time on reading books than on writing. My recent habit of reading is at odds with this, and has been the worst it has been in a very long time. By the nature of my job, I often read. But I don’t always read whole books or challenging academic essays. I have read plenty of longer essays and excerpts from challenging books. But the only two full-length books I have read cover-to-cover since New Years were a couple of action science-fiction novels. There are times of my life where I am compelled to read: I find joy in it, it is easy to focus, and it is painful to set down a book. But my current state is quite the opposite: it feels like an unpleasant chore. The moment I pick a book up, I start to think of other things I could be doing.

More Violin: It’s been great, and there’s so much more to do. Enough said.

Running, lifting, going to the gym: It’s embarrassing how rarely I’ve gone to gym these past couple years. It’s even more embarrassing that I’m still paying for it. I have been better at running, and at home doing squats, curls, push-ups, and pull-ups. But I am always strongest and feel best when I have a good gym habit. I have gone both yesterday (first time in months) and today. My goal is to make it there every day for the next month–even if I don’t do anything.

Study Latin: About four or five years ago, I took it upon myself to start learning Latin. I want to be able to read Spinoza’s Ethics in the original, which is a sort of revived classical Ciceronian Latin with Dutch influences. I was pretty good in my studies for awhile, going through ups and downs for 18 months similar to learning violin. But then it came to a halt. There is no better time to get this going again.

As an aside, I want to spend a lot of time this year reading and thinking about the philosophy of language. Which means I should think about language. As someone who is basically a monolinguist, this is difficult. I’ve found studying Latin is useful in thinking about how language affects our thinking.

Study Farsi (Maybe): A language that I’ve known a little bit of for my entire life. I would love to get this into the mix, but for now it is not my priority.

Study Logic (Maybe): Likewise, I have always wanted to take my study of logic further and deeper. I’m going to focus on the other goals first and see how it goes.

In tomorrow’s post, I will write a bit about how I am planning to instill these habits into myself. For now, I’m headed to a coffee shop (a supporting habit I want to start) to start cultivating my reading and Latin habits.

“The way in which a problem or question is formed determines the sort of answer and insights that will follow. The answer, to some extent, is already imbedded in the question. The right and well-won answer to a mis-constructed question will yield illusions.”

This is something I’ve believed for a long time, and there are many examples that have satisfied me. But should they be satisfying? I have not sufficiently examined this belief, and certainly have not argued it well.

I have had some important life transitions lately that will allow me to focus exclusively to reading, writing, and teaching. Among these changes is the deactivation of my Facebook page. Over the past years, I have been very active in posting my thoughts to Facebook. We had a lot of good discussions too. But there is an obvious limit to what Facebook allows, and it is not a great medium for longer or more stable writing. There are a few reasons I left Facebook, but one important one was to avoid the indulgence of rambling off some small thought, then never developing it beyond that.

So, this blog is now the only place on the internet that is mine and where I have a personal writing platform. Expect this to become active once more.

Among the immediate changes: I’ve added a page on the right column for periodicals. My own periodical reading habits are fairly poor, and I tend to only check the NY Times, Atlantic, and Chronicle of Higher Education with any regularity. I want to fight against that habit and keep my reading diverse and thought provoking. One great thing about Facebook included all my friends who posted interesting articles from sources I don’t usually read. One of my last posts on FB asked my friends to recommend things they read, and they gave a lot of good suggestions. The periodical page includes anything they recommended. For now, I’ll leave it the way it is. In the future, I’ll edit it to reflect what I have actually found interesting.

Every once in awhile, I write an assignment that I’m especially pleased with. This is one that I wrote for my Ethics’s students’ first paper, and I received the the papers today. I like it for two reasons: first, because it provides an important lesson on the use of texts in a community, and second, because it requires students to use Confucius’s Analects to deal with a problem that is personal and for which they are the true expert.

Ethics Essay # 1: A Letter to a Community Leader

The Common Text

A “common text” is the name we give to a book (or other text) that nearly everyone in a designated community has read, is expected to read, and gives some kind of value. The community may be a small one: your family may its favorite movies or books that everyone is familiar with, and members of the family may gently reinforce morals or lessons by referring to those texts. A workplace or other institution may have a “creed,” plus it’s policies and inside jokes. Some colleges assign a “common text” to all of its first-year students, to encourage all students to have conversations about ideas.

An “authoritative common text” is like a common text, but with the additional feature that more or less everyone in the community is expected—and sometimes required—to believe in or accept the truth and morality of the text. This text, and how a community uses it, can often define a culture. The value of the text is to provide a common worldview, a place to agree even when people disagree on other things, a tool for law and education, a context to build stories, a sense of cultural identity…

Since the formal acceptance of Christianity into the Roman Empire in 313 ad, the Holy Bible served as the authoritative common text throughout most of Europe for more than 1400 years. After that, many European nations (and former European colonies, such as the United States), adopted constitutions that were based on “human rights” and divorced themselves from the authority of the Bible. Even still, most citizens considered the Holy Bible as an authoritative text, even if people should now be granted the right to choose which religion they ascribe to.

With the first Islamic State, founded by Muhammad in Medina in 622ad, the Quran has come to serve as the authoritative common texts for nearly all Arabic nations. The influence of the Arabic text expanded as well, being adopted by former Arabic colonies or through trade throughout northern and eastern Africa, Persia, India, and Malaysia. Today, many nations still hold the Quran as its authoritative common text.

Most nations today have adopted human-rights based constitutions, largely based on the constitutions of France and the United States. Not everyone believes these texts are flawless, but everyone understands that the law is based on this text above all others. All authoritative common texts need to derive their authority from some source, whether real or fictional. So long as the people believe the source, it is authoritative. It the case of the Holy Bible and Quran, this authority comes from God. In the case of most constitutions, this authority comes from “We the People,” and requires validation through a vote.

Enter Confucius: Since The Analects were composed about 2,500 years ago, many Confucian dynasties have adopted the Analects as an authoritative common text. Every Emperor was expected to know and follow it. Every government official, such as their versions of mayors, governors, senators, and so forth, were chosen not based on a vote, but based on how well they understood The Analects and how well they could apply it to real-life problems. The Emperor’s advisors were all the best Confucian scholars in the country, and they provided advice to the Emperor by writing papers and giving speeches that were based on the teachings of the Analects. “Confucianism” is not a religion. It is a set of political and moral beliefs with a few mystical elements. However, the Chinese civilization has treated the Analects with at least as much reverence as the Quran or Holy Bible ever has been by Islamic and Christian nations.

Your Assignment: A Letter to your Community Leader.

Your assignment is to write a letter, from you to one of your community leaders. Your goal is to provide respectful advice on how they could be a better and more moral leader. This should be someone to who you are acquainted—perhaps a church leader, a parent, a neighborhood spokesperson, your manager at work, or a teacher. An alderman is probably too distant, unless you have met them. Unless you have special connections, someone like Mayor Emmanuel or Presidents Obama and Trump are certainly too distant. We are adding one fiction to this scenario: we’re going to pretend that Confucius’ Analects are the authoritative common text for your community and the nation, and that both you and your reader (1) have read the Analects, (2) believe that a effective and moral person follow the Analects above all other texts, and (3) desires to be effective and moral. Consider the community leader’s behaviors and actions, and consider the text of the Analects. Using specific passages of the Analects¸ your assignment is to teach the community leader how they have failed and how they can improve

I know nothing. But I want to know. And I want to instill this paradigm in my students.

If I have faith in anything, it is in the validity of conditional statements: if this is true, then that is true. But the conditional statement, too, should be examined and questioned.

I also have faith in the power of critically reading difficult texts, writing, and discussion, in the cultivation of a broad, sharp, and developed mind. This too should be examined and questioned.

But to be a philosopher is to retain faith in these, even while they are doubted.

I will take no positions and advocate no beliefs beyond this.

I will pursue knowledge. I will investigate what my students believe, and work with them to discover the logical conclusions of those beliefs. I will assist my students in their pursuit of knowledge.

I will not accept or reject any of their conclusions, no matter how lovely or repulsive, no matter how right or wrong they seem to me–so long as they pursue them calmly and reflectively with the goal of knowledge and good judgment in mind. I will only make judgments on whether their conclusions follow from their premises, whether they follow necessarily or probably, whether they have been honest with the validity or strength of their conclusions, and whether their starting point began with a critical questioning of their initial positions.

This is my philosophy teacher’s oath. And it too should be questioned.

 

What is the difference between playing and experimenting? The first is what children do, and the second is what scientists do. But we can talk about a child experimenting, sometimes at the same time that we can describe them as playing. And we can talk about a scientist playing, at the same time that they are experimenting, or preparing to experiment.

When we experiment, we are trying to see what things lead to what. And we experiment on something for which we do not have complete control or knowledge: something that keeps its secrets hidden until we do the right thing. When we play, our goal is perhaps indefinable. But when a child keeps playing at the same thing for too long, they get bored. Why do they get bored? “Because they have been doing it for so long” is not an explanation: that is merely a statement of fact. What was it about the length that ended their interest? Perhaps that they no longer could see how they could learn.

Perhaps the difference is this. An experiment is pre-meditated. Play is improvised.

Observation 1: A significant portion of humanity has expressed some feeling of spirituality. This has been expressed in radically varying ways across time, culture, and class. It is possible that many people were simply adopting the views of their culture’s traditions and felt nothing deep: that they would be non-feeling atheists if their parents and other associates were non-feeling atheists. But without doubt, authentic expressions of spirituality have been and are present throughout every division of humanity.

Observation 2: Many people talk about having spiritually fullfilling or spiritually unsatisfying lives, and this can change throughout the course of one’s life. Certain practices and outlooks can stimulate that fulfillment, and other practices can separate us from having it.

Naturalistic Assumption (or Induction): There are no spirits or spiritual entities or phenomenon in existence. (This is induced from a variety of arguments, that I am not presenting now. Therefore, this can be taken as having the weight of an assumption for the sake of this argument)

If one believes in the naturalistic assumption, and accepts the two observations (I think one must accept the two observations), then one must still offer an explanation for why Observations 1 and 2 exist. This cannot be called idiotic or delusional–since even if those were true, it would not be an explanation. Rather, there must be something about the private human experience with the world, and their understanding of their relationship with the world, that gives birth to both the ideas and the deep feelings.