Jacques Barzun is dead. He died late last year at age 104 and his family’s loss is barely greater than our loss. Barzun is one of my heroes and has been that since about 1970 when I first heard of him. His was a gigantic intellect and no one can fail to appreciate his writings if one takes the trouble. His grandson Charles has found a perfect way to communicate with Barzun even now. The letter is both a touching tribute and a profound wisdom essay. Please read it all. I am very grateful to BARRY FISH for forwarding it to me.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Letter-to-My-Grandfather/139117/

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I am filing this post in the archives under “education,” “everything,” “language,” “love,” “personalities,” and “philosophy.”

I just don’t know whether I will publish anything else this year of equal importance.

Many of you are familiar with the Müller-Lyer illusion but I will present it anyway because seeing it is useful for my thesis, which I admit is very speculative. Please begin by looking at the diagram.

Now decide which of the horizontal portions of the two lines is longer. If you measure them, you will then KNOW they are identical but you will have difficulty seeing that even after you know it to be true. Can the optical illusion be overcome? With some effort it can be, but our tendency is not to try hard. Constantly questioning our intuitive judgments is unpleasant and often unrewarding. I believe that most of us have an instinctive liking for Barack Obama and a strong intuition that he is a good man who means well. Our trust in Obama is the cognitive analogy to our trust in the perceptual experience of viewing the illusion. We are making a mistake but my merely telling you so without much argument gets me nowhere. You already know some of his his worst policy errors but you have a way of dismissing them as “not his fault.” Because you may be right, my arguments, if I presented them, would strike you as curiously flimsy. “You can’t fight City Hall,” so to speak. So I won’t.

Mental effort is hard for all of us. Just ask students at Harvard, M.I.T, or Princeton to solve this math puzzle: “A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Any person smart enough to be admitted to any of these schools can figure out the answer if he allows himself 20 seconds of thought but a study has proved that most of them get the answer wrong because they take the path of least resistance. The intuitive (and wrong) answer is that the ball costs ten cents. This is almost the cognitive equivalent of the Müller-Lyer illusion. Of course it doesn’t take too long to see one’s error in the bat and ball “illusion” but I simply don’t know what can be done about the Obama illusion. The trouble is that it may very well be the case that Obama really is a good man who means well but our intuitive feeling that this is so is not based on a study of evidence but is a hastily formed opinion based on his apparent affability.

Quick judgments are the very stuff of life in a world that crowds us with important decisions that will not wait. Consider this problem: “All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly.” A person who has a grasp of elementary logic sees this is a fallacious argument and may even be able to name the error. The rest of us require a moment of reflection. But why bother? What would it prove? If we get it wrong, we get it wrong. How does it bear on Obama’s goodness? Answer: I don’t know but I think it is another instance of hasty judgment. Is Obama what he seems to be? My answer is this: Why rush to judgment? If it is too much trouble to think long and hard about it, don’t form an opinion. Let history decide unless you are willing to put your brain in the hands of others. Dangerous business, that.

For some people, the music in this video is the thing. For most of us, I hope, it is an astonishing revelation of the way the world turns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=L7N6slVrQeY&vq=medium

While I am not a great fan of God, I have to admit that sometimes he gets it right. Consider this one:

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

There are at least a dozen other versions of this with minuscule differences worthy of biblical exegesis for those with a great deal of time on their hands. All of them fall short in a very critical way: they don’t say why we should leave revenge to God. Most of us feel we would like to take a good crack at it but we are prepared to back off if God asks us to do so. Still, it is a nagging question and, without being too pushy, we think God should do better.

Plato does a little better. [Several hundred years before the New Testament writers try their luck.] In his dialogue called Crito, Socrates asks, “And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many – is that just or not?”

Crito, who is one of the gang always hanging around Socrates for bits of wisdom, jumps in with the answer: “Not just.”

Now, old man Socrates, expecting this, replies: “For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?”

Crito, profoundly, per usual, once more into the breach: “Very true.”

The old man, again: “Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him…. This opinion has never been held, and never will be held by any considerable number of persons.”

This still leaves something to be desired but a couple centuries later [just around the time of Jesus] EPICTETUS volunteers this idea upon being asked how a man should go about injuring his enemy: “By living the best life himself.” Now, damn it, why didn’t I think of that before reading it? Well, probably because I came across it as a 20-year old philosophy student, and really, how many 20-year olds could do better? [How many 80-year olds could do better?]

Eppie is not done. Thinking more about vengeance, he says this: “Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.” Boy, I like that one. My passions have been battering me all my life and I don’t know how to get out from under them. I know I should, but how? Eppie doesn’t tell us how to do that. My guess is that this is because he, himself, never faced that problem. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could drag him from his grave and make him president?

Every time you get mad at somebody but don’t keep it in check, you are making things worse for yourself. At least that is what Epictetus thinks and you have to be a helluva lot smarter than any living person on this planet to go against him. He says, “Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.” Don’t I know it! For consolation, I think about the fact that the Kenyan who dwells in the Washington, D.C. White House is no better than I am.

There is something about Eppie that gets on my nerves. He wrote, “When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.” Easier said than done, old buddy.

Finally, “To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.” I’ve got a dim(wit’s) sense of what he is getting at and honestly believe that if I am still alive in 15 years then there is a pretty good chance I will have at long last figured out how to reconcile the opinions of two masters of thought: Epictetus, who said that the foundation of all philosophy is self-knowledge and Johann Goethe who once said, “I don’t know anything about myself and thank God for that.”

I’m getting there. Don’t give up on me.

The genetic fallacy is committed whenever a person thinks he can prove or disprove a point by pointing to its origin and then disparaging the one who makes that point. For example, some people think belief in God is easily shown to be false by saying that the believer holds his view only because his parents told him there was a God. This attack on the believer is entirely irrelevant to God’s existence or nonexistence. Sometimes, in an interesting twist, a person boasts of his belief by saying “I was brought up to believe in God.” In the latter case, if the only reason a person has for believing in God is that he was taught to believe in God then he undermines his belief without help from any skeptic. Instead of calling this an example of a genetic fallacy, we may call this an example of self-imposed genetic revenge.

Try this one: Accused on the 6 o’clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be. He is right, but he may be a crook anyway. Being called a crook on the 6 o’clock news is not a guarantee that you are not a crook. For me, the most depressing example of the genetic fallacy imposed on oneself occurs whenever people brag that their parents brought them up to know right from wrong.

Now, in my own case, several people have charged me with insane envy of those they like to call “doctors.” They point out that my frequent criticisms of those in the medical profession derive from the fact that I resent the respect that amounts to reverence that the public shows to physicians and surgeons, that I wish I had this same degree of adoration, that I lust for the same degree of veneration. In this way, having proved the origin of my criticism they think they have undermined it. Usually, I reply, “You are absolutely right. I am mad with envy. Now, then, can we get on to the correctness or incorrectness of my criticisms?”

Is it possible that smart people can actually suppose that because I am wild with envy that my claims of widespread incompetence (and even corruption) are wrong? Sad to say, not only is it possible, it is a common blunder, a true instance of the genetic fallacy.

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

- George Bernard Shaw

The Infinite can be seen in the Finite, … the Great can be glimpsed in the Small, … we do not need to leave the world in order to know God.

– Tagore

I suspect that few of you can do a certain thing no matter how hard you try that I do easily. In fact, I’d be surprised if you can even try. What I can do, and you can’t even try to do, is this: DO NOTHING.

I first learned about nothingness as an undergraduate reading the works of Rudolf Carnap. I seems that Carnap despised a branch of philosophy called metaphysics and supposed that those who were interested in it were only knaves and fools. He quoted or pretended to quote a philosopher named Heidegger who wrote (or didn’t) the following:

What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; being alone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyond being-nothing. What about this Nothing? … Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? … We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation. Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing…. We know the Nothing. Anxiety reveals the Nothing. That for which and because of which we were anxious, was ‘really’—nothing. Indeed: the Nothing itself—as such—was present. What about this Nothing?—The Nothing itself nothings. (Heidegger as quoted by Carnap)

Now, Carnap, who is considered one of the great analytic philosophers of the 20th century (and was my hero during my undergraduate years) offered this up as the best example of gibberish since Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem. The difference is this: Carroll was having fun and Heidegger was being serious. One can picture Carnap, close to death from a laughing fit, as he wrote the above.

For me, personally, that passage was the nail in the coffin, so far as the study of metaphysics is concerned. For showing me the right way, Carnap became my hero for many years.

Today, I am not so sure. I think I may have found THE NOTHING. How often, as I have sat comfortably in my favorite chair, has my wife or someone else asked “What are you doing?”
My reply: “Nothing.”
Tormenter: “Well, you can’t really be doing nothing. Something must be going on in your head.”
SG: “There is, now. Since you began bothering me. Before that, nothing.”
Tormenter: “You can’t empty your head of all thought. You know that. You must mean that you are not thinking anything important, nothing worth mentioning.”
SG: “Have it your way.”
Tormenter: “”No, don’t patronize me. I asked a simple question: What are you doing? If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”

And so we begin another round of questioning, with my adventures in Nothingness called off — at least for the day. The possibility of my doing “Nothing at all” haunts and puzzles my interlocutors. They can’t fathom how a person can be awake and yet have a head empty of all thought. In asking me, they ask the wrong person. It is not a skill that I have worked at. There came a time in my life that I realized I could sit for hours doing nothing. If you could try this, you’d be lucky if you could last as long as ten seconds. You can make believe you are doing nothing but that effort would cost you. You’d be bored silly sitting in a chair for half an hour, pretending to be doing nothing. Why should you even try? Of course, in my case, I can do this for hours. It costs me nothing to be doing nothing. Oddly, I suppose, Nothing is very pleasurable. I am not being negative, not at all saying, implying or even suggesting that, for me at least, nothing is very pleasurable. Quite the contrary. I find that immersing myself in Nothing is quite delightful.

In some magic way, while doing Nothing, I track the time. Two hours of Nothingness is usually plenty. Do not think that I come out of a coma. No, indeed. I am actively in the Nothing and that is why I know exactly how much time has elapsed. People coming out of comas do not know how long they have been in them. For comatose people, a coma is like being in a state of death. For me, in some ineffable way, Nothing keeps me busy. I don’t want to die because I am too busy doing Nothing…and loving it.

Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors

Below, please find the first paragraph from that first chapter together with a link to the chapter’s entirety. There is no need to say it, but I will say it anyway, Dworkin’s book is an instance of his great mind, almost without equal in our day and age. First the link, then the very brief excerpt.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/religion-without-god/?page=1

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.

You may wish to revisit the entry of a few days ago on immortality.
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Alas, poor Sidney! You knew him; a fellow of infinite genius, of most excellent character: you have stood on his shoulders countless times; he hath inspired you for nearly half a century. Who, now, will show you the way?

IN MEMORIAM

Ronald Dworkin

1931 – 2013

“Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But

if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something

more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our

lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.”</blockquote>

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Excerpted from Ronald Dworkin’s final masterpiece, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS

In a 1999 study that followed 990 heart patients in a Kansas City hospital, the patients that were prayed for got better faster and had 11% fewer complications. In fact out of the 990 patients, 500 were prayed for and each one showed better results than the patients that did not have intercessory prayers on their behalf. The power of positive thinking? Possibly, but in this study, those patients did not know anyone was praying for them!

Here is a batch of articles on the subject.

Editor’s Correspondence
Data Without a Prayer
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1870. doi:.

Editor’s Correspondence
A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Prayer?
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1871-1872. doi:.

A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Prayer?
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1871-1872. doi:.
Editor’s Correspondence
P Value Out of Control
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1872. doi:.

Editor’s Correspondence
Does Prayer Need Testing?
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1873-1874. doi:.

Editor’s Correspondence
The Effect of Remote Intercessory Prayer on Clinical Outcomes
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1876. doi:.
Editor’s Correspondence
Ethical and Practical Problems in Studying Prayer
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1874. doi:.

Editor’s Correspondence
God, Prayer, and Coronary Care Unit Outcomes: Faith vs Works?—Reply
Arch Intern Med. 2000;160(12):1877-1878. doi:.

All these can be readily accessed via http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=485356

Read them and get back to me to tell me what you think.