Why We Need to Teach Kids Philosophy & Safeguard Society from Authoritarian Control

in Education, Philosophy, Politics | January 3rd, 2017

Several friends and relatives of mine teach philosophy, writing, and critical thinking to undergraduate college students. And many of those people have confessed their dismay in recent months. Threats and McCarthyite attacks on higher educators have increased (and in places like Turkey escalated to full-on war against academics). Many educators are also filled with doubt about the meaning of their profession. How can they stand in the pulpits of higher learning, many wonder, extolling the virtues of clear expression, logic, reason and evidence, ethics, etc., when the world outside the classroom seems to be telling their students none of these things matter?

But then there are some with a more optimistic bent, who see more reason than ever to extol said virtues, with even more rigor and urgency. Philosophy improves our mental and emotional lives in every possible situation. While millions of people in supposedly democratic countries have decided to put their trust in autocratic, authoritarian leaders, millions more have determined to resist the curtailing of civil liberties, democratic rights, and social progress. Educators see the tools of language and critical thinking as integral to those of political action and civil disobedience. And not only do college students need these tools, argue the executives of UK’s Philosophy Foundation, but children do as well, and for many of the same reasons.

Created in 2007 to conduct “philosophical enquiry in schools, communities, and workplaces,” the Foundation works with both children and adults. In the Aeon Magazine video above, COO and CEO Emma and Peter Worley explain the special appeal of philosophy for kids, making the case for teaching “thinking well” at a young age. Rather than lecturing on the history of ideas or presenting a thesis, their approach involves getting children “thinking about things together, working together collaboratively, coming up with counter-examples… really doing philosophy in the true sense.” Young students see problems for themselves and apply their own philosophical solutions, using the nascent reasoning faculties most of us can access as soon as we’ve reached school age.

The Foundation has shown that the teaching of philosophy to children “has an impact on affective skills and also on cognitive skills.” In other words, kids become more emotionally intelligent as they become better thinkers, developing what Socrates called “the silent dialogue” with themselves. These benefits are goods in their own right, argues Emma Worley, and as valuable as the arts in our lives. “We need philosophy because it’s a human thing to do,” she says, “to think, to reason, to reflect.” But there is a decided social utility as well. Philosophy can “safeguard against the ways in which education might sometimes be used to control people,” says Peter Worley: “If we have something like philosophy within the system, something that steps outside that system and asks questions about it, then we have something to protect us” against authoritarian means of thought and language control.

via Aeon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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An Animated Introduction to Voltaire: Enlightenment Philosopher of Pluralism & Tolerance

in Animation, Philosophy | December 29th, 2016

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has the distinction of holding prominent places in both mathematics and philosophy. A contemporary of Isaac Newton, a rival, and Baruch Spinoza, an acquaintance, Leibniz will forever be associated with Enlightenment Rationalism. But thanks to French philosopher and writer Voltaire, he will also be associated with a strain of thought generally taken much less seriously: the philosophy of Optimism.

In the Theodicy, the only philosophical book he published in his lifetime, Leibniz attempts to reconcile divine providence, human freedom, and the nature of evil. He concludes, more or less, that the world is a perfect balance between the three. As “an absolutely perfect being,” God must have made the best possible world, he reasoned, and many conservative theologians then and now have agreed. But not Voltaire.

Drawing on a diverse body of genres—travel narrative, Bildungsroman, picaresque novel—the French writer’s rollicking satirical novella Candide, or the Optimist presents us with a comically grotesque and hyperbolic world that is nonetheless much more like the violent, chaotic one we actually experience than like Leibniz’s idealization. The novel’s hero, a gullible naïf, traipses through Europe and the Americas with his mentor, Professor Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire.” A broad caricature of Leibniz, Pangloss insists—as the two run into devastating earthquakes, war, torture, cannibalism, venereal disease, and yet more earthquakes—that they live in “the best of all possible worlds.”

The assertion comes to seem increasingly, outrageously absurd and willfully obtuse. In the end, the various characters come around to the idea that their grand metaphysical questions have no real purchase on human existence, and that they would do best to practice a kind of quietism, settling down to small farms to, as Candide says, “cultivate our garden.” The response does not enjoin us to passivity, but rather to the use of our abilities for purposeful work rather than contentious speculation or in the service of blind faith. From his start as a writer, Voltaire fiercely attacked “fanaticism, idolatry, superstition,” as Alain de Botton says in the School of Life introduction to Voltaire above, as the basis of people killing each other “to defend some bit of religious doctrine which they scarcely understand.”

Voltaire found the phenomenon of religious war “repellant,” and his age had seen its share of war. In the historical background of Candide’s composition were the Seven Years’ War, the global imperial conflict that claimed the lives of eight million, and the Thirty Years’ War: the 17th century religious conflict that spread violent death, famine, and disease all over the European continent. In addition to these appalling events, Voltaire and his contemporaries were left reeling from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which historians estimate may have killed upwards of 100,000 people. This natural evil was wholly unrelated to any kind of human misbehavior—as Voltaire bitterly argued in his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”—and so made Optimistic philosophy and theology seem cruel and ridiculous.

The bawdy, bloody, and hilarious Candide has remained the most incisive literary representation of disillusionment in “best of all possible worlds” theodicy. It is by far Voltaire’s most popular work—a bestseller from the day that it appeared in 1759—and is still given to students to help them understand the philosophical Enlightenment, or what is often called, as de Botton says, “The Age of Voltaire.” With more clarity than even Jonathan Swift’s satires, Voltaire helps us grasp and remember the major historical, religious, and philosophical conflicts of the time. A “master at popularizing difficult material,” Voltaire also used literary techniques to explain the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Locke and Newton.

The anecdote of the apple falling on Newton’s head, for example, “is due entirely to Voltaire,” who heard it from Newton’s niece and included it in his Letters Concerning the English Nation. This work, composed during his two-year stay in England, implicitly critiques the intolerance of French society—causing the book to be banned—and makes the case for some of the philosopher’s most cherished values: pluralism, religious toleration, mutual respect, and free inquiry. We find these ideals all throughout the works of Enlightenment philosophers from all over the continent, but nowhere do we find them articulated with such forceful wit and vivid style as in the work of Voltaire.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Leo Tolstoy Became a Vegetarian and Jumpstarted the Vegetarian & Humanitarian Movements in the 19th Century

in Food & Drink, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Religion | December 26th, 2016

Leo Tolstoy is remembered as both a towering pinnacle of Russian literature and a fascinating example of Christian anarchism, a mystical version of which the aristocratic author pioneered in the last quarter century of his life. After a dramatic conversion, Tolstoy rejected his social position, the favored vices of his youth, and the dietary habits of his culture, becoming a vocal proponent of vegetarianism in his ascetic quest for the good life. Thousands of his contemporaries found Tolstoy’s example deeply compelling, and several communes formed around his principles, to his dismay. “To speak of ‘Tolstoyism,’” he wrote, “to seek guidance, to inquire about my solution of questions, is a great and gross error.”

“Still,” writes Kelsey Osgood at The New Yorker, “people insisted on seeking guidance from him,” including a young Mahatma Gandhi, who struck up a lively correspondence with the writer and in 1910 founded a community called “Tolstoy Farm” near Johannesburg.

Though uneasy in the role of movement leader, the author of Anna Karenina invited such treatment by publishing dozens of philosophical and theological works, many of them in opposition to a contrary strain of religious and moral ideas developing in the late nineteenth century. Often called “muscular Christianity,” this trend responded to what many Victorians thought of as a crisis of masculinity by emphasizing sports and warrior ideals and railing against the “feminization” of the culture.

Tolstoy might be said to represent a “vegetable Christianity”—seeking harmony with nature and turning away from all forms of violence, including the eating of meat. In “The First Step,” an 1891 essay on diet and ethical commitment, he characterized the prevailing religious attitude toward food:

I remember how, with pride at his originality, an Evangelical preacher, who was attacking monastic asceticism, once said to me “Ours is not a Christianity of fasting and privations, but of beefsteaks.” Christianity, or virtue in general—and beefsteaks!

While he confessed himself “not horrified by this association,” it is only because “there is no bad odor, no sound, no monstrosity, to which man cannot become so accustomed that he ceases to remark what would strike a man unaccustomed to it.” The killing and eating of animals, Tolstoy came to believe, is a horror to which—like war and serfdom—his culture had grown far too accustomed. Like many an animal rights activist today, Tolstoy conveyed his horror of meat-eating by describing a slaughterhouse in detail, concluding:

[I]f he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because, to say nothing of the excitation of the passions caused by such food, its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling—killing.

[W]e cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist.… [Y]oung, kind, undepraved people—especially women and girls—without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh.

The idea of vegetarianism of course preceded Tolstoy by hundreds of years of Hindu and Buddhist practice. And its growing popularity in Europe and America preceded him as well. “Tolstoy became an outspoken vegetarian at the age of 50,” writes Sam Pavlenko, “after meeting the positivist and vegetarian William Frey, who, according to Tolstoy’s son Sergei Lvovich, visited the great writer in the autumn of 1885.” Tolstoy’s dietary stance fit in with what Charlotte Alston describes as an “increasingly organized” international vegetarian movement taking shape in the late nineteenth century.

Like Tolstoy in “The First Step,” proponents of vegetarianism argued not only against cruelty to animals, but also against “the brutalization of those who worked in the meat industry, as butchers, slaughtermen, and even shepherds and drovers.” But vegetarianism was only one part of Tolstoy’s religious philosophy, which also included chastity, temperance, the rejection of private property, and “a complete refusal to participate in violence or coercion of any kind.” This marked his dietary practice as distinct from many contemporaries. Tolstoy and his followers “made the link between vegetarianism and a wider humanitarianism explicit.”

“How was it possible,” Alston summarizes, “to regard the killing of animals for food as evil, but not to condemn the killing of men through war and capital punishment? Not all members of the vegetarian movement agreed.” Some saw “no connection between the questions of war and diet.” Tolstoy’s philosophical argument against all forms of violence was not original to him, but it resonated all over the world with those who saw him as a shining example, including his two daughters and eventually his wife Sophia, who all adopted the practice of vegetarianism. A book of their recipes was published in 1874, and adapted by Pavlenko for his Leo Tolstoy: A Vegetarian’s Tale. (See one example here—a family recipe for macaroni and cheese.)

In her study Tolstoy and His Disciples, Alston details the Russian great’s wide influence through not only his diet but the totality of his spiritual practices and unique political and religious views. Interestingly, unlike many animal rights activists of his day and ours, Tolstoy refused to endorse legislation to punish animal cruelty, believing that punishment would only result in the perpetuation of violence. “Non-violence, non-resistance and brotherhood were the principles that lay at the basis of Tolstoyan vegetarianism,” she observes, “and while these principles meant that Tolstoyans cooperated closely with vegetarians, they also kept them in many ways apart.”

via History Buff

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A Crash Course in Existentialism: A Short Introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre & Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World

in Philosophy | December 22nd, 2016

Very broadly speaking, all philosophy contains within it dialectical tensions: some ideas seem ennobling and consoling, others unsettling and alienating. Every school, movement, and individual thinker deals in some measure of both. Sometimes we feel unsettled because of historical and cultural distance. When Socrates talks about slavery or censorship in matter-of-fact ways, for example, we might be startled, but his audience didn’t see things the way we do. When it comes, however, to the Existentialists, the cultural and political milieu of these thinkers may resemble our own closely enough that statements which shocked their readers still shock most people today.

Take one of the bigger questions like, oh, the meaning of life. “We understand our lives as being meaningful,” says Hank Green above—brother of John Green, the other half of the Crash Course educational team. We might find purpose and fulfillment in a number of things, from religion to art, sports, careers, and politics.

Existentialists, Green tells us, would say that “any or all of these things can give your life meaning.” Consoling, eh? “But at the same time,” and here comes the downer, “they say none of them can.” These thinkers may be spread out over time and space—from the 19th century Denmark and Germany of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to the 1950s France of Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. But Existentialist thinkers share at least one common trait: anti-essentialism.

As Green explains, classical philosophy offered the comforting explanation that everything contained an essence: “a certain set of core principles that are necessary or essential for a thing to be what it is.” Not only do chairs and tables have essences but so do human beings, they thought, and “your essence gives you a purpose.” Still a very widespread and commonplace belief, we can probably agree, and one people rarely think about critically unless they’re having… well, an existential crisis. So far so good when it comes to grasping the essence (sorry) of Existentialist thinking.

Green goes astray however, when he gets to Nietzsche, whom he claims embraced Nihilism, “the belief in the ultimate meaninglessness of life.” Not only did Nietzsche vehemently oppose nihilism as self-defeating, but he feared the consequences of its spread, even if he sometimes saw it as an inevitable product of modernity. Another important consideration when studying so-called Existentialist thinkers is that they themselves were deeply troubled by their troubling insights. Kierkegaard turned to a radical form of Christianity, Camus to an introspective individualism… and perhaps the most famous Existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre, came to embrace doctrinaire Marxism.

But first, he formulated the most quotable maxim of Existentialist thought: “Existence precedes Essence.” From this, he drew a conclusion both troubling and consoling: “It’s up to each of us to determine who we are. We have to write our own essence through the way we choose to live.” But this liberated condition is absurd: it means we are ultimately responsible for everything we do, even when we have no idea what’s going to happen when we do it, or any larger purpose for doing it at all. Whether ardently religious like Kierkegaard or ardently atheist like Nietzsche and Sartre, Existentialist philosophers who stared into the void found there all of the boundless freedom and terrifying vertigo we came to associate with the neurosis of the modern human condition.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Ethical “Trolley Problem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

in Philosophy | December 22nd, 2016

“A runaway train is heading towards five workers on a railway line. There’s no way of warning, but you’re standing near a lever that operates some points. Switch the points, and the train goes down a spur. Trouble is, there’s another worker on that bit of track too, but it’s one fatality instead of five. Should you do that?” Here we have the trolley problem, which since its first articulation in 1967 by Philippa Foot has become the classic example of an ethical dilemma as well as perhaps the best known thought experiment in all of philosophy.

This explanation of the trolley problem comes from one of the Harry Shearer-narrated BBC- and Open University-made animations previously featured here on Open Culture. The short video above takes a different approach, not just using a children’s train set to illustrate it but then putting the famous question to the child himself.

“Uh oh, Nicholas,” says the two-year-old’s father from behind the camera, “this train is going to crash into these five people! Should we move the train to go this way, or should we let it go that way?” The elegance of the toddler’s solution, implemented without hesitation, must be seen to be appreciated.

The father, E. J. Masicampo of Wake Forest University, researches “the effortful mental processes that seem to separate humans from other animals: resisting temptations and impulses, reasoning and decision making, thinking about and simulating non-present events, and making plans for the future.” Among his professional goals, he lists working toward “a theory of the human consciousness” by uncovering “how conscious thought contributes to human functioning in light of its apparent limitations.” He’s taken on a problem even harder than the one with the trolleys; perhaps young Nicholas, what with his demonstrated gift of “thinking outside the box,” invaluable in the philosophical disciplines, can offer some assistance.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

in Philosophy, Psychology, Writing | December 19th, 2016

The life of Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé has provided fodder for both salacious speculation and intellectual drama in film and on the page for the amount of romantic attention she attracted from European intellectuals like philosopher Paul Rée, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Emotionally intense Nietzsche became infatuated with Salomé, proposed marriage, and, when she declined, broke off their relationship in abrupt Nietzschean fashion.

For her part, Salomé so valued these friendships she made a proposal of her own: that she, Nietzsche and Rée, writes D.A. Barry at 3:AM Magazine, “live together in a celibate household where they might discuss philosophy, literature and art.” The idea scandalized Nietzsche’s sister and his social circle and may have contributed to the “passionate criticism” Salomé’s 1894 biographical study, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reappraisal, Barry argues, as “a psychological portrait.”

In Nietzsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sorrowful ailing and triumphal recovery, incandescent intoxication and cool consciousness. One senses here the close entwining of mutual contradictions; one senses the overflowing and voluntary plunge of over-stimulated and tensed energies into chaos, darkness and terror, and then an ascending urge toward the light and most tender moments.” We might see this passage as charged by the remembrance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the concept of the Eternal Recurrence ‘in a quiet voice with all the signs of deepest horror.’”

We should also, perhaps primarily, see Salomé’s impressions as an effect of Nietzsche’s turbulent prose, reaching its apotheosis in his experimentally philosophical novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra. As a theorist of the embodiment of ideas, of their inextricable relation to the physical and the social, Nietzsche had some very specific ideas about literary style, which he communicated to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teaching of Style.” Well before writers began issuing “similar sets of commandments,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Nietzsche “set down ten stylistic rules of writing,” which you can find, in their original list form, below.

1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)

3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.

5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.

6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.

9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.

10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.

As with all such prescriptions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s perspectivism has been (mis)interpreted as wanton subjectivity, his veneration for antiquity places a high value on formal constraints. His prose, we might say, resides in that tension between Dionysian abandon and Apollonian cool, and his rules address what liberal arts professors once called the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic: the three supports of moving, expressive, persuasive writing.

Salomé was so impressed with these aphoristic rules that she included them in her biography, remarking, “to examine Nietzsche’s style for causes and conditions means far more than examining the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can listen to his inner soundings.” Isn’t this what great writing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Nietzsche not only mastered language but also transcended its inadequacies.” (As Nietzsche himself commented in 1886, notes Hugo Drochon, he needed to invent “a language of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-disciplined writing found a complement in Salomé’s boldly keen analysis. From her we can also perhaps glean another principle: “No matter how calumnious the public attacks on her,” writes Barry, “particularly from [his sister] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche during the Nazi period in Germany, Salomé did not respond to them.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Slavoj Žižek Answers the Question “Should We Teach Children to Believe in Santa Claus?”

in Life, Philosophy | December 16th, 2016

Local parent tells other local parent how to raise their children: this scenario has provoked many a neighborhood listserv flamewar, and maybe a street brawl or three. Unkempt and inflammatory philosopher Slavoj Žižek telling parents how to raise their children? Well… maybe a few hundred eyerolls.

I exaggerate. Žižek only addresses one small aspect of parenting—a benign, culturally specific one at that, which ranks far beneath, say, health and education and falls in line with whether one should pretend to be a nocturnal creature who lives on children’s teeth, or to see a giant rabbit in the spring.

We’re talking about Santa Claus, and to lie or not to lie to your kids is the question posed to Žižek by students at SUNY Brockport in the low-quality video above. If you can adjust to the audio/video, you’ll hear the cultural theorist give an interesting answer. I can’t vouch for its consonance with child psychology, but as a parent, I can say my tiny demographic confirms the insight.

Though he’s nearly inaudible at first, we eventually hear Žižek saying, “No… they will absolutely take it as this cynical [reason?] of ‘let’s pretend that it’s real,’ no matter how much you insist that you mean it literally.” For those who might agonize over the question, it may be most kids aren’t nearly as gullible as we imagine, just good sports who don’t want to let us down.

This would not be a Žižek answer if it did not veer into claims far more ambitious, or grandiose, than the question seems to warrant. Sensing perhaps he’s on shaky ground with the whole parenting advice thing, he quickly moves on to the subject of “what does it mean, really, to believe?” Belief, says Žižek—in the sense of individual, inward assent to metaphysical propositions—is a modern invention.

In attempting to make Saint Nicholas believable to children, we’ve paradoxically turned him into a cartoon character (and in the U.S. and elsewhere banished his lovable demon sidekick, Krampus). Kids see right through it, says Žižek in another interview above. And so, “You have a belief which is nobody’s belief! Nobody believes in the first person.”

Why, then, not just admit we’re all pretending, and say “we’re enjoying a story together”? We do it every night with children, this one just involves food, lights, family, gifts, sweaters, uncomfortable travel and maybe religious ceremonies of your tradition. You can often hear Žižek opine on those kinds of beliefs as well. My only comment on the matter is to say, sincerely, Happy Holidays.

via Critical Theory

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Medieval Doodler Draws a “Rockstar Lady” in a Manuscript of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (Circa 1500)

in History, Life, Philosophy | December 13th, 2016

By the early 6th century, the Western Roman Empire had effectively come to an end after the deposition of the final emperor and the installation of Germanic kings. Under the second such ruler, Theodoric the Great, emerged one of the most influential works of literature of the European Middle Ages: The Consolation of Philosophy. Its author, senator and philosopher Boethius, wrote the text while imprisoned and awaiting execution.

A conversation the despondent author has with his muse, Lady Philosophy, the book seeks the nature of happiness and the nature of God, in the midst of great loss, disgrace, and tyranny. The Consolation of Philosophy belongs to a long tradition of prison literature that extends to Don Quixote, “Civil Disobedience,” and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Almost a thousand years after Boethius’s 524 execution, one late Medieval reader of his book—perhaps inspired by the text, or not—left the drawing you see above on the last page of a 15th century English illuminated manuscript.

Such doodling was common practice at the time, notes Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel. Blank pages in manuscripts “often filled up with pen trials, notes, doodles, or drawings.” But this particular doodle “is not what you’d expect: a full-on drawing of a maiden playing the lute, which she holds just like a guitar.” Boethius may have dismissed poetry in his search for happiness in the midst of despair, but his literary efforts might put us in mind of poet Berthold Brecht, who famously wrote while in exile from Germany in the 1930s, “In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.”

As if to remind us of the necessity not only of philosophy, but also of song in dark times, our anonymous reader drew a “rockstar lady,” whose pose connotes nothing but pure joy. We could juxtapose her with the joyful guitar poses of any number of modern blues and rock stars, who have played through any number of dark times. The drawing appears in a translation by John Walton dating from between 1410 and 1500, a century in Europe with no shortage of its own political crises and tyrannical rulers. “Even in the darkest of times,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her essay collection profiling artists and writers like Boethius and Brecht, “we have the right to expect some illumination,” whether from philosophy or poetry. We also have the right—the medieval doodler in Boethius’ book seemed to suggest some 500-odd years ago—to rock out.

via Erik Kwakkel

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Why We Need to Teach Kids Philosophy & Safeguard Society from Authoritarian Control

An Animated Introduction to Voltaire: Enlightenment Philosopher of Pluralism & Tolerance

How Leo Tolstoy Became a Vegetarian and Jumpstarted the Vegetarian & Humanitarian Movements in the 19th Century

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Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882)

Slavoj Žižek Answers the Question “Should We Teach Children to Believe in Santa Claus?”

Medieval Doodler Draws a “Rockstar Lady” in a Manuscript of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (Circa 1500)

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