Environmental Ethics: Note to Self:

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Note to Self:

Note to self: write essay on hope and despair, and how to be happy in the face of the end of human civilization as we know it. Discuss first what we mean when we talk of being “happy.” Distinguish between moments of pleasure or positive emotions and tranquility and eudaimonia. Discuss how stoic philosophy can help us reduce our anxiety about the future and all the possible consequences of failure to address the causes of climate change. [Be sure to address those who see stoicism as just passive acceptance of the state of the world. Here would be a good place to discuss John Lacks’s Stoic Pragmatism, the idea of committing ourselves to making life better until our powers are overwhelmed, and then surrendering to the inevitable without complaint.] Review the history of the philosophy of hope, from Plato to Descartes/Hobbes/Spinoza to Kant to Nietzsche to James. Finish with a full discussion of Spinoza’s theory on emotions and how to control them; call it Stoic Spinozism.

Elaborate further on Spinoza's understanding of what the emotions of hope and confidence and despair and fear are. Show how The Ethics demonstrates why emotion leads to pain and sadness, and how we can use the power of our own reasoning to overcome that sadness. Base it on your essay The Metaphysical Basis for Pandemic Coping Advice.

https://1drv.ms/b/s!Ao604sECdB1Upi5qWi4sjQ8KAa4b?e=kuYu4S

Stress how using reason to develop (self-cause) active emotions, as opposed to externally caused passive emotions, can increase our power to act and affect others. Address here Spinoza and free will. Explain your opinion that, while he held that we are 100% determined by the laws of nature, and that he wrote that “the will is a particular mode of thinking,” not a free cause, that doesn’t mean that thinking doesn’t lead to action.

Use this comment from Dr. Bombardi: “Choosing to ride one's bicycle to school … rather than to drive, and thus add to the smog, is a particular mode of thinking; thinking thusly is a consequence of a chain of earlier thoughts, each of which is an expression of Nature … under the attribute of Thought, and parallel to chains of events in the attribute of Extension. In the end, Spinoza would remind us that we love those things we think of as causes of our pleasure (our happiness) and we hate those things we think of as causes of our pain and distress (our unhappiness). We will likewise inevitably (by dint of the conatus [desire for self-preservation] in us all) pursue what we love and aver what we hate. Let us begin loving science and hating superstition. What we do is simply a reflection of what we actually love/hate, and what we love/hate follows from what and how well we think rationally.”

Weekly Participation Summary

10/06 This post

10/07 Discussion question and comment on white collar crime

10/08 Comment on Just Keep Swimming

Week Seven Point Total – 5

Seven Week Cumulative Point Total – 35

2 comments:

PhilOctober 6, 2020 at 9:17 PM
That's an ambitious memo, Ed, I really look forward to that essay!

The "we" in that last paragraph has to begin, of course, as an "I"... each of us is tasked to become the change, in hopes of inspiring and mobilizing an effective "we" -- so, may the force be with US.
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Tyler BrooksOctober 8, 2020 at 9:03 PM
Well Ed, I another way to make yourself happy would be to list out what you are grateful for here in the present. It always amazes me doing this seems to brighten up my day.
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NOV 5 GT 5.15--5.21 (thru Mending...Earth). McK thru Terry Tempest Williams. Final report presentations begin... NOV 7 GT 5.22 (Hope... What Next?). McK thru Ellen Meloy... NOV 12 MacA Part I-The Long View. McK thru Jack Turner... NOV 14 MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes. McK thru David Quammen... A NOTE ON OUR TEXTS. This is an ambitious reading schedule. Read what you can, prioritizing the texts in descending order: first-listed assignment for each class gets top priority, second gets 2d, and so on... Fall 2024: HONORS BUILDING 116, T/Th 4:20 pm

TEXTS Fall '24

First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

Note to Self:

2 comments:

Peripatetics