To excel is to surpass. Excellence is the state of attainment at which most others are surpassed. Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. [attributed to Vince Lombardi] The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal…
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Value for Tuesday of Week 19 in the season of Growth
Reasoning
Reason is a level beyond rationality.
- To understand the world is never a matter of simply recording our immediate perceptions. Understanding inescapably involves reasoning. [Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Preface]
- When (the philosopher) is actively thinking, his life is no longer human. He has transcended (if only for a while) the sphere of human concerns, and partakes directly of the everlasting order of the world . . . [Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, p. 189.]
- The trouble with quotations on the Internet is that you never know if they are genuine. [Abraham Lincoln]
Some people say that reason is their ultimate value. That is never true. Reason serves human interests; therefore, human interests are the ultimate value. However, people who focus on reason may recognize reason’s importance in helping us to achieve our ends. Still, reason cannot tell us why we should value being happy. Happiness is a Truth revealed from within, an emotional state that reason can scarcely touch.
Reason can tell us that stopping at two drinks is more likely to lead to happiness than having ten drinks but we do not reason our way to the pleasure of a slight buzz or the misery of a hangover; residing at our emotional and sensory core, they just are. Reason can help us understand the deleterious effects of alcoholism, its demographic associations, and behavioral patterns leading to it and within it. To a point, reason can help us understand the meaning of “deleterious” but it cannot tell us the core meaning of “deleterious”: once we understand that alcoholism is associated with higher rates of disability and dysfunction, we can reason that we wish to avoid those states of affairs. At the core, however, is the emotional experience of life, which reason mainly cannot access.
“Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do.” It is “the mental faculty that enables agents to deliberate about what they ought to do and to act on the basis of such deliberation.” We use practical reason mainly in our everyday affairs, often employing the messy field of personal narrative.
“. . . theoretical reflection is concerned with matters of fact and their explanation.” “Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. It may be distinguished from theoretical reasoning, which is reasoning about what to believe.” We use theoretical reason in our everyday affairs, and also in mathematics, science, engineering, and similar fields.
“Ethical reasoning is the ability to identify, assess, and develop ethical arguments from a variety of ethical positions.” It is “a species of practical reasoning . . .”
Reason drives progress. It is essential to good mathematics, science, medicine, business, politics, art, sports, and everyday life.
Real
True Narratives
(The four chambers of the human heart) must have distinct functions, (Leonardo) argued, because they were separated by valves and membranes. “If they were one and the same, there would be no need for the valves that separate them.” [Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 415.]
The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and the United States marks the period when secularism began to displace theism. Jonathan I. Israel has authored a massive trilogy on this epochal development.
- Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2002).
- Enlightenment Contested: Enlightenment, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford University Press, 2006).
- Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Here are a few writings from early champions of reason. I classify them as narratives and not as technical writings because in content, most of these works have been discredited and replaced by more advanced scholarship.
- Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677): Ethics
- John Locke (1632-17904): “An essay concerning human understanding”
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727): Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
- Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778): numerous writings
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): numerous writings
- Denis Diderot (1713-1784): John Morley on Diderot
- Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771): A treatise on man, his intellectual faculties and his education.
- Paul Henri Thiery (Baron d’Holbach) (1723-1789): Good Sense Without God, or Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas; The System of Nature, or Laws of the Moral and Physical World; Superstition in All Ages
Matthew Lipman devoted his professional life to making children into philosophers. Convinced that adults were beyond help, he promoted and ran educational programs for teaching philosophy to children.
- Matthew Lipman, Thinking in Education (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- Matthew Lipman, Philosophy Goes to School (Temple University Press, 1988).
- Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and S. Frederick Oscanyan, Philosophy in the Classroom (Temple University Press, 1980).
- Ann Margaret Sharp and Ronald E. Reed, Eds., Studies in Philosophy for Children: Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery (Temple University Press, 1991).
Modern works on ancient history illustrate the virtue of reason because the modern historian of antiquity must draw reasoned conclusions from the available data. (Every historian must do that: rarely do the available data offer the complete picture.) The idea is not that the ancients were paragons of reason but that today's great historians must be. Read these works, then, with an eye not only on the history but on the methods of analysis.
- Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King (Basic Books, 2012).
- Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack the Ancient Code (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2013): a history of investigation into hieroglyphics.
- Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Nenderthal Love, Life, and Death, and Art (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020): “Sykes explains that Neanderthals were sophisticated and competent human beings who adapted to diverse habitats and climates.”
Here are some more modern histories from Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff.
- Vera: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov (Pan Books, Ltd., 1999).
- Cleopatra: A Life (Little, Brown & Company, 2010).
- A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Henry Holt, 2005).
- Saint-Exupéry: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1994).
Other books on reason:
- Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer (Random House, 2018): “Arthur Conan Doyle delves into a real-life crime to exonerate a convicted murderer.”
- David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon Books, 2018): The book is a detective story, of sorts.
- Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt (Riverhead, 2020): “Johnson instead uses Every’s remarkable story as the organizing principle for a kaleidoscopic rumination on the ways in which a single event, and the actions of a handful of men with no obvious access to the levers of state power, can change the course of history. Johnson argues that the attack on the Ganj-i-Sawai, which would have been an outrage in any century, takes on greater significance when seen as a crucial inflection point in the rise of the British Empire.”
- Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention (Basic Books, 2020): “Baron-Cohen argues that humans split off from all other animals to become the 'scientific and technological masters of our planet' because we evolved a unique piece of mental equipment that he calls the Systemizing Mechanism.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison, The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason (Routledge, 2020).
- Mark Greif, Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon Books, 2016): “In our dumbed-down, social-media-driven age, ‘Against Everything’ embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable.”
- Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Crown Publishers, 2015): “‘Superforecasting’ focuses on one issue: how we form theories of what will happen in the future. ‘Superforecasting’ is a sequel of sorts to Tetlock’s 2005 book ‘Expert Political Judgment,’ in which he analyzed 82,361 predictions made by 284 experts in fields like political science, economics and journalism.”
- Keiran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (Riverhead Books, 2022): “Setiya’s treatise belongs to a particular genre: brainy books for the general public that present lessons for modern living from Aristotle, Montaigne or the Stoics. Unlike with most of his predecessors, however, Setiya’s main goal is not to describe how things should be; in his view, given that there is much in life that makes us miserable, and that we can neither change nor ignore, we might as well find ways of dealing with the reality.”
On the dark side:
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011): presenting a “vision of flawed human reason”.
- Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (Columbia University Press, 2010).
- William Davies, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “We now live in a world so much in flux that it can seem as if few if any establishment institutions, with their slow and steady accumulation of knowledge, have an authoritative purchase on a volatile reality.”
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Blurring the line between documentary and dramatization, The Thin Blue Line traces a wrongful conviction and the uncovering of the truth.
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone. [Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale (1851), Chapter 5.”Breakfast”.]
What fictional works could better illustrate reason than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels?
- A Study in Scarlet (1887).
- The Sign of Four (1890).
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892).
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905).
- The Valley of Fear (1915).
- His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes (1917).
- The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).
- A Duet (D. Appleton and Company, 1899), a fictional autobiography.
In the manner of the Sherlock Holmes character:
- Hareni Nagendra, The Bangalore Detectives Club: A Novel (Pegasus Crime, 2022): “Kaveri struggles with her new life until a most unexpected event occurs at a party she and her husband attend: the murder of a man — distinctly not invited — whom she’d spotted in the gardens just an hour before. Suspicion is cast, too easily, on a preyed-upon young woman whose name Kaveri is determined to clear, relying on her wits (and her familiarity with Sherlock Holmes).”
- Simon Stephenson, Sometimes People Die: A Novel (Hanover Square Press, 2022): “. . . patients at a London hospital are dying at a rapid clip — especially ones who shouldn’t be.”
Other novels:
- Wendy Walker, What Remains: A Novel (Blackstone Publishing, 2023): “Elise’s life depends on rationality, on routine, on thinking through her problems.”
Poetry
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
[John Keats, “Ode On a Grecian Urn”: Notwithstanding the famous concluding lines, Keats considers what the urn tells us about the people who made and used it.]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Beginning in the early twentieth century, several composers took the thoughtful romanticism found in Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, in a new, ostensibly more reasoned direction, one that reflected the spirit of these then-new times. Composed in 1904, Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (1904, rev. 1905) (approx. 28-40’) (list of recorded performances), conveys the tone of post-romantic angst that would characterize the twentieth century in the developed world. This concerto may also reflect an important part of Sibelius’ life. “Sibelius wrote this concerto for a kind of ghostly self. He was a failed violinist.” “Though he took up the violin too late to realize his dream of becoming a virtuoso, Sibelius’s intimate knowledge of the instrument’s technical and expressive capabilities inform every page of the Concerto.” Top recorded performances are by Heifetz (Beecham) in 1935, Wicks (Ehrling) in 1952, Ferras (Mehta) in 1965, Oistrakh (Rozhdestvensky) in 1966, Stern (Ormandy) in 1969, Chung (Previn) in 1970, Perlman (Previn) in 1979, Mullova (Ozawa) in 1985, Lin (Sanonen) in 1987, Kavakos (Vanskä) in 1990, Dalene (Storgårds) in 2021, Jansen (Mäkelä) in 2024, and Ehnes (Gardner) in 2024.
Also composed in 1904 and similarly contemplative and thoughtful in its approach and tone (“. . . filled with virtually every technical trick in the book . . .”) is Alexander Glazunov’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 82 (1904) (approx. 20-27’) (list of recorded performances). In composing the work, Glazunov seems to have been toying with musical ideas.
- The opening movement (Moderato) begins with a suggestion of purpose but that becomes more introspective and thoughtful a little more than a minute in, a tone that pervades the remainder of the work.
- The second movement (Andante) deepens the contemplative tone, as you would expect in an Andante. As the movement continues, the most energetic passages suggest the mind busily at work exploring an idea.
- The concerto concludes with an Animando movement, which suggests the triumph of an idea, along with its continued exploration.
Top recorded performances are by Heifetz (Barbirolli) in 1934, Naiden (Schulman) in 1965, Markovici (Stokowski) in 1972, Kaler (Kolchinsky) in 1994, Rosand (Bakels) in 2007, Benedetti (Karabits) in 2015.
Sergei Prokofiev wrestled with the composition of his Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 19 (approx. 21-23’) (list of recorded performances), beginning it in 1917 (the year of the two Russian revolutions) but not completing it until the 1920s. “'Play it as though you’re trying to convince someone of something' the composer told the young David Oistrakh.” “The Concerto made an equivocal impression, the progressives finding it too conservative, the conservatives too progressive (it does, indeed, straddle two worlds).”
- The first movement (Andantino) clearly evokes the agitated concerns of people who lived through the wintry Russian climate of 1917.
- The second movement (Scherzo {Vivacissimo}) begins with an attempt at playfulness but that quickly gives way to the twisted framework of the Scherzo.
- The third movement (Animando/Allegro) opens with passages from the solo violin that suggest a mocking quality. The remainder of the movement is consumed with a struggle between the soloist and the orchestra.
Top recorded performances are by Szigeti (Beecham) in 1935, Oistrakh (Matačić) in 1954, Mintz (Abbado) in 1984, Lin (Salonen) in 1994, Vengerov (Rostropovich) in 1994, Hahn & RTVE Symphony Orchestra in 2013, Ehnes (Noseda) in 2013, Gluzman (Neeme Järvi) in 2016, Petrova (Poska) in 2017, and Hahn (Franck) in 2021.
Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 (1935) (approx. 28-33’) (list of recorded performances), reflects the internal struggles of the twentieth century, which by that time had become more obvious than when Sibelius and Glazunov composed their concerti in 1904. This work “represented what is believed to have been the future direction for USSR music, and was considered an ideal work for the composer to be armed with upon his return to the Soviet Union.” “. . . it was dangerous to compose music under Stalin. Prokofiev died of a stroke in 1953, the same hour, day, and year as Stalin, lucky not to have been one of the twenty million deaths during the Stalin regime.”
- The first movement (Allegro Moderato) is an exposition on moving forward in a challenging and often difficult world.
- The orchestra suggests a certain playfulness with the opening pizzicatos of the second movement (Andante assai) but the solo violin quickly overrides those with a plethora of questions and concerns. This interplay between orchestral playfulness and the soloist’s doubts and concerns continues throughout the movement. Was Prokofiev trying to suggest that the world offers us more than we are yet capable of appreciating?
- The third movement (Allegro, ben marcato) continues this quasi-argument of the second.
Top recorded performances are by Heifetz (Munch) in 1959, Milstein (de Burgos) in 1965, Chung (Previn) in 1972, Vengerov (Rostropovich) in 1994, Josefowicz (Dutiot) in 2001, Mullova (Previn) in 1989, Jansen (Jurowski) in 2012, Ehnes (Noseda) in 2013, Kopatchinskaya (Jurowski) in 2014, and Hadelich (Măcelaru) in 2022.
In the works by Gaspard Fritz (1716-1783), of Switzerland, you can practically hear the 18th-century Enlightenment in Europe taking place:
- Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 6/1 (> 1770) (approx. 22’)
- Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 6/2 (> 1770) (approx. 26’)
- Symphony No. 3 in G Major, Op. 6/3 (> 1770) (approx. 13’)
- Symphony No. 5 in F Major, Op. 6/5 (> 1770) (approx. 16’)
- Symphony No. 6 in G minor, Op. 6/6 (> 1770) (approx. 14’)
- Violin Concerto in E Major (ca. 1740) (approx. 18-19’)
Other works:
- Franz Joseph Haydn, Symphony No. 22 in E flat Major, Hob. I:22, “The Philosopher” (1764) (approx. 15-21’) (list of recorded performances).
- Haydn, L’anima del filosofo (The Soul of the Philosopher, or Orfeo ed Eurydice), Hob. XXVIII:13 (1791) (approx. 115-125’) (libretto), is a re-telling of the myth of Orfeo and Eurydice.
- Raga Rageshwari (Rageswari – Rageshvari – Ragesvari), a Hindustani classical raag, commonly known as the “queen of ragas”, and usually is performed late in the evening. Performances are by Shahid Parvez, Kala Ramnath and Vilayat Khan.
- Leonard Bernstein, Serenade, “After Plato’s Symposium” (1954) (approx. 30-34’) (list of recorded performances)
- James Dashow, Archimedes Suite (1988) (approx. 25’), after the Greek engineer, inventor, mathematician, physicist and astronomer
- Daniel Jones, Piano Suite in E Major, Op. 6, “Academic” (1934) (approx. 31’)
- Alberto Hemsi, The Pilpúl Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 27 (approx. 20’), “draws on ironic aspects of Talmudic argument, creating an absorbing work that incorporates elements of jazz and impressionism.”
Albums:
- Matthew Shipp Due with Joe Morris, “Thesis” (1997) (63’)
- Jordi Savall, La Capella le Reial de Catalyuna and Hespèrion XXI, “Henricus Isaac: Nell tempo di Lorenzo de’ Medici & Maximilian I, 1450-1519” (2017) (76’), “Splendour of the Humanist Renaissance before the Protestant Reformation”.
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Coldplay, “The Scientist” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of Denis Diderot (c. 1769)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Two Old Men Disputing (c. 1628)
- Peter Paul Rubens, Democritus (1603)
- Quentin Massys, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1517)
- Raphael, Philosophy, from the "Stanza della Segnatura" (ceiling tondo) (1509-11)
Film and Stage
- The Day of the Jackal, in which a police investigator “cleverly pieces together the clues to the Jackal's identity” (review)
- High and Low: police solve a kidnapping and double murder.
Few works of art, if any, have poked fun at illogic and unreason better than these two Monty Python films:
