Tag Archives: sports

The consolations and pleasures of philosophy

05 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in External Goods, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Patient Endurance, Play, Pleasure, Serenity, Stoicism

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The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has been a struggle for everyone, and some more than others. It has been a heartbreak for those who have lost loved ones, a terror for those who have lost jobs, and a great struggle for those who must suddenly take care of their children full-time while simultaneously trying to do their full-time jobs as well.

I am lucky not to have fallen into any of these three troubled categories – yet, at least. But I have noticed how difficult these times have been even for others who share my relatively lucky position – simply because everything is cancelled. We may not have parties. We may not go out to eat. We may not go to the movies. We may not travel, not without severe quarantine restrictions. We may not play sports; we may not even watch sports. We may not watch, or play, live music. Most of our social interactions must be through a medium where we cannot tell whether others are looking at us or at something else on their screen. Even as we recognize others’ difficulties are considerably greater, this is all still a major loss of the things we love.

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Putting intimacy/integrity back together

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Play, Work

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Last week I submitted Thomas Kasulis’s dichotomy of intimacy and integrity worldviews to critical scrutiny. I pointed out the distinction between the epistemological element on one hand, in which intimacy knowledge is somatic and affective while integrity is self-reflective and public, and the ontological element on the other, in which intimacy sees the world as composed of internal relations and integrity sees it as made up of external relations. I noted Hegel appears to have an intimacy ontology and an integrity epistemology, while the Pali Buddhist texts appear to be the opposite – suggesting that rather than speaking of intimacy and integrity as a unity, perhaps we should break them up.

And yet while one can separate the two elements of these ideal types in this way, I suspect that one shouldn’t – because they turn out to have a deep logical relation to each other. It is one that I think Kasulis tends to leave unstated, partially because he doesn’t split up these two elements in the first place. Continue reading →

Of novels, politics, and being Gretchen

15 Sunday May 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Food, Happiness, Place, Pleasure, Politics, Virtue

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In Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project – an attempt to learn as many ideas about happiness as possible and try them all out to see what worked – she found that the first commandment of happiness was to “Be Gretchen.” That is, even (or especially) while striving for constant self-improvement, she needed to accept her own tastes, recognize what genuinely gave her pleasure and what didn’t, rather than what she wished would give her pleasure. For example, she needed to realize that the pleasures of good food and music mostly did nothing for her, but she adored children’s literature of all kinds.

The example intrigues me because I’m the exact opposite. Continue reading →

The tennis player’s paradox

08 Wednesday Sep 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Physical Exercise, Play

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A little while ago, I wrote about the paradoxes of hedonism and consequentialism: if you try too hard to be happy, it may stop you from being so; more generally a belief in always achieving the best consequences may itself stop you from achieving the best consequences. I said a little bit in the earlier post about Peter Railton‘s defence of consequentialism in spite of this paradox, but there’s more to be added. I’ve talked before about how consequentialism requires us to lie to ourselves; Railton is rightly concerned with the further problem that consequentialism requires us to lie to ourselves about consequentialism.

Railton distinguishes between “subjective” and “objective” consequentialism, which works something like the distinction between act- and rule- utilitarianism. A subjective consequentialist examines each decision according to the question “which action in this case will bring about the best overall consequences?” and acts accordingly. The subjective consequentialist, according to Railton, can be subject to a paradox: a person who always thinks this way may actually end up with worse consequences. (A possible example: each time one lies to murderers at the door may individually seem like it produces a better consequence, but if one does it repeatedly, one may no longer be believed, in a way that makes one less likely to achieve future good results.) An objective consequentialist tries to get around the paradox by following the pattern of behaviour that would on the whole bring about the best consequences, even if that means not thinking about each action in consequentialist terms.

Railton gives a helpful example of a simpler case that, I think, both illustrates and undermines his point: Continue reading →

Yoga in the news

22 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in French Tradition, Jainism, Physical Exercise, Politics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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The term yoga tends to be awkward for students of Indian philosophy today. Traditionally in Sanskrit, yoga meant something like “spiritual exercises” in Pierre Hadot’s sense – practices intended to transform oneself. The term has this sense in the work most often associated with it, the Yoga Sūtras attributed to Patañjali. There yoga is a set of eight practices: vows of self-restraint (yamas, the same ones as in the Jain tradition, and very similar to the Buddhist Five Precepts); ethical observances (niyamas); bodily postures (āsanas); breath control (prāṇayāma); withdrawal of the senses (pratyāhāra); concentration (dharana); meditation (dhyāna); and meditative concentration (samādhi). The goal of all this is to reach a state of “aloneness” (kaivalya, again similar to Jainism) – a state in which one has transcended the world and merely observes it, a super-Cartesian subject detached from all the objects of observation. (In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, Patañjali’s yoga has a stronger integrity orientation than just about anything in Western thought.)

But none of this tends to come to mind when most Westerners think about “yoga” today. In English, the term has come to mean nothing more than the third of the eight practices, the āsanas or postures – perhaps occasionally with some of the fourth (breath control) attached to them. One might add some meditative practices as well, but certainly not with the intent of reaching kaivalya, a goal that would freak out hippie Westerners enthused about “interdependence.” The point is merely a limber body, and perhaps a slightly more disciplined mind – the philosophy of yoga has become a mere technique, a theme that pervaded this year’s conference of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy.

But even those who have made yoga into a technique have started to become uncomfortable with the idea. Two recent American news articles highlight the issue. Continue reading →