A sharp-eyed reader noticed that I called this year-old contraption a collection of notes, that I did not use the word “blog,” and asked if I had a problem.
Yes, I do, but I can’t get my finger on it. There’s something about the diction that seems off. That word doesn’t quite get at what I’m trying to do.
I might use that word one day to describe this venture. But not today.
This collection of notes began a year ago. By now, I should be able to tell you what this is all about, and I would if I knew. If you’re reading, you’re watching a person think. Not much of an explanation, but it's the best I can do.
You cannot logically derive an ought (a value) from an is (a fact).
That’s not an empirical statement — a hypothesis that an ethicist proposed and then tested experimentally. It’s a statement about the limits of thought, a statement about logic.
The remarkable thing is that though we understand why we can’t derive an ought from an is, we do it every day. Further, we blame people who don’t. Sometimes we put them in prison.
As Paul Woodruff points out, this is the story of Achilles in the Trojan War.
Achilles, furious at a slight, sulked in his tent while the other Greeks were fighting and, without his leadership, dying. When Achilles’s best friend was killed, Achilles came to his senses.
You cannot derive an ought from an is, but everyone did. All the Greeks acknowledged that Achilles was a great warrior. But no one thought he’d done the right thing by pouting in his tent. Even Achilles finally saw the light.
If you don’t see the point of the myth, take a case from everyday reality: Imagine driving down the freeway and seeing a toddler on the side of the road, about to wander into traffic.
Are you having trouble deriving an ought (an action you should do) from the is (the fact of the toddler’s situation)?
Wittgenstein’s point to the Vienna Circle was that vital human activity occurs in areas that logic, mathematics and science simply can’t reach.
That’s the human condition: we face challenges in finding ways to live meaningfully and ethically, and we have to improvise tools of thought as we go because the laws that govern our sciences don’t help us in these cases.
That’s why we need the humanities and people to teach them and people to study them. A failure to grasp that is a spectacular failure.
I would love to have witnessed a famous moment in intellectual history: when the Vienna Circle met Wittgenstein.
The Vienna Circle was made up of mathematicians and scientists. Most were Positivists, meaning they were looking for a coherent way to state the case that science is about what really is, and that other talk — talk of arts, literature, music, aesthetics, ethics, religion, etc. — is nonsense.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus offered possibilities, they thought, in providing a theory that would divide the sheep from the goats.
When they invited Wittgenstein, the members of the Circle indeed found a person who could articulate why scientific propositions can be expressed in verifiable terms and other matters of human interest cannot.
They were delighted with Wittgenstein’s ability to illuminate the distinction between these two kinds of human activity.
They were appalled as they gradually realized that he thought they were focused on the least important kind.
Presuming to speak for Wittgenstein is hubris, but I think this is fair: Wittgenstein thought that science was an enormously important human activity. But not the most important, and not the most interesting.
I’m telling this story because, in our times, a lot of students — and teachers — are giving up on the humanities.
It’s a story I wish more people knew.
Somehow, lying in bed recovering, I remembered what Montaigne said about how the ancient Babylonians dealt with their sick.
They healthy hauled the sick to market so everyone would get to inspect them and suggest a cure.
It was medicine by helpful suggestion. Or so said Montaigne.
Montaigne’s story made me smile. No one is threatening to put me in a wheelbarrow and haul me to market. I’m grateful I can just lie in bed.
In another essay that mentions his own sickness, Montaigne said:
Many things appear greater in thought than in fact … I used to pity the sick much more than I find myself deserving of pity now that I am sick myself, and that the power of my imagination made the true essence of the actual sickness bigger by half. I hope that the same thing will happen with death and that it will not be worth all the trouble I am taking to prepare for it.
Montaigne’s imagination doesn’t work quite like mine. I imagined that having COVID would be like having a tiger by the tail, and it was for me. And though I worry needlessly about many topics, turning the possibilities over in my imagination, death isn’t one of them.
• Sources: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993. The note on Babylonian medicine is from “On the resemblance of children to their fathers,” p. 882. He pinched the story from Herodotus, but Montaigne’s version stuck in my mind. The extended quotation that mentions his illness is from “On practice,” p. 418.
A cautionary tale about letting your mask down:
I tested positive at 4 p.m. Friday and got a prescription for Paxlovid, which I started that evening. I don’t remember much of Saturday, a feverish and dreamy day, something out of a Katherine Anne Porter story.
I was weak but at least partly lucid Sunday. I saw the brilliant young doctor Monday.
I suggested that having the virus was like diving into the sea on a moonless night — so dark it can be hard to find the surface. She corrected my metaphor: my case was a quick, steep dive and a quick return to the surface, made possible by vaccinations and Paxlovid.
What I learned:
• If in doubt, use your test kit provided by the government. Use it sooner, rather than later. Eliminate the doubt.
• If the test is positive, call the doctor and ask specifically for Paxlovid or a similar drug. Take it immediately. A quick response means a quick return to the surface.
• Keep some throat lozenges in the medicine cabinet. I thought I was up on COVID. But I was surprised by the severity of the sore throat. Even trying to swallow was painful. Symptoms vary, of course. But if your symptoms turn out to be like mine, you’ll be proud of that sack of lozenges, as we say in Texas.
• Keep a carton of orange juice or some other source of vitamin C in the icebox. I knew that people with the virus tend to dehydrate. But, even with that knowledge, I had trouble getting enough fluids down.
A few days before I got sick, I’d had truck trouble and had to call for a tow. The driver, who wasn’t wearing a mask, said he was surprised to see that I was. He said he hadn’t seen anyone wearing a mask in a long time.
Being careful doesn't make you bulletproof. The virus is everywhere. As my doctor says, that’s what “pandemic” means. But it’s not a bad idea — certainly not a silly idea — to cut your risks as much as you can.
A bit more on Lorraine Hansberry’s point about the values that come through the culture.
Guy Davenport put it this way: “Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted.”
Consider just a few of the things that came through the culture when I was a boy:
I’m old enough to remember legal segregation, the separate drinking fountains at the courthouse. You were required to believe what obviously was false: that this country treated people of African descent with justice.
I’m old enough to remember half-literate but fully-frenzied preachers giving detailed accounts of the Judgment Day, with emphasis on the Lake of Fire. You had to believe all that was literally true. But you had to believe, at the same time, that the snake-handling preachers in the river bottoms were religious fanatics.
There were impossibly difficult rules you just had to absorb. A Davenport example: You could talk about movies, but had remember which people you were talking to. Some people thought you were going to hell if you went to the picture show, and that the hellfire might be catching.
I’m talking as if this unhinged reality were in the past. I still witness the most casual acts of racism. And millions of Southerners believe Trump won the election.
Lorraine Hansberry’s point was that when you are thinking about a fictional or dramatic character, you have to keep thinking until you get to values that did not come from the culture.
The stuff that comes through the culture is the stuff you have to endure. It doesn’t get interesting until you get beyond it.
