living life as a story

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Peter

Thesis: It is better to live as if one’s life were a story, yet many people cannot live that way.

A conventional story has a finite number of named characters, many of whom know many of the rest. These characters have constraints and limitations, but they also face at least some consequential choices. The choices they make contribute to the plot. Their choices tend to be related to their inner lives: their beliefs, desires, and character traits. Although they may spend most of their time separately and quietly, the narrative emphasizes their interactions. In fact, dialogue occupies much of a conventional novel and all the text of a play or a screenplay. In biographies and narrative histories, quotations from speech may be shorter, but they are are often prominent. What the characters think, do, and say is noticed and preserved–at least by the narrator, and usually by some of their fellow characters.

We can feel that our lives are like this, and we can be correct about it. Or we can feel (rightly or wrongly) that this is not how we live. Here are some threats to living as if in a story:

Modern economies (capitalist or socialist) that organize masses of workers so that each one feels little agency, while many live so precariously that they cannot make consequential decisions.
State tyranny, which not only blocks consequential choices and suppresses frank discussion but also invades the private spaces in which people could develop independent beliefs and values.
Hypertrophied science and technology, which make human behavior appear mechanical and predictable, or which actually control human beings.
Bureaucracy, which minimizes individual agency by applying rules, metrics, and files.
Ideologies, in the pejorative sense of all-encompassing theories that explain individual choices away or that replace human characters with abstractions, such as classes or nations, as the major protagonists.
Loneliness or isolation, meaning the absence of the interactions that would constitute a conventional story.
A lack of solitude, an inner life that can be described in a narrative and connected to overt actions.
Catastrophes, which wipe out the memories of characters and their actions.

(On that last point, Jonathan Lear writes:

Not long ago, I listened to a lecture on climate change. The lecture went as one might expect. There was a warning of impending ecological catastrophe and talk of the “Anthropocene,” suggesting that our age—the age in which humans dominate the Earth—is coming to an end. At the end of the talk, there was a discussion period. At one point, a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.

Lear develops the idea that missing or mourning things is a distinctively human contribution; and it is ineffably sad that no one would miss homo sapiens, even if we cause our own extinction, and even if other species would be better off without us. It means that all the stories would be gone.)

I think many of us assume that our lives are like stories and that some other people notice and remember our roles in them. For us, the evaluative questions are: How is this story turning out? And what kind of a character am I? I would rather live in a comedy than in a tragedy, and I aspire to be the hero rather than the villain in my own little patch.

However, I think the main thrust of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy is that there is an antecedent question: Am I in a story at all? (See, e.g., The Human Condition, chapter v.) I believe she would say that it is better to be the villain in a tragedy than not to inhabit any kind of story, and that most modern people no longer do. The list of threats (above) comes directly from her work.

Note that this is a different ideal from the common one of authorship. For instance, Immanuel Kant defines ethical individuals as the authors of the rules that govern them:

The will is therefore not merely subjected to the law, but in such a way that it must also be regarded as self-legislating, and precisely for that reason must it be subject to the law (of which it can consider itself the author [als Urheber]).

In contrast, Arendt writes:

Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author (The Human Condition, p. 184)

For her, politics is the domain where people are characters but there is no author. This is a result of plurality: there are many of us, and no one (not even a dictator) can solely determine the outcomes.

Jürgen Habermas holds a generally similar view but presents all the citizens of a community as its authors (in the plural):

According to the republican view, the status of citizens is not determined by the model of negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claim as private persons. Rather, political rights—preeminently rights of political participation and communication—are positive liberties. They guarantee not freedom from external compulsion but the possibility of participation in a common praxis, through the exercise of which citizens can first make themselves into what they want to be—politically autonomous authors of a community of free and equal persons.

Authors and characters are metaphors, not literal descriptions. As such, they capture certain compelling ideas without fully describing reality. Here I want to suggest that the metaphor of characters draws our attention to urgent issues. We need social, political, and intellectual reforms to enable more people to live like characters in stories. These reforms require intentional action. We must be the authors of contexts in which people can be characters.

Sources: Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022, p. 1); Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (my trans.); Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton University Press, 1996). p. 22. See also: Hilary Mantel and Walter Benjamin; Kieran Setiya on midlife; a vivid sense of the future; the coincidences in Romola; and Freud on mourning the past.

a vivid sense of the future

Posted on February 6, 2026 by Peter

My conception of the relatively distant future is almost empty. How things will be in 20 years, or 50–I have no idea. I am not motivated or inspired by any such vision.

Walter Benjamin would not approve. He concludes his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with these words:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

According to Benjamin, history was not linear for the ancient Hebrews. Studying the past revealed a future that could suddenly appear in the present. For them, the future was not empty. Nor were they like “soothsayers” who make predictions by studying current trends–like today’s pundits who project a magical, technological future based on what they observe today. The future for the ancient Jews was something radically different from the present yet foretold by the past, if you read it right.

Benjamin is thinking of the Hebrew prophets. For example, the Lord gives Amos a message to convey to the rich and powerful:

^5:11Therefore because you trample on the poor
    and you exact taxes of grain from him,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
    but you shall not dwell in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
    but you shall not drink their wine.
¹²For I know how many are your transgressions
    and how great are your sins—
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
    and turn aside the needy in the gate.

A bit later, the Lord adds a hortatory or imperative sentence:

²⁴But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Such sentences from the Lord can have direct consequences, as in “God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” He then promises to shake the house of Israel, “as one shakes a sieve,” except that no pebble will make it through this shaking:

¹⁰All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword,
who say, ‘Disaster shall not overtake or meet us.’

This is not only a prediction (certain people will die) but also an instruction (stop denying your faults). Then comes a much more positive promise:

¹¹“In that day I will raise up
    the booth of David that is fallen
and repair its breaches,
    and raise up its ruins
    and rebuild it as in the days of old …

This is a vivid vision of the future–the text goes on for many verses describing it– brought into the present to serve a purpose. Amos’ prophesy is both a prediction and an exhortation. It chastises the wicked and comforts the oppressed.

Here is a quote from another text which–like the Hebrew Bible–impressed Walter Benjamin. It is Das Kapital (from the afterward of the second German edition)

With me [in contrast to Hegel], the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. …

In its rational form [dialectics] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.

Marx is saying, on the one hand, that he simply studies “the existing state of things.” As a hard-headed scientist, he knows that the world is material and governed by laws. However, his analysis also reveals the “negation of that state,” an infinitely better future. This makes his text “critical and revolutionary.”

Benjamin begins his “Theses” with the famous story of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th-century automaton that appeared to be a machine capable of winning at chess. Actually, there was a man inside who pulled the strings. Benjamin says, “One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.”

Marxism can be interpreted as historical materialism. As a rigid system, it is unfalsifiable–“it can win all the time.” It is also inert, because human agency isn’t needed to bring about the future. It works like a machine and assumes that history is mechanical. Benjamin suggests, however, that Marxism is really a religion–in a good way. Its power is prophesy. Like the Torah, it instructs people in remembrance, conjures a future into the present, and inspires us to act.

I take my own bearings neither from Amos nor from Marx, yet I appreciate Benjamin’s idea that historical time is not linear. By acting politically, we change the meaning of the past and bring an imagined future into the now (Benjamin’s Jetztzeit). When we lose the capacity to envision a radically better future, we abandon our agency to impersonal forces.

The Way of Skepticism

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Peter

Here is a pitch for a book that I have finished drafting, with the title The Way of Skepticism:

In 2025, I was invited to give philosophy lectures in Kyiv, Ukraine (on the day of the third-worst bombardment in the war so far) and then at two Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank. In both settings, I spoke as a philosopher and essentially made the following argument:

There are no answers to questions that have sometimes been thought to provide a basis for overall happiness, such as “What is the purpose of human life?”

You might expect that someone who teaches or writes about philosophy will offer ideas that you should believe. Famous philosophers and religious traditions have recommended various beliefs as the foundations of a happy life.

But beliefs are easily overrated, especially when we use them to assess a person’s authority or character. A strong attachment to beliefs can distort judgment, inhibit listening, and substitute for action. Disagreement about beliefs produces unnecessary distress and hostility. On the other hand, suspending the search for such truths can bring valuable relief if we renounce the pursuit in a wise way.

We can experience good things, such as pleasure and justice. These experiences are real enough, but there is no reason to presume that they fit neatly together, so that (for example) being fair to others will surely bring inner peace.

Paying close attention to particular people and animals, both oneself and others, reinforces skepticism about general matters, such as the purpose or the nature of life, by reminding us how different everything must seem to creatures who have different bodies and who experience different circumstances.

A focus on individual people and animals also encourages compassion for them. Genuine compassion spurs action on their behalf. And a life infused with compassion and beneficial action is better than one without those things, although it does not guarantee happiness.

There is an important difference between fact and error. Valuable information can be discovered, stored, shared, and revised collectively and can guide action. The problem is not knowledge (a social good) but individuals’ adherence to beliefs.

Skepticism does not imply that reality is only what can be empirically observed. Human understanding is limited, and reality exceeds what our minds can grasp. Skepticism can coexist with religious faith. It is not a theory of reality but a practical way for finite, fallible beings to navigate a world of suffering.

Skepticism about beliefs does not imply moral relativism. We make good and bad decisions. Ethical responsibility arises most powerfully in face-to-face encounters with other people. Being present with others creates moral demands. Decisions to act or to be present should arise from invitations and relationships. We should be committed to people (and animals), not to beliefs.

My lectures had mixed success, for reasons that I discuss in the manuscript. In neither setting would it have been appropriate for me to share a much longer argument. In the book, I offer more detail.

First, I ground the general points summarized above in a rich intellectual tradition. This tradition begins with the ancient Skeptical School (represented by Pyrrho of Ellis and Sextus Empiricus). Their arguments were intriguingly similar to portions of the classical Buddhist Pali Canon, which I also interpret and discuss.

Renaissance authors rediscovered Sextus’ work, and Michel de Montaigne developed a version of Greek Skepticism while drawing on other sources and adding his own insights. Montaigne did not know anything about Buddhism, but his commitment to compassion made his form of Skepticism resemble the Pali Canon as much as it resembled Sextus. Montaigne’s Essays suggested Skeptical themes to Shakespeare, which echo in John Keats and several modern authors for whom either Montaigne or Shakespeare have been touchstones.

I believe that my position benefits from close readings of Montaigne and some of his predecessors and influences, because these thinkers are complex and persuasive.

Second, the ancient Skeptics did not simply offer arguments in favor of Skepticism. (In fact, as they acknowledged, an argument against belief would risk self-contradiction). More usefully, they practiced and taught methods or meditative exercises that could reduce our level of belief in beneficial ways. Sextus offers several lists of these “modes” (the standard translation of his word for such methods), reaching a maximum of 10 in one text. Montaigne practices some of Sextus’ modes and discusses other ways that he has pursued equanimity.

In modern European authors and in some Mahayana Buddhist texts, I have found mental exercises that are fundamentally consistent with ancient Skepticism but more appropriate for our period. The bulk of my manuscript presents ten such modern Skeptical “modes”:

Don’t strive to be original but think vividly. This method involves acknowledging that our best beliefs are often clichés (which is a specifically modern complaint). Seeing a belief as a cliché reduces our attachment to it without making us negate it.
Adjust your relationship with the past and the future. This method involves identifying problematic mental states, such as dread and nostalgia, that depend on beliefs about time that we can challenge.
Learn from shifting moods. Sextus and Montaigne try to shake our commitment to beliefs by showing that they depend on the mood that we happen to be in. Science offers methods that are supposed to combat all form of subjective bias, including moods; however, science cannot reveal what is good or right. Drawing on Heidegger, I argue that we can derive specific insights from each mood (because it is one way for us to be in the world), while also loosening our commitment to the beliefs associated with any given mood.
Appreciate being oneself. Montaigne is a great student of his own experience, a phenomenologist before that word was coined. He gains happiness from this exploration. (“There is no description so hard, nor so profitable, as the description of a man’s own self.”) The goal of Do-It-Yourself phenomenology is not to discover general truths that will make us happy or better once we believe in them. Instead, DIY phenomenology can reveal complexities, mysteries, and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.
Consider the boundaries of experience. Sextus and Montaigne emphasize that the world that we consider objective is actually contingent on whatever senses, values, and reasoning powers we happen to have. A different creature must inhabit a different world. The Zen master Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), William Blake, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein derived consolation from realizing that the world infinitely exceeds our capacity to know it; and we can learn from them.
Don’t try to be perfect but appreciate the turn toward it. Let’s define a “sublime” experience as something far better than our usual life. From a classical Skeptical perspective, sublime experiences are neither true (revealing that the world is really better than it seems) nor false (as if we merely imposed our wishes on reality). Sublime experiences are simply experiences among others, but they are much more enjoyable. Therefore, we should seek them out.
Recognize others in sublime experiences:Many modern views of the sublime are highly individualistic. They assume that anything of spiritual value must be timeless and can be appreciated by a lone individual who is in the right frame of mind. But we always learn what to value from other people, both living and dead. A sublime experience depends on the particular people who have influenced its creator and its audiences. This is a Skeptical point, suggesting that we would find different things beautiful and moving if we had different backgrounds. But it also gives us an opportunity to be grateful to the people who have shaped our values, and this gratitude can deepen our sublime experiences.
Do things for their own sake. Many authors and even whole traditions offer the same valid advice: focus on doing the right thing, not on whether it has the intended outcomes. Derive satisfaction from the act, not its goal. I justify this advice in a Skeptical way and turn it into a “mode.” First try to identify morally good actions and then view them as intrinsically valuable ways of being, not as means to any end.
Be compassionate (not sympathetic). Montaigne is a great proponent and exemplar of compassion. Properly understood, compassion is not a mirroring of someone else’s emotions, so that if they are angry, we must also feel anger. It is a specific emotion that can be positive (or at least calm) and must result in action. I draw on Buddhist texts and Emmanuel Levinas to present a view of compassion that is compatible with Skepticism.
Decide what to do in conversation. Perhaps the most serious criticism of Skepticism is that it may discourage action. If we have no beliefs, then why should we do anything? Yet many people suffer, and we should help them. As Sextus and Montaigne emphasize, we have limited intellectual capacities and unreliable motives. Besides, as individuals, we cannot accomplish much. To put it bluntly, we are both stupid and weak. But we do have other people around us. By listening, talking, and working with others and reflecting on the results, we can make ourselves at least a bit wiser and stronger. Even when a group errs, we are at least in solidarity with the other members.

We live in a period of polarization and conflict, including several cruel wars. These challenges have political causes and require political solutions. Becoming a Skeptic is not a solution to such problems, but it is a way for an individual to navigate our current world with a dose of sanity and responsibility.

This book is also an argument for practicing the humanities–the disciplines that interpret human culture–to improve one’s inner life and one’s relationships with other human beings and animals. Reading for pleasure is in decline. The academic humanities are under political attack for being (allegedly) leftwing and economically unprofitable. And reading and writing risk being replaced by artificial intelligence. This book argues that engagement with texts can improve the inner life, but it also justifies other modes, including ones that require no texts.

(Revised for clarity on 1/7.) See also: three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne; consider the octopus; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; notes from the West Bank; etc.

in praise of John Florio

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Peter

I find myself nearly finished writing a book whose hero is Michel de Montaigne. In the manuscript, I quote him many times. I have read large swaths of his Essays in M.A. Screech’s translation, which is learned and reliable (and good English prose). I translate the passages that concern me most. But sometimes I also turn to John Florio’s 1603 translation, which was hugely influential. Shakespeare had the same publisher as Florio and drew heavily on Montaigne, probably using Florio’s translation.

Florio is not always as literal as I need for my purpose (closely reading Montaigne), but he is an excellent writer.

Consider, for example, a passage from “De Mesnager sa Volonté” (or “How one ought to governe his will” in Florio’s translation). I will first offer a summary, interpolating my own translations, and then show what Florio does with with the text.

The passage begins with Montaigne saying that he no longer wants to improve himself. “It’s almost better never to become an honest man than to do so so late, and certainly better to learn how to live when you no longer have a life to live. I, who am about to depart, would gladly pass on to someone who comes after me the lessons of prudence I’ve learned in dealing with the world. Mustard after dinner.”

He mentions the recent change to the Gregorian Calendar, a reform that has “eclipsed” ten days. He says that it depresses him, and he finds himself clinging to the old ways even though it makes him feel a bit like a heretic. He convinces himself that the reform is not for him but for those who will follow after he has died. He may keep “counting” the days as he has. He explains, “In short, here I am, finishing this man, not remaking another. Through long use, this form has passed into substance for me, and fortune into nature.”

I think Montaigne means both that the old calendar, which was a flawed human invention, has become a natural truth for him—and also that all the experiences that have accidentally turned him into Michel de Montaigne have become his substance and nature. “I say, therefore, that each of us, in our weakness, should be excused for considering as our own what is comprised within this measure. But also, beyond these limits, there is nothing but confusion.”

Now consider Florio’s version:

I will say this by way of example; that the eclipsing or abridging of tenne dayes, which the Pope hath lately caused, hath taken me so lowe, that I can hardly recover my selfe. I followe the yeares, wherein we were wont to compt otherwise. So long and ancient a custome doth chalenge and recall me to it againe. I am thereby enforced to be somewhat an heretike: Incapable of innovation, though corrective. My imagination maugre my teeth runnes still tenne dayes before, or tenne behinde; and whispers in mine eares: This rule toucheth those, which are to come. If health it selfe so sweetely-pleasing, comes to me but by fittes, it is rather to give mee cause of griefe, than possession of it selfe. I have no where left me to retire it. Time forsakes me; without which nothing is enjoyed. How small accompt should I make of these great elective dignities I see in the worlde, and which are onely given to men, ready to leave the world! wherein they regarde not so much how duelie they shall discharge them, as how little they shall exercise them: from the beginning they looke to the end. To conclude, I am ready to finish this man, not to make another. By long custome, this forme is changed into substance, and Fortune into Nature. I say therefore, that amongst us feeble creatures, each one is excusable to compt that his owne, which is comprehended under this measure. And yet all beyond these limites, is nothing but confusion.

Florio sees a theme here about “counting” and uses that verb (“compt” or “accompt”) three times. There is no similar echo in Montaigne’s French text, but this is a lovely way to convey the author’s argument.

Likewise, Florio’s “hath taken me so lowe, that I can hardly recover my selfe” allows him to foreshadow the discussion of Montaigne’s “self” that is coming soon, although the word is not in the original (“m’ont prins si bas que je ne m’en puis bonnement accoustrer.”)

Screech ably translates a sentence as “I grit my teeth [a modern idiom], but my mind is always ten days ahead or ten days behind; it keeps muttering in my ears” (p. 1143). However, Florio’s language is more pungent: “My imagination maugre my teeth runnes still tenne dayes before, or tenne behinde; and whispers in mine eares.”

why policy debates continue

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Peter

I’m at Stanford today to discuss a paper, Policy Models as Networks of Beliefs. After circulating my draft, I realized that the following is really my argument. …

We use mental models to think about and discuss contested questions of policy. Worthy models typically have these features:

They have many components, not just a few. A model might include a causal inference, such as “spending more on x produces better outcomes.” But those two components (the spending and the outcomes) must be part of a much larger model that also explains why certain outcomes are valuable, where the money would come from, what else effects the system, and so on.
The components should be connected, and the resulting structure matters. Structures can take various forms (e.g., root-cause analysis, vicious cycles). There is no single best structure.
Pieces of models may prove regular. For instance, maybe spending more on x regularly produces better outcomes, all else considered. But such regularities only apply to small aspects of good models. The science-like effort to find regularities can only get us so far.
Some components of any worthy model should be values or normative claims. Some normative components have regular significance in all models. However, many value components change their significance depending on the context. Equality, for example, does not consistently mean the same thing and may not always be desirable.
If a model proves influential, it can change the world, which can require a new model. For example, arguing that more money should be spent on X could cause more funds to be allocated to X, at which point it would no longer be wise to increase the funding. Models are dynamic in this sense.

I believe this account supports a pluralistic, polycentric, pragmatist, and deliberative approach to policymaking, as opposed to a positivistic one.

from empathy toward compassion

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Peter

The English words empathy, sympathy, and compassion are used inconsistently; a dictionary will not sort them out.* For this discussion, I will posit the following definitions:

Empathy: An imaginative identification with someone else’s emotion. This is not just a belief that another person’s feels a certain way, but a kind of mirroring of the feeling. For example, if you are angry, and I empathize with you, then I “feel” your anger in some respect and to some degree. My feeling is embodied, affecting things like my heart rate and my involuntary facial expressions as well as any beliefs that I may express or privately think. Empathy can be positive if it mirrors a positive emotion. It is always partial and concrete. I can empathize with a person’s specific feeling or with the shared feeling of a group of people. I could empathize with many different people’s feelings, but only one by one, just as I can only hear one person’s story at a time.
Sympathy: An emotion provoked by someone else’s emotion. It is not a mirroring but a different feeling that arises in response. For example, if you are angry, and I sympathize, then I am sad that you are angry. The phrase “sympathetic joy” makes sense in English and covers situations when your fortunate condition triggers a positive feeling in me. However, this phrase almost always translates the Sanskrit or Pali word mudita. Without a modifier, the English word sympathy connotes a negative feeling, something akin to sadness or even pity. Like empathy, it is concrete and partial. I can sympathize for you in your loss, but not for everyone at once.
Compassion: an emotion that responds to someone else’s suffering, but it is not similar to the other person’s feeling, nor is it negative. It is calm and purposive. To be compassionate is to will that the other’s suffering ceases; and to will something seriously means being prepared to act accordingly. I don’t think it makes sense in English to be compassionate for someone else’s happiness, only for their suffering. We can use the English word for an emotion that is impartial and general, such as the attribute of God that is named in the first verse of the Quran or the Buddhist concept of karuna. Thus, if you are angry, I can compassionately desire that your anger cease along with the anger of your enemy and whatever is causing both. It is theoretically possible to feel compassion for all sentient beings, even though it would make no sense to empathize with all of them at once.

Against sympathy

Let’s say that I am angry or otherwise suffering. I may want you to empathize, sympathize, and feel compassion for me. I may want you to feel bad because I do. And I may want your feelings to be partial: Sympathize with me!

These desires are human frailties. Ethically, I should only want you to be compassionate. Asking you to feel my pain just expands the amount of suffering. Besides, you cannot really feel what I do, just a dim reflection of it or a different form of distress. Neither of us should fool ourselves that you can feel my pain, as if that were even desirable.

Empathy and sympathy are unreliable guides to good action. Perhaps you will wallow in your pity for me, or give yourself credit for feeling bad, or—worse—allow your partial feelings about me to negate other people’s valid interests. Politicians often stir up sympathy for favored groups to make us hate other people, and they succeed because sympathy is partial.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca didn’t write about any of the three words that I defined earlier, because none of those were available in classical Latin. But he criticizes misericordia, and although that word is normally translated as “pity,” it sounds a lot like sympathy. He calls it “a sickness of the soul due to the sight of others’ suffering, or a sadness caused by someone else’s misfortunes which one believes to be undeserved.”

For Seneca, misericordia is a sickness, and “no sickness can affect a wise man, for his mind is serene and nothing can get through to it that he guards against.” Therefore, a wise person does not feel misericordia. For Seneca, “it is impossible to be both great and sad.” Even in a disaster, a wise one maintains “the same appearance—quiet, firm—which he couldn’t do if he were overcome with sadness.”

Seneca warns that pity prevents effective planning in the interests of the person whom we may want to help. “A wise person discerns the future and makes decisions without interference, yet nothing clear and lucid can flow from turbulence. Sadness is unfitted for discerning circumstances, planning useful tasks, evading dangers, weighing equities. Therefore, the [wise person] will not feel pity, because there cannot be pity without suffering of the soul [De Clementia (2.5.4-2.6.4, my trans.]

Compassion as a virtue

Seneca’s idea of disinterested benign sentiments that we exercise freely and with a tranquil mind [2.6.2, 2.6.3] could translate the Sanskrit word karuna, which is fundamental in Buddhism. Seneca also relates this virtue to a political idea: equal standing and a common claim on the public good. A great-souled person

will reach a hand to the drowning, welcome the exile, donate to the poor, not in the abusive way of most people who want to be seen as pitying—they toss something and flinch in disgust at those whom they aid, as if they feared to touch them—but as a man gives to a man from the common pool. He will return the child to the weeping mother, unfasten chains, save people from [gladiatorial] games, and even bury the stinking body, but he will do these things with a tranquil mind, of his own will. Thus the wise person will not pity but will assist and be of use, having been born to help all and for the public good, from which he will distribute shares to all.

Even though Seneca addresses his book On Clemency to the Emperor Nero, I think that in this passage, he describes a republican virtue, appropriate for relations among equal citizens who co-own a commonwealth.

I can wish that you feel compassionate without wishing any harm on you, because compassion is a tranquil state that anyone can welcome. A compassionate person is not exposed to chance. If we feel worse as another person worsens, and better as he improves, then we demonstrate sympathy, which subjects us to fate. But compassion remains unchanged regardless of the state of the sufferer.

In fact, to the extent that a person is absorbed in compassion, that person’s own negative emotional states recede. While willing the end of other people’s suffering, we are not desiring concrete things for ourselves, and so we escape from the inevitable frustrations of a selfish will.

Quiet is his wisdom,
Calm his emotion,
Serene and firm his reasoning.
His will has departed. His self-consciousness has been abolished,
Making him serene.

(Lotus Sutra, translated by Reeves, 2014)

It is no accident that the Boddhisatva of Compassion is depicted with a serene expression.

One pitfall is to attach one’s happiness to accomplishing the relief of other people’s suffering. Most remedies fail. Even if they succeed, suffering recurs, and while you address one problem, suffering also afflicts everyone else. However, we can focus on the action, not the outcome, thus avoiding disappointment.

How do we know that compassion is a virtue?

In contemporary courses on moral philosophy or ethics, we usually present students with difficult moral choices about which reasonable people disagree, such whether punishment or war can be just, whether people have a right to health insurance, or whether abortion is acceptable. The overall message is that it is not easy to know what is right, but we should reason about justice, developing and assessing competing arguments. Students may also learn that the ultimate basis of ethical reasoning is hard to determine, a matter of controversy. Value claims may be objective or subjective, discovered or created. We often assign competing arguments about this question.

Until the late 1700s, moral philosophers in the European languages made a different assumption. They thought that all reasonable people knew what was right (Rosen 2022). The philosophical challenge was to develop a theory that matched all our moral intuitions so that we would understand the overall structure of ethics better. The practical challenge was to get people to do what they already knew they ought to do, whether through education, social pressure, rewards and penalties, or in some other way.

Emily McRae (2017) summarizes a similar tenet of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism that I think is widely shared in classical Asian thought:

Most of us understand that there is great and unbearable suffering in the world and that it would be better to alleviate that suffering than ignore or increase it. The moral problem, according to Buddhist ethics, is not that we do not understand what we should do, but we may not have the emotional and psychological resources to actually do it. … One of the basic assumptions—and, I would argue, insights—of Buddhist ethics is that most of us, most of the time, fail to adequately respond to suffering. This failure is not because we are especially bad people, or that human beings are inherently evil or selfish, but it is simply the result of the sheer amount of suffering that is part of the sentient condition (samsara) combined with the habits of thought, feeling, and action that make it difficult for most of us to respond to or sometimes even notice suffering. An appreciation of the myriad ways in which beings suffer and having an adequate response to that suffering is not a basic set of moral skills in Buddhist ethics; it is a rare moral accomplishment that requires a major transformation of our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Empathy is one of the main ways by which this transformation can occur.

Thus empathy reemerges in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism not as a goal but as a step along the way. First, we can imaginatively project ourselves into the experience of a concrete person or animal who is suffering. We strive to feel its pain while retaining our own consciousness, so that we attain a dual perspective. This is a practice that requires attention and time. It is a continuum. We can never replicate another creature’s feelings, but we can work on it.

Next, we can shift our empathy to other creatures. One reason is to avoid partiality. We are trying to develop a general capacity. The goal is compassion, which includes empathy along with a lack of selfishness and a genuine desire to act to alleviate all suffering. A moral exemplar, a bodhisattva, demonstrates empathy plus “other skills and virtues such as wisdom, mindfulness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness” (p. 129)

The overall picture is of compassion as an ideal that does not need a foundation in beliefs but that does require cultivation.

Indeed, there is a path from skepticism to compassion. We can begin by applying skepticism to all beliefs that seem to justify suffering or explain it away, including the Aristotelian idea that people have a telos; theologies that attribute suffering to divine will; the Third Noble Truth (enlightenment frees us from suffering); and all political ideologies that make some people’s suffering seem necessary for a better future.

Once we have made ourselves appropriately skeptical about such beliefs, all that is left is the realization that other creatures suffer for no ultimately good reason. And this realization comes close to compassion.

One might ask: Why care about the others’ suffering? What reason compels concern instead of indifference? This question is the mistake that Stanley Cavell analyzes in his famous interpretation of King Lear—thinking that we need a reason to love (Cavell 1969). Skeptics do not believe in the kind of truth that could serve as a foundation for caring in the face of prevalent suffering. Nor do they believe in the negation of such truths: in moral nihilism. Rather, they teach that seeking beliefs as the basis for happiness and ethics is a habit that we can train ourselves to drop.

We can simply care. And as we do so, we may experience some of the benefits recommended by proponents of compassion, such as diminished self-clinging and increased serenity. We will not escape from our own suffering, but we can find a measure of relief.

*Indeed, sympathy and compassion come from words that mean exactly the same thing—“feeling-with”—in Greek and Latin. The Greek word sympatheia originally meant harmony within nature more than a human emotion, and our modern sense of sympathy as well as the Latin translation compassio come well after the classical period. Empathy was coined on p. 21 of Edward Bradford Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (Macmillan, 1909) as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, which goes back at least to Herder.

Sources: McRae, Emily. “Empathy, compassion, and “exchanging self and other” in indo-Tibetan Buddhism.” The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy. Routledge, 2017. 123-133; Rosen, Michael (2022) The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History (Harvard University Press); Stanley Cavell, “The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1969, updated ed., 2002), pp. 246 – 325.

This post is an amalgam and revision of several previous ones, so apologies for the repetition.

gratitude and the sublime

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Peter

Let’s define a sublime experience as one that is dramatically better than life as usual, since life involves suffering—at least in part and over the long run.

I doubt that sublime experiences reveal a truth: that everything is redeemed. Nor are they false, mere fantasies of people who cannot face reality. Rather, they are part of human experience, within our available range.

Life may be suffering, but it also encompasses the sublime. We are constituted to enjoy some things, and that is a wonderfully good fact about us. Just as we may lament our human proclivities to violence, despair, and cruelty, so we can celebrate our ability to savor what we find sublime. And not only celebrate it but actively cultivate this appreciation and share it with other people through the representations that we create.

Some wonderful experiences intrinsically involve interacting with other people. These activities include romance and sex, athletic competition, and success in any collective effort, including (I presume) victory in battle. I will leave this category aside for the present purposes, although it is desirable to gain emotional highs by interacting with other people while also being ethical.

I want to focus, instead, on that diverse category of experiences in which a person encounters an object that seems sublime, whether it is a view of nature, a song or a picture, a religious ceremony, or a meditative insight. Indeed, the word “sublime” is generally reserved for this category.

A classic debate in aesthetics asks how we should interpret such experiences. Does the object cause the experience? If so, do some things merit being called sublime while others should not be treated that way? (Can we be wrong to relish something that is not worthy?) Did the creator of the object have a powerful and positive emotion that the object now communicates to us? Or are observers more responsible for causing our own emotions by how we choose to perceive an object (Peacocke 2024)?

Our answers to those questions may differ if the object is a poem, a sunset, or a meditative exercise. For instance, an author has emotions while writing, so we can ask whether a poem conveys the poet’s inner state to us. But some would say the same about nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877) detects a Divine Father behind all “dappled things,“ like “skies of couple-colour” or “a brinded cow.” “Praise Him,” says Hopkins. On the other hand, some doubt that an author’s emotion is relevant in any case, even when a sensitive human being has made a work. They think it is all about the object or the observer.

This debate continues. I want to add a different dimension, not only because I believe it is true, but also because it can enrich our experience.

I think we often relish things because we have been taught how to perceive them. This is a skeptical point. It reminds us that we would enjoy very different things if we lived in a different time and place. It provokes some (appropriate) doubt about whether our reactions are true.

For instance, I like a snowy day. I believe this appreciation is something learned. I do not simply see the snow; I see it with things already in my mind, like Christmas decorations, paper snowflakes on second-grade bulletin boards, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow,” Han-shan’s Cold Mountain lyrics, Robert Frost’s “lovely, dark and deep” woods, Hiroshige’s woodblock prints of wintry Japan, Rosemary Clooney with Bing Crosby. In short, I have been taught to appreciate a winter wonderland, a marshmallow world, and a whipped cream day. Some of these influences probably detract, but they were meant well.

It is sometimes said that when Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux (in Provence) in 1336—simply to enjoy and describe the view—he was the first European ever to do such a thing. Clearly, some people outside of Europe had loved mountain views long before Petrarch. I find it plausible that certain communities of people appreciate alpine vistas, while others do not. And some of us may have learned the sublimity of landscapes from a chain of people originally inspired by Petrarch, although he was surely influenced by classical sources. We all see what we have learned to see.

Let’s say that I am looking at a large and dramatic sky, with ragged clouds that are mostly dark but illuminated here and there by a hidden sun. Perhaps there are also wind-blown trees in view and small signs of human habitation.

I believe that I appreciate this vista in part because I have studied and enjoyed 17^th-century Dutch landscape painters and some later artists whom they influenced, such as John Constable, the Americans of the Hudson River School, and Impressionists. These artists do not explain nature to me. They do not reveal why the background color of the sky is blue and leaves are generally green. Their representations of nature would not convey sublimity to a different species, such as my dog Luca or an alien from Mars. As Thomas Nagel (1970) says, “A Martian scientist … would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud.”

Instead, these artists help me to see what is in my phenomenal world: how clouds pile up and sun peeks through. Come to think of it, our phenomenal world is a bit strange. It includes an object that is so painfully bright that we avoid it, and it has borders that we cannot see because they move as we shift our gaze. This is also the world that the Dutch painters present on canvas.

In turn, I enjoy Dutch landscapes more thanks to Svetlana Alpers’ 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, which I read when it was still fairly new and have returned to since. Alpers’ project is not to praise the artists whom she discusses; she does not practice “art appreciation.” She identifies a way of thinking about images, an epistemic framework, that explains what the Dutch painters were up to and that distinguishes them from Renaissance Italian painters (without suggesting that either is preferable). Her insights have enriched my understanding of the original works. And she is only one in a sequence of critics and historians, collectors and curators, and subsequent artists who have turned 17^th-century Dutch landscape painting into a category and helped us to value it and see it better. Again, how I see that art influences how I see nature, especially when the landscape even remotely resembles Holland.

I hold a doctoral degree and have chosen to visit museums and read academic criticism for decades. I am not claiming that reading scholarly books and labels in museums is the best (let alone the only) way to enrich current experiences. Many people learn to name, value, represent, protect, and use objects from their elders without needing written words. Religious communities also develop ceremonies and observances that convey the creativity of previous generations. Academic criticism is unusually explicit and transparent about its sources; that is the purpose of footnotes. But all human communities accumulate and transmit ways of experiencing the world.

Sometimes, people are motivated to ignore or conceal the influence of previous observers on their own sublime experiences because of an implicit assumption that the sublime should be pure and universal and stand outside of history. Just as an example, North Americans who experience anapanasati, or Buddhist breathing-meditation, may be told (or may tell themselves) that this is the original practice of the Buddha himself. They envision themselves as doing something pure and personal that reveals absolutely general truths, such as the non-existence of the self. A person who may have lived in what is now northern India and Nepal more than two thousand years ago not only did the same thing as modern meditators but is causing us to practice anapanasati now, because we hear the Buddha’s “teachings.”

But we might look around the room, which probably (not invariably) incorporates some aesthetic elements from East Asian art, along with 20^th century European minimalism: bare wood, a simplified statue. People speak English with a sprinkling of Sanskrit words. They sit cross-legged and meditate but do not maintain shrines, prostrate themselves, make pilgrimages, or give alms, which would be common manifestations of Buddhism in East Asia (Moon 2024)

Many participants may identify as white and think of what they are experiencing as Asian. Indeed, they may classify the Buddha as an Asian man, notwithstanding that he predated the distinction between Asia and Europe. Rev. Cristina Moon (a Zen priest from Hawaii) recalls:

Over the fifteen years before coming to Chozen-ji [a temple and monastery founded by Asian Americans], I sat with more than a dozen different Buddhist communities where I was often the only Asian and sometimes one of the only non-white people in attendance. When non-Asian Buddhists (particularly at American Zen centers) wore Japanese clothes, bowed to me theatrically, referred to me as “Cristina-san,” responded to requests in English with “Hai!”, and expressed rigid attachment to the technical accuracy of certain Japanese and Buddhist forms, it looked more like cosplay [dressing as a character from a movie] than a means to enter Zen, (Moon 2024)

In the US, there is a certain tendency—I don’t know how widespread—to see Buddhist thought as ahistorical. The Buddha is treated as a contemporary; the meditating mind lives only in the immediate present. There is also a tendency to acknowledge Buddhism’s roots in Asia but to depict Asian or Eastern “culture” as monolithic, apart from superficial aesthetic differences that people can browse like consumers.

The white or European-American Buddhists whom Rev. Moon has encountered may differentiate between the transcendent truths of the Buddha and optional traditions and behaviors that they label “culture.” They then pick and choose from the traditions without recognizing that they (highly educated, mostly White Americans) are every bit as immersed in their own stream of inherited behaviors, aesthetics, beliefs, and values, which influence their choices about what to borrow from Asian contexts. Linda Heuman writes:

The French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour famously described it this way: “A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.” A modern Buddhist, in Latour’s sense, is someone who believes that Asian forms of Buddhism carry the “baggage” of their host cultures but who remains unreflective about the assumptions that shape his or her own modern adaptation (Heuman, 2015).

For instance, sitting in a minimalist pine room feels pure, although it reflects the same Modernist aesthetics as a boardroom in a skyscraper, whereas prostrating before a brightly colored Tibetan shrine would seem like “culture.”

Any mind is ineluctably historical. As we develop from speechless infants into adults, we absorb a vast array of classifications, assumptions, and values that other people invented before us. We can never escape this historical contingency. You might think that you can have an unmediated experience of nature, but your tastes in nature, your words and concepts for nature, and even your physical location in front of a specific patch of nature are all historically conditioned.

History is highly complex, diverse, and often cruel, whether we happen to know the details or not. Evils are widespread—consider, for example, the use of Buddhist ideas in imperial Japan or in Myanmar today. Human beings widely and blatantly violate principles that they expressly teach, such as nonviolence and compassion. On the other hand, people all over the world also create practices and institutions that reflect wise goals and choices. What we think we know is a result of this complex, globally interconnected, and fraught past.

Cristina Moon’s description of cringy behavior at North American Zen centers is a portrait of people who want to pick and choose ideas and practices that they find comfortable without taking seriously the historical development and interconnection of those ideas, without being genuinely open to practices that might challenge them, without being careful about their own status and impact, and without wrestling with the connections among racial hierarchy and exclusion, everyday culture, and the abstract beliefs that we might classify as Buddhist philosophy or theology. Yet the solution is not to declare these beliefs off limits (nor does Moon suggest we do so), because everyone should always be looking for good beliefs to adopt. We must simply do it with a lot of care–not only about the ideas and their effect on our inner lives, but also about the other people we touch.

To me, our debt to other human beings only deepens the sublime. Nature was not created for us; it just is. And we were not created to enjoy it, although—very fortunately—we do. But our fellow human beings have deliberately shared their appreciation and heightened our own, which means that we are the beneficiaries of benevolent intelligence after all.

In “Of Dappled Things,” Hopkins writes, “Praise Him.” I would (also) say, “Praise them.”

This is a combination and reformulation of previous posts (apologies for the repetition), including: the sublime and other people; the sublime is social–with notes on Wordsworth’s Lines Above Tintern Abbey; notes on religion and cultural appropriation: the case of US Buddhism

Sources: Antonia Peacocke, “Aesthetic Experience,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.); Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?.” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 394-403, p. 443; Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Cristina Moon, “From ‘Just Culture’ to a Just Culture, Tricycle, Oc.. 29, 2020; Linda Heuman (2015) “A New Way Forward,” The Tricycle, Spring.

Freud on mourning the past

Posted on October 6, 2025 by Peter

In 1915, Sigmund Freud wrote a short essay entitled “Transience.” Just over a century later, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the philosopher Jonathan Lear wrote “Transience and Hope” about returning to Freud’s essay in a time of COVID-19, the climate emergency, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Now, Lear has passed, adding one more layer of pathos to their dialogue.

Freud’s piece turns out to be political, but it begins with a personal memory. “Not long ago,” he says, he went on a “summer walk through a smiling countryside” with a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet.” Many commentators have identified this poet as Rilke, but Lear thinks the whole story is fiction.

In any case, Freud and the poet argue. The poet is unable to enjoy the beauty of nature because it will fade with the coming fall, “like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create.” Freud has the opposite feeling, that transience only “raises the value of the enjoyment.” He adds, “A flower that blooms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account any less lovely.” But neither the poet not the silent friend is convinced by Freud.

Freud says that his friends could not accept the transience of beauty because there was “a revolt in their minds against mourning.” He explains that we have a natural inclination to love–first ourselves, then other objects. When an object of love is lost, we cling to it anyway, which is the painful stage that we call mourning. However, mourning “comes to a spontaneous end,” allowing our love to move to new objects. In a later essay, Freud will explicitly distinguish the healthy, temporary process of mourning (which ultimately frees us to love something new) from “melancholia,” which is stuck in place.

The final paragraph of “On Transience” explains what the story is really about:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

In 1914, Europeans like Freud had lost an object of their love–life before the war–and they were mourning it. To make matters harder, they had strongly identified with prewar culture and taken pride and hope in it. They were like a widower who not only misses his deceased partner but also mourns his own lost role or place in the world as a spouse. (This is my analogy, not Freud’s or Lear’s.)

Dr. Freud has a prescription. Mourning passes, and the same will happen to Europeans as the war moves into the past. “When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”

Mourning involves, among other emotions, a recognition of the value of what was lost. Thus, for someone like Freud to mourn his optimistic youthful days before August 1914 was to recognize their worth. His sadness reveals that it had been good to pursue medical science in Vienna.

In this case, however, the prewar culture had yielded an unspeakably terrible war. Therefore, the culture was not only over but also discredited. If Freud could travel back in time, perhaps he should not enjoy prewar Vienna (or Paris) but regard it with dismay as the predecessor of a global slaughter. Perhaps Freud and his contemporaries were not like people mourning loved-ones who had died innocently, but like people whose lovers had been unmasked as villains. Worse, the mourners had been part of the lost and discredited world.

When Freud went for his country walk, he and his friends knew that the flowers would fade. But that was not the flowers’ fault. Watching them wither would not negate their value while they bloomed, and the friends could fully appreciate new buds when they returned (as normal) the following spring. In contrast, the First World War revealed that prewar European society, which had seemed so progressive to Freud’s generation, had been deeply corrupt all along.

I am disagreeing here with Freud. He thinks that the negative feelings of his contemporaries are symptoms of mourning, which is healthy but should not be allowed to last forever. Their mourning reflects an authentic and appropriate appreciation for life before the war. They now realize that the past was “fragile,” but this recognition should not detract from its value. Their job is to create good things anew.

It is much harder if we think that something that we have lost is not only transient and absent but was never as valuable as we had previously believed.

I am often nostalgic for the polity and society that I knew as a young adult and up through the Obama Administration. I realize that many people who were less fortunate than I felt less positive about things then, as did people who were more radical than I. I am simply reporting my subjective state. I now experience mourning for that time. The questions is whether my mourning is appropriate because the past was good, or whether it is naive and self-justifying.

Lear’s main objective is to help us to see that mourning reflects a degree of appropriate appreciation for the past, and we can continue to make good things. We should recognize the fragility of what we had built but not reject it all. This is difficult if we blame the past that we miss for what has gone wrong.

Source: Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” 1915 (just “Vergänglichkeit” in the original, without a preposition), translated by James Strachey in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, pp. 305-7, discussed in Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022). See also: the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be; nostalgia in the face of political crisis; there are tears of things; and Rilke, The Grownup

consider the octopus

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Peter

Ancient Greek members of the Skeptical School taught methods or habits that helped people to live better. One method involved pondering how different the world might seem to different animals, considering that other species have diverse types of eyes, ears, and tongues; preferences and aversions; and perhaps whole senses unknown to us.

Skeptics said that we are animals and not fundamentally different from the “so-called irrational animals.” Meditating on examples of animal psychology would prevent people from believing that their own experience was true or that the pursuit of truth was possible. In turn, suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.

In this spirit, consider the octopus, as described in detail by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. People who study this animal almost universally conclude that it is curious, intelligent, and interactive and that each octopus has a personality that persists over time. Yet the species is so remote from us on the evolutionary tree that it is like an alien visitor to our planet. Or we could be the aliens on theirs.

For one thing, an octopus has quite different senses from ours, such as suckers that each have 10,000 sensors and eyes of a fundamentally different design. Since an octopus lives underwater and has a soft and flexible body, its whole relationship with its environment must be profoundly different from ours.

I gradually became who I am over many years–the first period now barely a memory for me–and I was deeply connected to other people from the start. I have persisted for almost six decades, building up (and losing) memories. An octopus emerges from an egg and for lives for two years, if it’s lucky, before it dies of old age. Its combination of substantial intelligence and a brief lifespan is unusual on earth and would presumably give it a different sense of time from mine.

An octopus doesn’t have a brain, because its complex nervous system is distributed through its body, and its arms have considerable autonomy. “Octopuses [may] not even track where their own arms might be” (p. 67). Nevertheless, each octopus functions as a coherent organism with an individual personality.

I think of myself as one thing, my body parts as something a bit different (because I control them imperfectly), and the external world as something distinct from both my self and my body. This experience deeply influences my assumptions about fundamentals like self and other, thought and matter, cause-and-effect, intention, and the objective world. It is hard to believe that an octopus feels the same way, yet my experience is no more valid or true.

If you doubt that an octopus has enough mental capacity to have a model of its own world, fine—just imagine an extraterrestrial creature with a similar design as an octopus and 10 times as many neurons. It doesn’t matter whether an alien like that exists on other planets, only that it is plausible. The thought-experiment is enough to tell us that we experience just one of many possible worlds.

Sources: Sextus, Outlines of Pyrhhonism (see 1.13:61 on humans as animals); Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). See also: thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; ‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism;

the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be

Posted on September 16, 2025 by Peter

I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”

This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.

Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.

Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.

Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:

Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:

Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.

To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.

Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.

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