What Runners Are Thinking

According to this article in The Atlantic, runners are thinking trivial thoughts, about their pace, their pain, traffic. The conclusion the article comes to is that onlookers shouldn't assume runners have entered some zen state of mind in which time and space become one, or disappear. They're just thinking about how hungry they are.

The problem in this conclusion can be found in juxtaposition of the phrases "zen state of mind" and "What they're thinking." A zen state of mind is a state of "not thinking." So, okay, they asked runners to record what was going through their brains while running; on the surface, they got trivialities. What I question is the assumption that those surface thoughts are the whole of the running experience.

It is the experience, not the thoughts, that bring me back to the trail every day. There is something internal, something well below the level of conscious thought that is happening while I'm running. And, whether I'm thinking about moon pies or not doesn't touch that experience.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/what-runners-think-about/400883/

The 18th Century Meets the 21st Century

This e-mail exchange between Dr. Randall Monty and myself:

Me: “Can you add Graduate Recruiting to the schedule?”
Monty: “Absolutely.”
Me: “Been listening to Hume lately. He's got me convinced that nothing is absolute.”
Monty: “One of these days, we'll get you into the twentieth century!”
Me: “Bud, I'm living in the future. The Twenty-First Century.”

Monty was kidding me about my habit of listening to what has been derisively referred to as “dead, white males.” And I often think he has a point. There’s so much interesting stuff out there. But, of course, 21st Century writing isn’t in the public domain, so isn’t available on librivox, the website I download audio books from, and Amazon doesn’t record audio for the books I’m interested in, because they don’t sell enough to justify the expense.

The exchange between Monty and myself made me think about the intersection of the 18th Century, when Hume wrote, and 21st Century technology that makes it possible for me to listen to his words. What I do wouldn’t be possible in the 20th Century. Librivox just celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. They didn’t exist in the 20th Century. Neither did the smart phone that allows me to access their site while running. True, I remember listening to cassette recording on the thirty-minute drive to school every day back in the 20th Century. But I wasn’t a runner then.

So, the technology of the 21st Century makes it possible for me to connect with a mind from the 18th Century in a way I would not be able to in written form. I’m not simply talking here about the convenience of being able to get some good reading in while I’m running. If all I was looking for was more reading time, I would listen to these writers on long drives as well. But I don’t, though I’m not sure why there is a difference. Ah, but there does seem to be a difference.

I’m not arguing something as strong as the “oral” theory of Havelock or Ong. Nevertheless, there are some writers, and some writing, that opens up when heard. Plato is one such writer, Aristotle only sometimes so. The Nichomehean Ethics listens well, The Topics less well, Prior Analytics, not at all. William James’s Pragmatism is a delight to listen to; Essays on Radical Empiricism is almost incomprehensible, even though I read it long before I tried to listen to it. Kant? Impossible.


Why those differences, both between listening and reading, and between various authors and works? I’m not entirely sure. When I first started listening to Plato, I thought his writing was accessible because the dialogues were written to be heard; the dialogue format encourages us to be listeners rather than readers. After listening to other writers who are firmly entrenched in textuality, I’m not so sure. Perhaps I’ll eventually come up with a theory. Perhaps not. I will keep running and listening though.  

Oh, Love, Where Art Thou?

Listened to The Symposium last. Each of the three sections is just long enough for a six mile run, with five minutes or so left over to listen to Pandora. Given the topic of The Symposium, love, I thought something schmaltzy, like the Moody Blues channel, was appropriate.

I lost count of how many spoke, each in turn, in this account of a speaking contest that Plato apparently did not attend. Of course, it's all a set-up. Socrates speaks last, and outdoes everyone. Each participant gives a speech on love. (This is one of the few dialogues in which Socrates doesn't complain about speech-making, and doesn't interrupt other speakers to ask them unanswerable questions. For some reason, he's on his best behavior. The gadfly is silent until his turn to speak comes around.)

What I find interesting is how much time in this and other dialogues, most notably, Phaedrus, is devoted to the topic of love, and how little time modern philosophy seems to spend on the topic. We seem to have rewritten The Symposium so it isn't actually about love, but about "love of philosophy." And, of course, Weaver's well-known analysis of Phaedrus would have us believe that it's really about rhetoric. Thus, love is never a philosophical topic in the dialogues; it's merely a stepping stone to other, more important topics.

So, do we leave "love" to Nicholas Sparks and the Hallmark Channel? Is love so outside the realm of reason that it's not worth talking about?

I know, I'm overstating my complaint. If we are to trust the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a philosophy of love. (However, look at the citations; almost all are from the Greeks. Not much in the Twentieth Century, and none in the Twenty-first, even though an internet encyclopedia is very Twenty-first Century.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/

More thorough citations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/

And let's not forget Wikipedia. Lot's of links to online texts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love

Interesting that they all refer to love as a noun. I've always thought of it as a verb.  

Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.”

Listening to Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” Perhaps Hume’s most famous soundbite: “That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood” (IIII.1.21).

To put his more eloquent syntax in modern parlance: logic (demonstrative, a priori, deductive reasoning) cannot prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. Only inductive reasoning, or experience, leads us to “believe” it will come up.  Certainly, the probability is high. But it is still only probable, not necessary, to use the language of analytical philosophy. Science often uses the word “theory” in this way. In science, a theory is a proposition that has been tested sufficiently that its probability is so high that we can start to refer to it as a scientific fact. This difference is often why Creationists can’t understand why scientists continue to refer to the Theory of Evolution as a fact, and not “just a theory.” With every discovery, the statistical likelihood becomes more and more probable. But it will never be certain, just as the sun rising tomorrow will ever be certain.

  

This is the sort of game runners are playing when they train for a race. Training is a way of building up experience, of terrain, of the body, or what works (critical, since what works one day doesn’t seem to work the next, confounding us as we try to figure out our best form or strategy) in order to increase the probability that we will perform the way we wish for the next race. Hume sometimes uses the word habit, though it doesn’t seem to be as critical a word for him as it is for Charles Sanders Peirce, who goes as far as to argue that everything happens from habit, even nuclear fusion.  All I want to do is finish another 50 miler. Every runner knows that it’s habit, the training you do before a race rather than the race itself, that helps you finish that race.