Halcyon Imagines

Imagining drawing on three thousand years of wisdom...

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth", so said Goethe, as quoted in Jostein Gaarder's philosophy primer-cum-mystery novel Sophie's World.

Like AC Grayling cutting across the "-ologies", Halcyon is convinced that our framework for making sense of the world is best underpinned by a strong grounding in historical narrative. 

One example: without such interdisciplinary curiosity, how could we appreciate why Tolstoy had Pierre felt that he must try and kill Napoleon, even while Beethoven and many of the 19th century Romantic intelligentsia were waiting in the wings in adoration of the little corporal?

Imagining being able to see the world as a whole

Or in a grain of sand.

Reading Stanley Fish in the New York Times stirred memories of having read Robert Pirsig’s "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" (1974).  The narrative follows a long motorcycle journey the author takes with his son and two friends. Another main character (present only in thought and imagination) is named Phaedrus.  He is at once Pirsig’s alter-ego, a questing philosopher of daunting and destabilising intellect, and the foil of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. 

Fish argues too that the philosophy Pirsig and Phaedrus wrestles with is a variant of the holism of those philosophers who share a conviction that knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts.  Rather, they contend, the world must first be conceived or assumed whole and entire and the emergence of its parts and the possibility of describing them then follows.

This lies at the heart of Halcyon's ambition but, paradoxically, in order to describe the world whole and to destroy divisive categorisation, it is tempting to first divide the world back into its component parts - be they issues, or the values, ideas or domains of knowledge that taken together can help us address those issues - and then label them, before starting on the fun and valuable part - i.e. the alchemy of putting together ideas and values that have never met.  ("Take a dash of authenticity, add two parts innovation and a drop of responsibility...")

The danger though, and hinted at by Fish and Pirsig, is that the inventory and the labelling can take a lifetime, and we lose ourselves by spending too much time in taxonomy and too little in alchemy, investing too much in diagnosis and too little in cure.

Imagining the meaning of and the reason for things

AC Grayling talked on Desert Island Discs about 'contributing to the conversation society has with itself about possibilities for good lives in good societies'.

This is exactly what Halcyon will be about too; encouraging frank conversations, between diverse individuals and groups, that help people develop their own "choice architecture" but that do not romanticise particular values.