What we’re about
Hey all you liminal atypical lovers of philosophy this project is for you! Get away from the digital AI moloch for a few hours and return to conversation and the primordial power of the spoken word.
The phone is inherently democratic. How many thousands of hours has my spirit indwelled its wires and sound waves?
Countless billions of phone conversations have taken place in the last hundred years and they have all succeeded in bringing people together.
Talking on the phone can not begin to match the potential of a face-to-face encounter in terms of meaning, depth and beauty. However it remains in its simplicity the best second best mode of communication.
The timbre of the voice and the things that it says are of priceless value. As we talk to each other like blind people our eyes find rest. In the silence between words we find peace.
If we understand philosophy as encompassing contemplation, meditation, poetry and the philosophic aspects of the various academic traditions; If we understand that there is a philosophic side to all human activity no matter how humble or deranged we are forced to admit that philosophy probably counts as humanities highest cultural achievement.
Do you remember the dodo race in Alice and Wonderland? All the animals run around in a circle and all the animals win a prize. In the same way all philosophies have their place no matter how badly formulated.
I have initiated hundreds of public philosophy exchanges over the last 30 years have yet to judge a single one a waste of time even if on the rarest of occasions I have been rebuffed.
I believe that philosophy without conversation is stillborn.
Philosophy can get people smiling as if they were milling about at the jazz festival.
The Roving Dog Telephone Society aims to break the chains of digital addiction by offering the possibility of sane, lucid and coherent conversation with individuals with whom you might develop bonds of friendship with the passage of time.
It’s starting here in Montreal; North America’s city of philosophers.Who is to say that the idea might not grow in the manner of Vipassana meditation or Alcoholics Anonymous or Practical Philosophy or a hundred and one other worthy social ventures which were destroyed with the advent of television and all the rest.
Philosophy is the last stand of the human spirit.
I have no problem in devoting my self full time to this project. But without the participation of restless, alive and articulate souls such as yourselves this project will not get off the ground.
It is my intention to gather the names interests and coordinates of as many people as possible so as to be able to offer a rich array of social and intellectual possibilities.
Send me a notification if you are interested. I will pass you my number and from there you can phone or text me.
What is philosophy? Philosophy is a concrete attitude and determinate life style which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down changing the life of the person who goes through it. It raises the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry to an authentic state of life, in which he attains self-consciousness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace and freedom. Pierre Hadot
Passions, hobbies and interests. As I am in my early seventies I can say that I have acquired some experience in my various fields of interest even if I have left a few of them behind.
Music. I played the saxophone on and off over a fifty year period and never ceased to make incremental progress. Along the way I offered 200 evenings of the Jazz Work shop for Beginners where beginners played with more experienced musicians in a convivial environment.
My source of inspiration was music theory since it provided an endless source of musical ideas.With the passage of the decades my mind grew to contain knowledge of hundreds of scales, modes, chords and progressions as well as their precise relationship to each other.
Art. I began drawing and painting when began living with my wife at the age of 28. I gradually came to produce work of genuine beauty.
Over a five year period I produced countless portraits always looking for ways to refine my technique. I moved from the simplicity of charcoal into the sensuality of pastel. There was always a rapport between me and my model. I scarcely blotched a portrait.I worked as if each portrait was a matter of life and death and enjoyed drawing each and every one.The project was a commercial failure of the highest order and I eventually lost all interest in doing portraits.
I made the typical transition from figurative painting to abstract painting entering into a phase of abstract Impressionism that was experimental and inconclusive.
Art died away as did music. Though I cherished my identity as a dilettante as these activities melted away I was relieved. My centre of gravity lies in thought rather than in sensuous expression.
Writing. Across my life I have probably spent 10,000 hours writing if you include all the contemplation writing involves. A minute fraction has been published. And yet it scarcely matters. Circumstances have keep me away from writing over the last 5 years. Time will tell as to the future.
The accordion. It was in 1997 that I bought a gaudy gold and white accordion for a few hundred dollars in a pawn shop. I practiced for a few weeks and then sat on the bench in front of the fancy restaurant around the corner from our home, in the silence of the evening with the odour of mussels and the convivial din.
I sang in French the couple of song fragments I knew.The rest was improvisation.But I looked dapper and relaxed. The coins accumulated in the open case with its red felt. I was bringing people together, children were dancing. ThoughI had been sure that I would be chased away like a dog this didn’t happen. Indeed the wait staff gathered together change for me at the end of the evening and the owner- blond in an aqua blue flowing dress- emerged with a beer in her hand and questions as to my person.
I become a fixture. For four years I played there each summer. I soon learnt the sociological rule that an accordionist can always be relied on for conversation. The secret of my social success was strait forward. I used philosophy as a way to get people to talk about their vital interests. As sure as a kite flys so people become expansive if they feel that they are being listened to and valued. At one point even the premier Bernard Landry got pulled into the whole thing.
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. Masha Linehan translated her devote Catholic background, intense involvement with Zen meditation and work with volatile borderline personality types into a therapy that constitutes the synthesis of three great traditions. 1) Buddhist meditation helps make the unconscious conscious. This is the fundamental principal of all dynamic psychotherapy. Freud was the greatest thinker of the twentieth century but from the Buddhist perspective to say that he discovered the unconscious is like saying from a native perspective that Columbus discovered America. 2) Embodied, authentic, here and now I-thou dialogue centred on the quest for the true, the good and the beautiful in the context of the patient’s life.This is cognitive behaviour therapy at its best. The sinuous and evocative word dialectic unites the Logos with the Tao and introduces a contextualism which softens black and white thinking and eases the voices of self condemnation in the patient. The Greek tradition which inspired CBT is under going a massive revival.3)The Christian tradition. Masha hadn’t a problem receiving calls from her suicidal patients at all hours of the night. She was a Florence Nightingale of the soul challenging her beloved patients to take the leap into darkness and decide to live another hour. She practiced agape meaning the love which brings personhood into being.
Masha united the heart, the mind and the depths of the unconscious into a transformative practice with roots in primordial wisdom. DBT is relevant our personal situation regardless of how fine our mental health may be. It is positive psychology par excellence.
In some format or the other DBT will become a grassroots success.
Human Nature. We are living organisms with the need to love and be loved, We need a family as well as a place we can call home and people we can call friends. We need meaningful work.We need to belong to a community and to have a spiritual life of some sort. We need the chance to unfold our abilities and gifts in an orderly manner. We need time alone so as to make sense of our experience. It is important to keep these needs mind so as to better understand how the digital AI moloch is destroying our humanity.
Even in 1900 the French philosopher Henri Bergson called New York “the land of interrupted conversations.” Albert Einstein said that he would never have discovered the theory of relativity had he remained at the university. He needed the silence of the patient office. Today, the whole world has become New York City. To sit quietly or else carry on an uninterrupted conversation is almost a revolutionary act. Digital reality is the bane of our time.
The loneliness engendered by connectivity is the loneliness that dares not speak its name. Nor are we interested in counting up all the many layers of pain caused by digital reality which tend to reenforce each other. These include a sense of being continuously under surveillance and having one’s initimate life violated in terms of information gathered up by powers that be and also information and images shared promiscuously on social media; the endless stream of interruption and distraction which shatters our concentration and which is far more painful than is popularly recognized; the elimination of any kind of barrier between oneself and being rendered miserable, subhuman and raped by the assault of pornography; the experience of being flooded hour after hour with visual imagery 95 per cent of which we tend to forget a few minutes after we have seen it and which has been chosen for us by algorithms primed to increase addictive pain; the sense being condemned to view the world through a periscope which never allows us to see the larger picture;
The forward march of technology, capitalism and convenience has been the dynamic of western society since the 19th century. Man vs the machine has become Man being eaten from inside by the digital AI moloch. That which is destroying us has become part of who we are.
The internet has had a massive amount to do with the deinstitutionalization of society and the dissolution of the social fabric with in turn accounts for the rising rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness. Indeed England now has a ministry of loneliness. Main streets around the world have disappeared.
The internet has inspired the disappearance of material currency. All peoples no matter how preliterate use objects as currency and ascribe magical qualities to these objects. The counting of coins was the beginning of numeracy and part of our adventure into abstract thinking. The digital AI Moloch pushes into non existence the street musician, the begger and the kid selling lemonade. It atrophies the imagination as our minds wish to conceive of money in terms of cash.
The use of cash encouraged enterpreneurship. The circulation of cash made capitalism democratic and experimental. It facilitated the explosion of life in every possible direction and expressed everything that was truly fantastical in the American dream.
Cash in the hand represents a kind of power that can become anything for good or evil. Just as we want to hold a book in our hands so we want to handle money.This grants us a sense of agency, anal pleasure and the opportunity to be generous or reckless at any moment. In contrast the credit card records and taxes our spending.
The internet has undermined embodied participation in office work environments,
education and sexual activity where men prefer pornography to embodied relationships with women and eroticized relationships with their tenderness and meaning. The desublimation of sexuality though pornography drives men and women into their respective ways of undergoing loneliness, causes untold grief and contributes to a decline in births among white Americans.
The existence of pornography creates the demand for pornography. If it didnt exist there would be no demand of it. The world without pornography was perfectly adequate. Pornography represents the internet at its most addictive and heartless.
The exponential growth in the use of cell phones after 2010 has destroyed any sense of shared social space in urban settings. Cell phones are particularly deleterious for young people who use these devises 7 hours a day and who don’t have the judgement to pace their involvement.
Watch the vintage who done it Murder She Wrote and the dissolution of the social fabric will jump before your eyes. Each episolde was consummate art overflowing with humanity. In contrast, contemporary detective shows are mediocre apart from passable acting. In these shows, the use of cell phones work to destroy any sense of intimacy, mystery, suspense, patience, and contemplation as indeed they do in our own lives. Rooms are bare, music stray electronic sounds.
The internet has engendered the disappearance of newspapers and magazines as part of our daily ritual as well as the decimation of billions of books including children books, bibles, boardgames, dictionaries, self published poetry, in other words all that we held dear as a civilization. The comparison with the destruction of the library of Alexandria is not with out merit. How exactly is the glow and glitter of electronica supposed to replace the worlds libraries?
Poetry and fiction read on an iPad are disposable experiences. The glare of the screen blocks the use of the imagination. The eyes can’t roam freeing as they can over the pages of a book.
A book is an animistic object as is a piece of jewelry or a letter from a lover. You can put any one of these under your pillow. Children can never own too many books. However the American Psychological Association severely limits the use of screens for children.
The virtual is inherently unsatisfying and engenders cycles of addition. All that is virtual entails consumption. However reading-particularly in the modality of a book-is is active, creative and imaginative. You can speak of it as a form of consumption purely as a figure of speech.
The sense of authority, clarity, and organization you had when studying with books, journals and newspapers is gone. In contrast the internet explodes with cognative garbage and visual distraction with no value on the intellectual level. its got nothing to do with adult learning.
Seriously reading books in the context of on going discussion with informed people is the best way of acquiring an education. In England you don’t study a subject at university. Rather you read a subject. Attentive reading is a meditative and demanding activity needing absolute silence. It involves the on going review of what you have previously read. You need to stop often so as to pounder the material. It is a personal meditative activity which helps develop a sense of selfhood.
The book is both your slave and your teacher. Each book represents a writer's attempt to communicate something. When you slow down enough to read the book at the pace the writer would read the book himself, the book unfolds and you can linger for an hour on a single page. This was called lectura divina.
In contrast audio and visual material constitute for the most part entertainment. A talking head on a screen doesn’t reproduce the vivacity of an embodied encounter. The same goes for audio material.
For those disposed to contemplation, meaningful conversation and books are the foundation of a life worth living. In the past, the bible was the main foundation for literacy and wisdom.
In contrast, everything else is electronic monkey business.The disappearance of the writing of term papers at university has gone hand in hand with the general erosion of literacy. In the past, the ability to write well was well regarded and went hand in hand with skill at organizing information, concepts and ideas. Education was considered across all classes to be something worthy of respect.
The screen can’t compare to the reading of a book for comfort, silence and the orderly assimilation of material. In contrast writing on the net tends to be fragmented, redundant, scattered, and without authority. It has nothing to do with ‘the quiet air of delightful studies’ which is the motto inscribed on the side of the main library on the Mccill Campus.
Nor can we take a walk to get away from the net because our phones follow us, These relatively expensive, encumbering, fragile objects contain our precious personal information. Thus they burden us hampering the free movements of our bodies the same way the screen hampers the free movements of our eyes and engenders tension through the whole body.
Today’s digital world is realized science fiction. We are extensions of the net who crave our slavery. Indeed half of young adults would rather lose their sense of smell than be separated from their devices.
I am extremely sceptical as to any serious positive effects AI can have on our happiness in terms of the concept of human existence as outlined above. Cold reflection can only conclude that AI will lead to the disappearance of academia, invalidate all areas of human self expression touching on language and the formulation of thought and generalize senility. It will cruelly damage music and the visual arts but it will probably leave intact embodied forms of self expression.
The digital AI moloch will continue to increase its grip as it alines its self with fascist tendencies in the political sphere thus embodying Brave New World,1984, Fairenheit 514, Marshall McLuhan and many unforeseen elements.
The use of the internet is painful and the social and cultural effects of the internet are painful. One way or another these two overlap in ways that tend to remain unconscious. To find inner peace, you have to undertake an exploration of your addictions, compulsions and afflictions but also study how the internet is distorting the social and cultural landscape around you. Your best chances of lessening the grip of the digital AI moloch on you is to understand how it is both corrupting you and your environment. You have to understand its dual nature.
Live your life off line as much as possible and aspire to an embodied purity.
If it is any consolation to you, the idea that humanities future will consist of animal existence punctuated by trivial has been a powerful one across the 20th century. It has inspired much thought from Nietzsche on and has involved such fine minds as Max Weber, Alexandre Kojeve,and Micheal Foucault.
Royal Court Karate. I practice a style karate of my own invention called Royal Court karate. It’s a blend of Shotokan and tai chi and is inspired by my studies with Ari Anastasiadis. In the 1950s Ari lived in Japan and studied Aikido with the arts founder O sensei Ueshiba and karate with Masatoshi Nakayama chief instructor of the Japan Karate Association. I studied with Ari for a few years in the early seventies. At the center of Royal Court Karate is the natural stance, one point sparring, the eight directions and combinations which can number in the hundreds. After thousands of hours of practice stretched over 50 years my body has acquired some of Ari’s fluid sway. However the study of karate is endless. Karate is a way of life as Ari would always say.
Walk with a Philosopher. Walk with me around the scenic Senneville area.There is a small woods, secluded waterfront area, and quiet park with a gazebo.
Reflections on growing old. Maturity brings deep joy and perhaps some wisdom. Growing old has been the most interesting thing that has yet happened to me. It involves the expansion of consciousness on all possible levels. Because your mind is uncluttered it functions better. You are more relaxed, your judgement is better, your senses are more alive.
Meditation. I practiced about a 1000 hours of Samatha Vipassana meditation this year and thus ridded myself of 50 years of depressive mist. By following my breath and consciously relaxing my body I entered into autogenic states of consciousness similar to small doses of mushrooms. I also practiced a contemplative kind of reading.This year I spent 2000 hours reading.
‘And yet we have forgotten how to read; how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtly and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This is a spiritual exercise one of the most difficult. As Goethe said. ‘Ordinary people don’t know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I’ve spent eighty years at it, and I still can’t say that I have reached my goal.’’ Pierre Hardot
Conclusion. Along the paths of life -there are many- I have been deeply appreciative of those who paid me some attention. So if you are getting into drawing and painting or writing or meditation or karate or if you are simply feeling overwhelmed and confused and prone to depression and anxiety I may be able to help you
Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve human suffering. Epicurus
Some biographic material. My name is Tom Levitt. I am a hermit living somewhere in Senneville. Actually I live 5 minutes from the Ste Anne-de-Bellevue train station in a hundred and twenty-five-year-old light-filled rustic castle surrounded by a garden and trees. I have a loving wife, a husky and three or four cats. Our home has in shelves up to the ceiling books which I gathered intermittently from blue boxes as humanity committed spiritual suicide by throwing books out by the billions.
Over the years I have spent thousands of hours writing, reading and discussing philosophic anthropology meaning the interdisciplinary study of everything pertaining to the human condition apart from the price of chicken wings.
I call myself an independent scholar and a philosophic entertainer. I prefer not to call myself a philosopher as I consider this to be an honorific.
I speak an excellent but extremely rusty French which is poetic, academic and charmingly artificial.I also speak an elementary but strong German.
I am a materialist down to the cells of my bones. Epicurus is my Jesus Christ.
Digital media is kryponite to my soul. I haven’t sent or read an email in seven years. I use the internet a few dozen hours a year. On the other hand I started texting a couple of years ago and I find the medium intimate and relaxing. I am perfectly willing to entertain a texting correspondence with you if this pleases you. You can also write me by hand.
**Family background.**I am the the scion of an illustrious intellectual family. My father was a professor of Canadian history at the University of Ottawa. He concluded a 25 year career in his sleep with a history book open on his chest. My mother was Kari Levitt who was widely regarded as Canada’s most flamboyant political economist.In the early seventies her Silent Surrender was the Communist Manifesto of Canadian nationalists concerned by the American take over of the Canadian economy by multinational corporations. Her father Karl Polanyi has been recently described in The Guardian as ‘the most important intellectual you have never heard about.’ His The Great Transformation (1944) was an analysis of the on going standoff between society and ‘disembedded’ market forces from 1800 onward.
For his part, his brother Micheal Polanyi (‘must be ranked as one of the most versatile scientists of the twentieth century’. Twentieth Century Criticism Harper and Row 1983) Personal Knowledge (1958) is an eclectic, wide ranging and knowledgeable reflection on the role of intuition in the realm of scientific discovery and much more.
Neither Hungarian born brothers were particularly welcome in English speaking academic institutions. Karl didn’t have the right kind of degrees though admittedly he wound up at Columbia in the 50’s.
It is true that Micheal got a post in the chemistry department at Manchester University in 1933 arriving in England from Germany with a test tube of heavy water in his jacket pocket. And in deed in 1948 the social sciences department created a special chair for him allowing him to write the Logic of Liberty(1951) and other books praising the market economy. However from the publication of his polymathic Personal Knowledge on Herr Doctor Professor Mishi was shunned by the world of professional philosophers due to his lawless disregard for the traffic rules of strait academic philosophy (in deed in real life he was a legendary bad driver).
Each brother condensed decades of cogitation into a single foundational masterpiece written in magisterial English. However it was highly unlikely that either had read each other’s books. Micheal found socialism revolting.Karl had no interest in the natural world. Indeed in all likelihood, very few people have seriously read both books reflecting as they do the quiescent realm of science and religion versus the engaged realm of political economy.
In the 1920’s both underwent a low key conversion to Christianity. Karl was interested in Christ’s social message with sympathy for Rousseau’s totalitarian side. In contrast Micheal was interested in the relationship between Christian mystical experience, scientific discovery and personal fulfilment.
Personal Knowledge is a giant amusement park for the mind which explores what Polanyi called the tacit dimension the foundational premises of which are simple, strait forward and appealing. 1) I know more than I can tell. ) 2) I know because I believe. The last line comes from St. Augustine.
