An online commonplace book
“Being interested is what is scarce.”
– Tyler Cowen
I’ve listened to this podcast 5, 6 times, pulling out a new insight from each listen. It’s an excellent primer on John Stuart Mill.
Start with Autobiography. It will get you interested. And listen to the podcast in full here.
“Reading John Stuart Mill.” The Common Reader (podcast), featuring Tyler Cowen, hosted by Henry Oliver, December 11, 2023. https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/tyler-cowen-reading-john-stuart-mill.
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
– John Stuart Mill
Had to capture this one…
In Roman Stoicism, I saw the hard wisdom of the men who raised me. They had suffered sorrow, poverty, and discrimination. Some had been beaten, extorted, or unjustly arrested. They took pride in their capacity for work and self-sufficiency. They remembered their troubles and deprivations, but they did not define themselves by their trauma. The were fatalistic, but happy. No one had much money or property, but they felt what they had sufficed. They were suspicious of luxuries. They viewed their troubles with laughter rather than anger. Stoicism wasn’t a philosophy. It was my family.
Dana Gioia
Similar to John Stuart Mills father James, Gioia absorbed the stoic lessons from the examples the men around him lived out.
From: Sentences from Seneca pg8
My father’s moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the ‘Socratici viri’; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labour; regard for the public good; estimation of personas according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion, in contradiction to one of self-indulgent sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern reprobation and contempt.
But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still more, on what manner of man he was.
John Stuart Mill
James Mill didn’t raise his son John Stuart Mill with a formal religion, however James demanded morals were included in his education. Stoic morals above all I’d say, – temperance, readiness to encounter pain.
But, as with most things parenting, or teaching, the manner of person you live out in front of your students or children matters most.
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989. pp55
James Mill’s influence on John Stuart’s education is indefatigable. Here John describes how Plato, and the Socratic method helped him create a mental tool-box for clear thinking.
There is no other author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting errors, and clearing up confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology.
James Mill was adamant about proper elocution. A lost oration skill today:
In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when asked: but the particular attention which he paid to elocution (in which his own excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to him a most painful task. Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice, or modulation as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the one side, and expression on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence.
I sense James Mill would be furious with modern western educational curriculum. Outside of some particular schooling, or private tutors, elocution is an afterthought.
Extinct.
intellectus sibi permissus = the intellect left to itself
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989.
In this period of my father’s life there are two things which it is impossible not to be struck with: one of them unfortunately a very common circumstance, the other a most uncommon one. The first is, that in his position, with no resource but the precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married and had a large family; conduct than which nothing could be more opposed, both as a matter of good sense and of duty, to the opinions which, at least at a later period of life, he strenuously upheld. The other circumstance, is the extraordinary energy which was required to lead the life he led, with the disadvantages under which he labored from the first, and with those which he brought upon himself by his marriage. It would have been no small thing, had he done no more than to support himself and his family during so many years by writing, without ever being in debt, or in any pecuniary difficulty; holding, as he did, opinions, both in politics and in religion, which were more odius to all persons of influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen, in that generation than either before or since; and being not only a man whom nothing would have induced to write against his convictions, but one who invariably threw into everything he wrote, as much of his convictions as he thought the circumstances would in any way permit: being, it must also be said, one who never did anything negligently; never undertook any task, literary or other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all the labor necessary for performing it adequately.
The Greek and Arithmetic lessons weren’t the only disciplines James taught John Stuart, it was the energy, the willing to take on more responsibility, and personal discipline that he modeled.
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989.
Floodlights and Goalposts 