I’ve been reading John Dewey in the morning. Last weekend I finished Experience and Education and started Freedom and Culture.

At night I’m reading Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis. It is one of the best-written popular philosophy/science books I’ve read. Haight knows how to make his ideas accessible without the long-windedness and stiff condescension that usually makes the genre intolerable. This is probably because he actually has a large number of substantial, nonobvious ideas to present. I imagine the challenge to his editor was probably to compact a long book to a more manageable length (what is commonly called editing), where in most books of this kind there’s exactly one semi-novel idea which could be conveyed perfectly in a short essay, pamphlet or wikipedia article, but which has been “fleshed out” – or more accurately, flabbed out – into a more profitable book-length form. I also get the sense that Haight is sharing genuine enthusiasm (and amusement) in the ideas he is presenting, where other authors seem to be calculating what ought to be interesting and fascinating to the dumbass laymen they’re stooping to edu-tain. When Haight says something humorous it is never a humor gesture; he was laughing when he wrote it. If I ever try to write a book, Haight will be my model.

Finally,  I’m doing my best to watch the Ister, tiny bits at a time.

It is interesting to me how these three works are therapeutically harmonizing. The minute I dropped Levinas and picked up Dewey I feel a hunderd times better. This is the second time I’ve had to abandon Levinas. I also found it impossible to connect with (early) Husserl. Maybe this would be a good plan: I’ll read pragmatist philosophy in the winter, and save the crazy idealist-existentialist-dionysian-esoteric metaphysics and poetry for the spring when I can understand it.