William James
The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing.
The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase suggestive of his singularity —
happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement.
An ideal wraith like this, of Emerson's personality, hovers over all Concord today, taking, in the minds of those of you who were his neighbors and intimates a somewhat fuller shape, remaining more abstract in the younger generation, but bringing home to all of us the notion of a spirit indescribably precious. The form that so lately moved upon these streets and country roads, or awaited in these fields and woods the beloved Muse's visits, is now dust; but
the soul's note, the spiritual voice, rises strong and clear above the uproar of the times, and seems securely destined to exert an ennobling influence over future generations. What gave a flavor so matchless to Emerson's individuality was, even more than his rich mental gifts, their singularly harmonious combination. Rarely has a man so accurately known
the limits of his genius or so unfailingly kept with them. "Stand by your order," he used to say to youthful students; and perhaps the paramount impression one gets of his life is of his
loyalty to his own personal type and mission. The type was that of what he liked to call
a scholar, the perceiver of pure truth; and the mission was that of
the reporter in worthy form of each perception. The day is good, he said, in which we have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the sky, the field and forest,
sedulously waiting every morning for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good Spirit will give me.
This was the first half of Emerson, but only half; for genius, as he said, is insatiate for expression, and
truth has to be clad in the right verbal garment. The form of the garment was so vital with Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter. They form a chemical combination — thoughts which would be trivially expressed otherwise, are important through the nouns and verbs to which he married them. The style is the man, and if we must define him in one word, we have to call him Artist.
He was an artist whose medium was verbal and who wrought in spiritual material. This duty of spiritual seeing and reporting determined the whole tenor of his life.
It was to shield this duty from invasion and distraction that he dwelt in the country, that he consistently declined to entangle himself with associations or to encumber himself with functions which, however he might believe in them, he felt were duties for other men and not for him. Even the care of his garden, "with its stoopings and fingers in a few yards of space," he found "narrowing and poisoning," and took to
long free walks and saunterings instead, without apology. "Causes" innumerable sought to enlist him as their "worker" — all got his smile and word of sympathy, but none entrapped him into service. The struggle against slavery itself, deeply as it appealed to him, found him firm:
God must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of
my post, which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to face than those Negroes, to wit, imprisoned thoughts far back in the brain of man, and which have no watchman or lover or defender but me.
This in reply to the possible questions of his own conscience. To hot-blooded moralists with more objective ideas of duty, such fidelity to the limits of his genius must have often made him seem provokingly remote and unavailable; but we, who can see things in moral liberal perspective, must unqualifiably approve the results. The faultless tact with which he kept his safe limits while he so dauntlessly asserted himself within them, is an example fitted to give heart to other theorists and artists the world over.
The insight and creed from which Emerson's life followed can be best summed up in his own verses:
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man!
Through the individual fact there ever shone for him the effulgence of the Universal Reason. The great
Cosmic Intellect terminates and houses itself in mortal men and passing hours.
Each of us is an angle of its eternal vision, and the only way to be true to our Maker is to be loyal to ourselves. "O rich and various Man!" he cries, "thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the city of God; in thy heart the power of love and the realms of right and wrong."
If the individual opens thus directly into the Absolute, it follows that there is
something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowed traditions and living at second hand. "If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?" Emerson writes; "As long as any man exists there is some need of him: let him fight for his own." This faith that in
a life at first hand there is something sacred is perhaps the most characteristic note in Emerson's writings. The hottest side of him is this
non-conformist persuasion, and if his temper could ever verge on common irascibility, it would be by reason of the passionate character of his feelings on this point. The world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is. "Each one of us can bask in the great morning which rises out of the Eastern Sea, and be himself one of the children of the light."
"Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. There is a time in each man's education when he must arrive at the conviction that limitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; and know that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which it was given him to till."
The matchless eloquence with which Emerson proclaimed the sovereignty of the living individual electrified and emancipated his generation, and this bugle-blast will doubtless be regarded by future critics as the soul of his message.
The present man is the aboriginal reality, the Institution is derivative, and the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues. "If anyone would lay an axe to your tree with a text from I John, v, 7, or a sentence from Saint Paul, say to him," Emerson wrote, " 'My tree is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.' Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and, if he were Paul himself, that you also are here and with your Creator;" "Cleve ever to God," he insisted "against the name of God;"— and so, in spite of the intensely religious character of his total thought, when he began his career it seemed to many of his brethren in the clerical profession that he was little more than an iconoclast and desecrator.
Emerson's belief that the individual must in reason be adequate to the vocation for which the Spirit of the world has called him into being, is the source of those sublime pages, hearteners, and sustainers of our youth, in which he urges his hearers to be incorruptibly true to their own private conscience. Nothing can harm the man who rests in his appointed place and character. Such a man is invulnerable; he balances the universe, balances it as much by keeping small when he is small, by being great and spreading when he is great. "I love and honor Epaminondas," said Emerson, "but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, 'He acted and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas. if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude." "
The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the Soul has need of an organ here, and shall I not assume the post?"
The vanity of all superserviceableness and pretence was never more happily set forth than by Emerson in the many passages in which he develops this aspect of his philosophy. Character infallibly proclaims itself. "Hide your thoughts! — hide the sun and moon. They publish themselves to the universe. They will speak through you though you were dumb. They will flow out of your actions, your manners and your face. ...Don't say things: What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. ... What a man is engraves itself upon him in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His vice glasses the eye, casts lines of mean expression in the cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast upon the back of the head, and writes, O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king. If you would not be known to do a thing, never do it; a man may play the fool in the drifts of the desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see — How can a man be concealed? How can he be concealed?"
On the other hand, never was a sincere word or a sincere thought utterly lost. "Never a magnanimity fell to the ground but there is some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly.... The hero fears not that if he withstood the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — himself — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation than the relating of the incident."
The same indefeasible
right to be exactly what one is, provided one only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson's way of thinking, from persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine:
In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor, Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man's day. What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castellan etiquette? The soul answers — Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution, — behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham's, Hampden's, Bayard's, Alfred's, Scipio's, Pericles's day, — day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron, or Burke; — but ask it of the enveloping Now ...
Be lord of a day, and you can put up your history books. [From "Literary Ethics," 1838.]
"The deep today which all men scorn" receives thus from Emerson superb revindication.
"Other world! there is no other world." All God's life opens into the individual particular, and here and now, or nowhere, is reality. "The present hour is the decisive hour, and every day is doomsday." Such a conviction that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could say, you find most of them as alike as their barns and pantries, and soon as musty and dreary. Never was such a fastidious lover of significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their discovery.
His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar. For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved the situation — they must be worthy specimens, — sincere, authentic, archetypical; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious bore and canter. But he would infallibly have added what he then added: "It is strange and horrible to say this, for I feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, and the axis round which the Universe revolves passes through his body where he stands."
Be it how it may, then, this is Emerson's revelation:
The point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold of eternity. This vision is the head-spring of all his outpourings; and it is for this truth, given to no previous literary artist to express in such penetratingly persuasive tones, that prosperity will reckon him a prophet, and perhaps neglecting other pages, piously turn to those that covey this message. His life was one long conversation with the invisible divine, expressing itself through individuals and particulars: "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man!"
I spoke of how shrunken the wraith, how thin the echo, of men is after they are departed. Emerson's wraith comes to me now as if it were but the very voice of this victorious argument. His words to this effect are certain to be quoted and extracted more and more as time goes on, and to take their place among the Scriptures of humanity. "'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity, shall you pace forth," beloved Master. As long as our English language lasts men's hearts will be cheered and their souls strengthened and liberated by the noble and musical pages with which you have enriched it.
We are the culmination of our experiences, thoughts, and behaviors. This is, in part, how a sense of self is established. Thus, the ego emerges. If we do not understand or acknowledge the ego, we cannot do the work to untangle the attachment to self. The statement shared from The Philosopher and the Monk, “The state of the river at any given moment is the result of its history. In the same way, an individual stream of consciousness is loaded with all the traces left on it by positive and negative thoughts, as well as by actions and words arising from those thoughts,” alludes to the fact that our thought processes and inner dialogue are a direct reflection and combination of our experiences and interpretation of those experiences. It is not contradictory to assume that “You need first to have an ego in order to be aware that it doesn’t exist,” (The Philosopher and the Monk). It is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain an absence of being without establishing a sense of being. There is no frame of reference from which a sense of self can be undone. In theory, we strive to make sense of the world around us by defining our position in our environments and those foreign to us. Once we formulate an understanding of how we belong, we can begin the greater work unmasking the ego.
ReplyDeleteA strong sense of self is an indicator of success in life in Western culture. It is also often associated with being highly egotistical. The ego, in terms of self-assertion, is generally an obstacle to effective communication and conversation. It can impede the ability to listen critically and without concern for how the content affects the listener personally. Rather than listening for meaning, we tend to hear and develop a response. The response may often be a disguise from the ego to defend the self or self-preserve.
As one works to disseminate an attachment to self, there may be a concern that what is left is a nothingness. However, a discovery in the process is the altruistic nature and conscious adoption of the wellbeing of all other beings. When our thoughts and actions are in the best interest of others, a greater sense of indescribable fulfillment occurs. Positive thoughts and actions breed goodness and promote selflessness. Ricard illustrates this with a verse from the eight-century Buddhist sage Shantideva:
All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself.
Is there need for lengthy explanation?
Childish beings look out for themselves,
While Buddhas labor for the good of others:
See the difference that divides them!
It's so counter-intuitive to the western mind,to think that we can gratify ourselves by seeking the good of others. And, I think, it's the source of much of the partisan division that's wracked our politics and public life. Happy lives aren't ego-driven, but the disappearance of Self doesn't mean we don't still care, or can't still flourish. We seem to have a hard time getting that.
DeleteOh, and speaking of the Buddha...
Delete"As we teach children to observe physical hygiene for its health benefits, we need to teach them to cultivate emotional hygiene — to tackle destructive emotions and find peace of mind." Dalai Lama
Natalia Jiron
ReplyDeleteThoughts on Week 2
The second weeks readings were a bit more challenging for me to understand, but the Zoom class most definitely helped me understand the concepts a lot better. When it came to the topics for this week’s readings, it was a struggle to understand. I have a harder time trying to differentiate the type of concepts and vocabulary that is being used. In reading these articles and watching TED talks, I found myself researching background on the philosopher and many concepts. In my undergraduate and graduate career, I have not studied the concept of philosophy until taking this block with Professor Oliver.
In the first article, “Life, Pragmatism, and Conversational Philosophy”, I had to research the meaning of pragmatism in order to understand the basis of the article (this may seem silly). One of the main ideas that stood out to me was the concept of conversation. The article states how conversation is an important idea in being able to understand the motions behind Rorty’s philosophy. In relation to this, Rorty wanted philosophy to become a conversation. Overall, he preferred the ideas of conversational philosophers over analytical philosophers. The reason can be that they are being a part of a conversation instead of practicing a specific discipline (Zabala).
After being able to read the second article, “The Fire of Life”, I believe that I developed a different understanding of poetry. The introduction that Rorty gives sends out the message of how poetry has impacted him and how he wishes he spent more time with poetry. “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose” (Rorty). In further reading the article on about David Whyte, “The Conversational Nature of Reality”, I found it rather fascinating how captivated Whyte become through poetry. He claims falling in love with poetry at a young age and feeling being “abducted” in some type of way. The experiences from Rorty and Whyte show how the positive impact that poetry can have. Whyte’s experiences in the Galapagos allowed him to return back to poetry since he felt that the language did not match along with what he had experienced. Reading through these two articles, I have been able to appreciate poetry in a different perspective especially through some of their own works.
“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose” (Rorty)--
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit tricky. Maybe poetry conveys no particular "truths" that philosophic prose misses, but the point of James's statement that something always "glimmers and twinkles" for which familiar language comes too late, and which honest philosophers have to acknowledge, is that poetry evokes a dimension of experience and humanity that improves our lives. Rorty had technical reasons for not wanting to call that dimension a source of "truth" but it's still something he found himself wanting more of, as his life wound down. He would have envied David Whyte's earlier insight that led him to "fall in love with poetry at a young age." But it's never too late for new love, is it?
Week 2 readings
ReplyDeleteSo, am I a pragmatist? I thought I was, and I still think I lean toward pragmatism but after listening to What is Pragmatism? A discussion on the BBC's "In Our Time" I’m not as certain. According to Webster, the definition of pragmatism is an American movement in philosophy marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. And as I understood the BBC discussion, one of the arguments against Pragmatism is that an idea’s truth isn’t always based on its usefulness, that it can be truth even if that truth isn’t useful. Of course, then you could argue, I suppose on what or how do we define usefulness? However, that pulls away from the basic question for am I a pragmatist? I would have to say that I yes, at heart my thoughts begin at the nature of practical thinking. Faced with a problem or situation that needs dealing with, I will think about possible solutions or ways of handling things, so the truths that I discover are related to a practical situation and trying to resolve that situation. However, in working to resolve practical matters, I also believe that we can discover truths that we did not consider before and even if they do not become used toward practical application of a situation, those thoughts should not always be discounted as untrue. Those unused truths by be relevant to a problem we have yet to think about which would make them useful in the future or help us shape and informed decisions we make about issues we haven’t thought of yet. I guess what I would caution myself against when looking for a practical application of thought is that I don’t discredit a though as true because it does not work with the issue I’m trying to resolve, essentially giving me to power to pick and choose what is true and ignoring the trues that I do not to deal with, the inconvenience truth. Of course, then you could get into a discussion about what is true. Is truth based only on its ability to solve practical matters. I don’t think so. But I do believe that the ability to see truth and apply those truths to practical matter helps form clearer thoughts about who we are and why we do things. So, dealing in the practical in order to “get things done”, is more of what motivates be that not, so yes, I would consider myself a pragmatist...I think.
This is the standard objection to pragmatism, that it incorrectly defines truth as usefulness. It's a serious objection, but I think it misses a crucial distinction between the definition of truth and the criteria by which we identify it. Pragmatists typically think we have no better criterion than usefulness, or practicality, or (as Wm James said, "what is better for us to believe"). That is, pragmatists may agree that truth is formally and officially DEFINED as something objective and independent of our estimation of usefulness... but they also insist that we have no other way of discerning what's true than in terms of what's useful. So, Jennifer, I do think you are a pragmatist. Me too.
DeleteJames on truth, in Pragmatism Lecture II ("What Pragmatism Means"):
...I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives. That it is good, for as much as it profits, you will gladly admit. If what we do by its aid is good, you will allow the idea itself to be good in so far forth, for we are the better for possessing it. But is it not a strange misuse of the word 'truth,' you will say, to call ideas also 'true' for this reason?
To answer this difficulty fully is impossible at this stage of my account. You touch here upon the very central point of Messrs. Schiller's, Dewey's and my own doctrine of truth, which I cannot discuss with detail until my sixth lecture. Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were no good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to shun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we ought to believe'; and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her. Probably you also agree, so far as the abstract statement goes, but with a suspicion that if we practically did believe everything that made for good in our own personal lives, we should be found indulging all kinds of fancies about this world's affairs, and all kinds of sentimental superstitions about a world hereafter. Your suspicion here is undoubtedly well founded, and it is evident that something happens when you pass from the abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation.
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I said just now that what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit. Now in real life what vital benefits is any particular belief of ours most liable to clash with? What indeed except the vital benefits yielded by other beliefs when these prove incompatible with the first ones? In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them... https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/James/James_1907/James_1907_02.html