Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

LISTEN. This show originally aired on July 6, 2017. Radio Open Source.

Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long.  “Simplify,” in a one-word sentence of good advice.  But then 2-million words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.  

It’s one of many odd points to notice about Thoreau at his 200th birthday: that the non-stop writer was equally a man of action, a scientist and a high-flying poet whose imagination saw that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back;” and still a workman with callused hands, at home in the wild, a walker four hours a day on average, in no particular direction.  His transcendentalism was all about the blossoming intersection of nature-study and introspection, fact and idea, detail and ideals.  In his pine grove, on his river, at his pond, the outdoor Thoreau.

N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) Walden Pond Revisited, 1942

What does a Transcendentalist do, we were asking in the first of three bicentennial Thoreau shows?  All the answers are to be found in the canoe trip that became a masterpiece, titled: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. What the Transcendentalist does is soar – between water below and sky above; between this day and eternity, between Nature, and human society.

We start our journey at the South Bridge Boat House near Thoreau’s house on Main Street in Concord, just upstream from the Concord River itself.  A naturalist philosopher in the Thoreau lineage, Alex Strong from Maine, is one of our guides.  During our trip down Thoreau’s “little Nile”,  Alex tells us about what the strapping, young 22 year old was learning on his voyage: 

He was learning about big-N Nature when he was studying the Perch, studying when flowers bloomed, where the bees were. The notes he took, the meticulous notes, weren’t just about the little details; they’re about understanding the whole picture and keeping nature sacred while understanding it, in all its finite mundane details.

Next up, the still-water Walden, a pond in Concord, Massachusetts where Henry Thoreau wrote his great book in a cabin by the shore. In 1845 Walden was a woodlot next to the new railway where the 28-year-old poet went to “suck out the marrow of life,” whatever it turned out to be. Our guide to the pond and the book, the young philosopher John Kaag had been in and out of the Walden water the other morning before we got there.

 

Photo by Michael J. Lutch

While we’re here, at Walden, we decided to stop and consider the statuesque, very tall, dark-green, almost black, pine trees all around Walden Pond, trees that Thoreau came to consider cousins, virtually human.  Richard Higgins, widely traveled in Concord today, has written a book on Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and he has no doubt that Thoreau spoke it fluently, from the heart.

Finally, we conclude with a Thoreauvian meditation on walking. Real walkers are born, not made, Thoreau liked to say.  “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”  These days the woods and the bookstores are full of such walkers.  Andrew Forsthoefel made his reputation in public radio walking 4000 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco, with a sign that said “walking to listen” and recording back-road stories. And then there’s the literary traveler Paul Theroux, of Cape Cod and Hawaii, of the Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway Bazaar. He has spent a lifetime on trains, and in kayaks, and a lot of it on his own two feet in China, in our own Deep South and specially in Africa.  In our conversation, Theroux extends Thoreau’s idea that walking is in-born, into some more than others.

See a full transcript of this show on Medium.

Guest List

John Kaag
professor of philosophy at UMass Lowell and author of American Philosophy: A Love Story

Alejandro Strong
philosophy teacher, wilderness guide and founder at Apeiron Expeditions

Paul Theroux
travel writer, novelist, essayist and author of The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Richard Higgins
author of Thoreau and the Language of Trees

Andrew Forsthoefel
radio producer and author of Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

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I Am An American Philosopher: Naoko Saito – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Naoko Saito is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Kyoto. She is the author of The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (2005) and American Philosophy in Translation (2019). She is co-editor, with Naomi Hodgson, of Philosophy as Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures (2018), and co-editor with Paul Standish of Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated (2017), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (2012) and Education and the Kyoto School of Philosophy: Pedagogy for Human Transformation (2012). She is a past recipient of SAAP's Ila and John Mellow Prize and the Joseph L. Blau Prize.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

My area of research is American philosophy and philosophy of education, with a special focus on John Dewey's pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Henry David Thoreau's American transcendentalism, and Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. I feel that education in the East and the West today is in need of a language and a mode of action that can resist not only the economic tide of globalization but also threats posed by anxieties of inclusion—by this phrase I mean, for example, those tensions brought into focus by the past presidency of Donald Trump and by Brexit. In response to this need, in my publications, I attempt to reconstruct Deweyan pragmatism in dialogue with other American voices: those of Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell, all of whom show strains of Eastern thought in their work. Their moral perfectionism helps Dewey address more sensitively the problem of alterity in globalization and saves him from the limitations of American democracy.

How did you become an American philosopher?

Over the past thirty years I have been working as a mediator in cross-cultural settings, especially between Japan and Anglo-American and European cultures. My academic research, international research activities, teaching and professional work are inseparable from these experiences. My area of specialization is philosophy of education and American philosophy, especially insofar as this relates to intercultural understanding and education for citizenship in a globalized world.

These interests derive in part from my first degree, when I majored in American Studies. Postgraduate studies with Israel Scheffler and Hilary Putnam at Harvard led me to a deep interest in philosophy of education, especially in Dewey's democratic philosophy of education. Later studies with Cavell furthered my interest in the transcendentalism of Emerson, culminating in my Ph.D. from Columbia University in October 2000.

Since 2001 I have been working closely with Paul Standish at UCL IOE, which has enabled me to expand my research activities into continental philosophies and connections with European scholars. Most recently, I have developed close research connections on American philosophy with Richard Bernstein at the New School for Social Research and with Sami Pihlström at the University of Helsinki. These international connections are at the heart of my research and teaching activities in cross-dialogue in philosophy and education.

How would you describe your current research?

My book, American Philosophy in Translation (2019), is the product of many years spent reading and studying American philosophy. Mostly I have done this from a remote part of the world—far from America across the Pacific Ocean – and, like so many others, in a language that is not my own. I came to the idea of this book, and to thematizing these issues in terms of translation, partly through a sense that there was something still to be released in American thought and pragmatism, and that an outsider's viewpoint might actually be beneficial. It is through the experience of standing on the precarious border between inside and outside that I hit upon the related ideas of translation, transcendence and transformation—following Henry David Thoreau's closing remarks in Walden:

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

The account offered in my book is driven by my strong attraction to the best assets of American culture, assets that seem, to this outsider's eye and ear, to have been stifled in stereotypical forms of American discourse. The book is an endeavor to attend in a fresh way to the voices of Dewey, Emerson, Thoreau and Cavell.

What do you do when you're not doing American philosophy?

I suppose my "hobby" is international networking. Before the spread of COVID-19, I was traveling abroad to see people and organize conferences, involving people from different fields and across generations. Since traveling abroad has become difficult, I have been organizing and attending international meetings online.

What's your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

Definitely Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau! For example, Thoreau's Walden, and Cavell's The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979) and The Senses of Walden (1992).

Saito-Interview-FinalDownload

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-naoko-saito/

America's Philosopher

I couldn't put this book down! The story of Locke in America is about so much more than just John Locke. It's about the needs, ideals, and questions that have transformed intellectual life in America and continue to animate us today.

A 🧵on Claire Arcenas' beautiful book https://t.co/xLfAEmoaKt
(https://twitter.com/miss_glory/status/1549082850883842048?s=02)

Agnosticism and pragmatic pluralism

William James wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic (Part 8, of an 8-part series beginning with Part 1: "A Religious Man for Our Times")

"The most important thing about a man," wrote Chesterton, "is his philosophy." William James agreed. He was fond of quoting the saying. Our philosophy, or "over-belief", shapes our "habits of action", which is to say our ethos – who we are becoming. Pragmatism, the philosophy of "what works", is taken to be James' philosophy. And yet, his pragmatism is different from that of his confrères.

Pragmatism is often associated with deflationary accounts of truth. Truth, with a capital T, is a pipe dream, it implies. No fact, rule or idea is ever certain – nor is even the possibility of facts, rules and ideas. Philosophy and science can make progress, but only in relation to current experience. "Truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate", wrote one pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey Charles Sanders Peirce. Or as Richard Rorty pithily averred: "Time will tell, but epistemology won't." When it comes to religion, such pragmatism implies that theologians are more like poets than metaphysicians. They are aestheticians – conjuring meaning with their descriptive powers, as opposed to capturing Truth in their formularies.

It's called ironic pragmatism. "There is an all" is inverted to "that's all there is." Such a stance requires the philosopher, or scientist, to be committed to finding the truth as it if existed, though it probably doesn't. It's truth as a "regulative ideal", to use another phrase. So, if James is a pragmatist, what of his religious quest? Is he condemned to perpetual agnosticism – longing for more and never finding it? It's a big debate amongst Jamesian scholars. But I think his ethos, his philosophy, can be summarised like this.

In the Varieties, he had found that the higher religious emotions – those associated with profound conversions and saintly lives – commonly give rise to a monist view of ultimate reality. (There is an all, and it is One.) But he wondered about such absolutism. What he disliked about it was its reifying tendency. He feared that the abstract language it fosters forgets the "thickness of reality". He wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic. In this sense, he was an empiricist, and a "radical empiricist" to boot – as in "rooted". He believed our experiences are rooted in reality, for all that we will misunderstand what's real, and get it wrong.

The process was captured in one of his many pregnant phrases: "stream of consciousness". The flowing waters of our experience – with its eddies, torrents and occasion pools of stillness – are steeped in the wider waters of consciousness that surround us. We perceive things from our point of view, sure. But that is not to say we cannot glimpse a fuller perspective too, as we're touched by other flows.

It's the usually unseen reality that spiritual virtuosi detect – the "more". But while we can hope that our experiences participate in these truths, our understanding of them must always be hedged with doubt: no-one ever perceives the whole of reality – the dream of the monist. We live piecemeal, in what he came to call a "pluralistic universe". (His final theological position is not contained in the Varieties, but in A Pluralistic Universe – the book of his Hibbert lectures of 1908.) To put it another way, truth is found in the quest itself. This is what his pragmatism means.

Ludwig Wittgenstein read James, and he offers an illuminating reflection on this quest in the Philosophical Investigations. He imagines James listening to some music and, whilst knowing that it's glorious, not being quite able say why it's glorious. "Our vocabulary is inadequate," he has James conclude, which raises the possibility that a richer vocabulary might contain a word for the way in which the music is glorious. Only, that's not the point, Wittgenstein notes. It's not that we don't have the words. It's that language itself is inadequate.

For much of his life, James devoted his imaginative energies to finding words that might better capture the superabundance of our inner lives. In the Principles of Psychology, his major work before the Varieties, he'd revolutionized the vocabulary used by the discipline. But there is always the more that lies beyond words too – the ineffable quality of the music. And so this opens up a second dimension to James' pragmatism. If truth is in the quest, the quest is never over too.

In another inventive phrase, James wrote that he was "ever not quite" at home with the existence of God. He couldn't easily live with belief in God. But he couldn't quite live without it either. It could never be otherwise for him. It's implicit in his perspectival empiricism.
It's a religiously-inclined agnosticism that demands an ethos of toleration coupled to curiosity. James wrote an essay entitled "On a certain blindness in human beings", that blindness being a tendency to forget that different people see the world in radically different ways. It leads to the mutual misunderstandings that lie at the root of so much human discontent, warfare and strife. Toleration is the necessary corrective to this blindness.

And we can recognise our blindness – which is why curiosity is a virtue too. By respecting another's point of view we might not only save ourselves the embarrassments of narrow-mindedness, but open ourselves to the unexpected and new. "Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer," he writes in the essay, "although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands."

"Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe," he affirms. That is to remain committed to the reality of the ineffable about which we'd speak, and to admit we'll never be able completely to capture it in our words. But our best mutterings will address us body and soul. Our deepest musings will "hover around" deeper insights. There's reason to have faith. As Wittgenstein observed: "The unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered."

Mark Vernon

Guardian

John Lachs

John Lachs is 88 today. I've tweeted a bit in appreciation of him over the years.

My favorite page in “John Lachs’s Practical Philosophy,” just out. Like JL, my late father loved life, valued honesty, and faced “chill reality” forthrightly. pic.twitter.com/OZI4T2mOcb

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 24, 2018

Frank Pajares

 UKY WJ site…

Frank Pajares was an Education scholar at Emory. When he died a few years ago his WJ site migrated to UKY. He linked the site to my blogs...under Bibliography you can click on my book and get this:

Sentiment of Rationality 2

"James ends this extraordinary essay, which is a call for a whole new philosophy of mind based on what mind actually is and does, by saying, provocatively, “The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails,” and he appeals for an example to Whitman: “Even the least religious of men must have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning that ‘Swiftly arose and spread around him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth’. . .To feel ‘I am the truth’ is to abolish the opposition between knowing and being.”6"

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/46keh29

The Sentiment of Rationality

"28. The Action of Consciousness ABOUT A MONTH AFTER he sent off his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” James sent off, in January 1878, an article called “The Sentiment of Rationality.” He later described it as “the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize,” and he noted ruefully that it might better have been called “The Psychology of Philosophizing.” We may, at this distance, prefer the original title, if only for its fresh and unorthodox, not to say brash, announcement that rationality is at bottom a feeling. Not a matter of logic or math, not reasoning or ratios, not induction, deduction, or syllogism, not something higher than and detached from the senses, not the opposite of a feeling or emotion—rationality is itself a feeling or emotion. He might even have called the essay “The Feeling of Rationality.” He begins by asking how we recognize the rationality of a conception, and he answers, “By certain subjective marks, that is, a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest.” He amplifies, saying, “This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness—the absence of all need to explain it, account for it or justify it—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.”1 James simply sidesteps the long history of reason, right reason, pure reason, and practical reason, walking right past the conventional notion that rationality means abiding by set rules of reasoning. James is not really interested in the history of philosophy or the taxonomy of logic; he is interested in how particular minds actually work. His starting point is not Greek or medieval philosophy but modern scientific or experimental knowledge of the functions of the brain and the senses. “All logical processes,” James says in another piece written at this same time, “are today hypothetically explained as brain processes.”2"

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/5zjnn6I