The Culture That Explains America

No one thing explains America. That's why "Americana" is so rich. Gatsby, South Park, Ted Lasso, Her, Breaking Bad, …

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/20/opinion/nyt-columnists-culture.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The Culture That Explains America

Dewey on The Jameses

The pluralism of James, his indeterminism, his relentless opposition to absolutes and dogmatisms, all had their source in this basic idea of individuality that underlay all of William James's thinking. There is nothing new in this statement and I do not suppose anyone would question it. What the volumes before us have taught me in addition to this fact is how acutely and deeply this idea bears the impress of his father's character and thought.

To one who has not taken into account William James's profound, unremitting and sincere sense of the ultimate nature and value of individuality, the philosophy of James will always remain a closed book. In some of his later writings, James said that the proper title for his essay called "The Will to Believe" was "The Right to Believe"—a right that existed in certain cases, namely, those momentous in issue and where objective evidence is inconclusive. To my mind this "right to believe" was an expression of James's sense of the indefeasible worth of individuality and its right to its own expression. Many sayings of James's that are superficially capable of interpretation as mere concessions of a compromising (if not a time-serving) sort to the ideas of others have their root, I am sure, in this same sense of the ultimate right of individuals to be themselves and to have their own ideas—provided only they are sincere. If he sometimes overstepped the mark, it was because he tended to impute to others the same sincerity that marked his own beliefs. He was always saying in effect, "How can I claim a right to my own ideas unless I grant the same right to others?"

If I may introduce a personal recollection in this connection, I recall the enthusiasm with which James greeted an essay in which Schiller developed the idea that an Absolute might be the culminating climax toward which things tend. My own enthusiasm being somewhat less, James added: "Oh, I don't myself need the conception of an Absolute at the end any more than at the beginning, but there are many who can't get along without the Absolute in some form." This remark suggests that quality which laid James open to accusations that are completely removed from his life and character. But James himself had achieved, along with an acute and penetrating insight into intellectual sham and pretense when they are elaborately formulated, the kind of spiritual innocence which his father thought the ultimate goal, in connection with his feeling for the rights of others.

I may seem to have got away from the volumes that are my nominal subject; in a way I have. But volumes of sixteen hundred pages that record a full and vivid career lived in a richness of context most of us can only dream about, elude conventional literary notice in any case. Anyone who reads these volumes with the spiritual continuity of father and son in mind will see clearly many things that otherwise may escape him. The grandfather, "William of Albany" had no misgivings with respect to forming the character and beliefs and dictating the conduct of his children. The father, Henry Sr., found himself in complete revolt. He wrote: "Accordingly as you inconsiderably shorten the period of infantile innocence and ignorance in the child, you weaken his chances of a future manly character." The positive statement of what is said negatively here is, "Liberty . . . consists in the inalienable right of every man to believe according to the unbribed inspiration of his heart, and to act according to the unperverted dictates of his own understanding." Anyone who has a responsive sense of the meaning of these words and who reads the sayings and doings of William James in their light, will, I am confident, better understand William's philosophical formulations. He will also understand better his depressions and uncertainties (in a body less vigorous and less assertively sure of itself than was his father's), will appreciate his sympathetic and often, in retrospect, unduly intense response to writings that gave back to him some of his own ideas; and will realize that something more than ill health is behind what his sister meant when she called him a "blob of mercury, unable to stick to anything for the sake of sticking." Temperamental and cultivated responsiveness to whatever seemed genuine in the ideas of others is not favorable to systematized logical continuity. But it will, unless I am vastly mistaken, give his work an enduring vitality denied to philosophic writings whose chief claim is a logical consistency. What seems a lack of conclusiveness in James is due to what James shares with life itself—its many-sidedness.

—John Dewey
https://newrepublic.com/article/84638/the-jameses

Working at home

"'Walden is a book about a house, a simple one on a pond, but also a not-so-simple one, a disordered one, orbiting the Sun.'

Instead of bank accounts and stock portfolios, the economy was meant to support the cultivation and maintenance of a home, in its most intimate and edifying sense: the ability to dwell in the world as a flourishing human being. Now, at this point, we can imagine the objections: “My bank account does support my home and my ability to flourish.”

But the objection misses Thoreau’s point: a job might fill your bank account and allow you to pay your mortgage and to go on three-day vacations every three months, but it might also squander the majority of your life, even deform your life, a life that seems better spent in the deliberate fashioning of a good home. Take this as literally or as figuratively, as broadly or as narrowly, as you like. It is true in any case. Thoreau believed that a certain type of work allows us to inhabit the world in a way that makes us feel, makes us actually, “at home.” That is the goal of Thoreau’s economy."

"Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living": https://a.co/9w03NHI

The Art of Human Connection: WJ on the varieties of happiness – The Marginalian

… Observing "the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals," observing "how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view," observing how often and how readily we judge the outward choices of others while losing sight of the "inward significance" of those choices, James writes:

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.

Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention, how our bodies affect our feelings, and the four features of transcendence.

Maria Popova https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/06/02/william-james-talks-to-teachers/

In Defense of Humanity

We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence.

...As a small child in Concord, Massachusetts, I could see Emerson's home from my bedroom window. Recently, I went back for a visit. Emerson's house has always captured my imagination. He lived there for 47 years until his death, in 1882. Today, it is maintained by his descendants and a small staff dedicated to his legacy. The house is some 200 years old, and shows its age in creaks and stains. But it also possesses a quality that is extraordinarily rare for a structure of such historic importance: 141 years after his death, Emerson's house still feels like his. His books are on the shelves. One of his hats hangs on a hook by the door. The original William Morris wallpaper is bright green in the carriage entryway. A rendering of Francesco Salviati's The Three Fates, holding the thread of destiny, stands watch over the mantel in his study. This is the room in which Emerson wrote Nature. The table where he sat to write it is still there, next to the fireplace.

Standing in Emerson's study, I thought about how no technology is as good as going to the place, whatever the destination. No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon. It is why you touch the arm of the person beside you as you laugh. And it is why you stand in awe at the Jardin des Plantes, floored by the universe as it reveals its hidden code to you. Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic