WJ's occult-progressive paradox

"Interest" is not un-progressive, uncritical acceptance would be. WJ was interested in why and how others' beliefs (of all sorts) motivated them, and he did believe in believing; but he did not accept all beliefs at face value. https://t.co/RGAKH9yeUW

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 7, 2021

Awakening

 "...we must remember that the basis of democratic leadership is ordinary citizens’ desire to take their country back from the hands of corrupted plutocratic and imperial elites. This desire is predicated on an awakening among the populace from the seductive lies and comforting illusions that sedate them and a moral channeling of new political energy that constitutes a formidable threat to the status quo. This is what happened in the 1860s, 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s in American history. Just as it looked as if we were about to lose the American democratic experiment—in the face of civil war, imperial greed, economic depression, and racial upheaval—in each of these periods a democratic awakening and activistic energy emerged to keep our democratic project afloat. We must work and hope for such an awakening once again."

"Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism" by Cornel West: https://a.co/0hthZgT

Inhibition

David Brooks (New York Times, May 28, 2021)

People wear masks when they feel unsafe, and for more than a year, we were unsafe, and we had to wear masks. But the physical masks we wore were layered on top of all the psychological masks we had put on, out of fear, in the years before Covid. Productivity is a mask. I’m too busy to see you. Essentialism is a mask. I can make all sorts of assumptions about you based on what racial or ethnic group you are in. Self-doubt is a mask. I don’t show you myself because I’m afraid you won’t like me. Distrust is a mask. I wall myself in because I’m suspicious you’ll hurt me.

As we take off the physical masks, it seems important that we take off the psychological masks as well. If there is one thing I’ve learned in life, it is that we have more to fear from our inhibitions than from our vulnerabilities. More lives are wrecked by the slow and frigid death of emotional closedness than by the short and hot risks of emotional openness.

 

William James (The Gospel of Relaxation, 1899)

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this over-tension,—and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you will agree as to the main facts,—where does the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed. And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

….

Why do we hear the complaint so often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other band, conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one band nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

Kaag's 5 best

"Fighting oppression operates by way of getting out of a basement by steps. You can be further up or down in this basement, depending on how many vectors of oppression you face"

@JohnKaag's American philosophy #readinglist: https://t.co/u6LqZg6LVJ
(https://twitter.com/five_books/status/1394095347673227264?s=02)

Doesn't hold water

Today was Commencement at Vanderbilt. Just got an email (in appreciation?) from a new graduate.... pic.twitter.com/cAul6mzUBh

— Robert Talisse (@RobertTalisse) May 15, 2021

Not if you’re a pragmatist.

— Robert Talisse (@RobertTalisse) May 15, 2021

---Shouldn't a pragmatist find academic debates about what's "essential" (vs. contingent) a distraction from more urgent questions about our practical experience of life and its constituents (H2O among them)? Essential or not, in the philosophers' sense, water is life as we know it. 

--Not at all. In order to attend to the things you mention in the way they prescribe, pragmatists also have to make sense of science (its method, presuppositions, laws, results, etc). Arguing that nothing is essentially anything is different from declaring the question irrelevant.

---"Nothing is essentially anything" is a vacuous verbalism. Pragmatists are concerned with how things enter into our actual experience. What are they "known as?" etc. Many academic disputes never even approach this fundamentally pragmatic question, and are in that sense irrelevant. 

--I think you’re wrong. 

---That's okay. We can talk about it at the bowling alley or something. [bowling gif] 

 --Deal! 7:48 PM · May 15, 2021·Twitter for iPad Andrew Howat @andrewhowat ·9h Replying to @RobertTalisse and @OSOPHER I’m writing a piece on pragmatist views of essence right now, so let me know how this argument turns out, okay?

Not sure this is an argument, until we move beyond "I think you're wrong"... But it is an important difference of perspective on pragmatism and what James called the irrelevancy of many of the "vocables we fire from our conceptual shotguns..." pic.twitter.com/ZpodObbTiH

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 16, 2021

The custom of creativity

 Thinking some more, this morning, about creativity and its roots in custom and habit. Younger Daughter just texted me the image of some jewelry she's designed (and sold!), now that she's a college grad she's got time to be creative. 

I was already thinking about creativity in writing and thinking, after talking yesterday with another new grad. He's much further down the path, decades further than her, and with a decade even on me; but with more decades still ahead, I'm quite sure. He thinks I'm going to deliver his eulogy. We'll see. (Well, one of us will.)

My friend mentioned that my colleague, another of his recent teachers, had instilled in him the habit of journaling. That reminded me of Emerson's seminal question to Thoreau: "Do you keep a journal?"

And that reminded me of Emerson's eulogy for his friend.

Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect,—his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably out-walk most countrymen in a day’s journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He said he wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.

I totally get that. The best time to write in your journal is after a walk. Or maybe before. Either way, it needs to be a daily habit. 

U@d 5.15.21

Wallace Stevens, peripatetic Jamesian

I've always admired Stevens' peripatetic working routine (his day job was at Hartford Insurance Co.)...

"Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine. He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour-three miles-to work. He dictated poems to his secretary. He ate no lunch; at noon he walked for another hour, often to an art gallery. He walked home from work-another hour. After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine. On Sundays, he walked in the park. I don't know what he did on Saturdays. Perhaps he exchanged a few words with his wife, who posed for the Liberty dime. (One would rather read these people, or lead their lives, than be their wives." Annie Dillard, The Writing Life 

Annie Dillard is (James, Emerson, Thoreau) biographer Robert Richardson's widow, btw

==

Wallace Stevens and William James: The Poetics of Pure Experience

Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism

Quoting James

This is a ‘letter’. This past Sunday was a great family day at Craigicello. Our boys came down to  celebrate younger son’s 26th birthday and Mother’s Day. To me, it was more; I called it Neo-Passover, but I’m not sure that will catch on with others. We were having our first meal together as a family inside the house since Christmas of 2019, before the plague began. I think this is a day, different for us all, that we should celebrate as a Passover. We also celebrated by doing some yard work that was a bit too strenuous for the old man.  

Waiting for lunch, the delicious poppy-seed chicken dish that is younger son’s favorite, we got to talking about their exam schedule for finals week (both at MTSU). That inspired me to want to read them James’s quote on tests, and flinging the books away. I went to my study and retrieved the (correct) Library of America volume. Before I read from it, they both admired the quality of the book. I showed them the two volumes, and told them they were what you and I referred to when talking James, and used shorthand, like saying ‘p836’.  

I said to them, “you know, like the old joke – number 4!” They didn’t know it, so my explanation was that a new prisoner was confused by other prisoners shouting out “number 4” or some other number, and then everybody laughing. It was explained to him that they’d all been in together so long, and knew all the jokes, that they had just numbered them to make it easier.  

I told them the p836 story, and how there was an entire concept in a passage on that page that I had related to Egoman. I then read the passage, and we talked about Egoman and the problems he causes us.  I went over to page 837, and read the passage about tests, and we had a good discussion about that too.

I realized later that we were having a philosophical discussion without talking ‘Philosophy’. We were talking about experience. That thought took me to James’s quote about defending experience against philosophy. 

Me sitting at the table with my sons, reading James from a nice book, reminded me of a deep memory of my grandmother Craig, wife of the more famous and influential Grandfather Craig. She would sit me down before her in that big black rocker chair, now in my living room, and read to me from the bible that was ever-present in her lap, and lecture me. I don’t remember enjoying it. If you recall, my GP2 began with me talking about the interminable lectures I received from this grandfather. It appears that I was getting it from both sides. 

And now, here am I, reading from the gospel of Wm. James to my sons before me, his lectures being the foundation of my lectures to my sons. It looks like Craigs are born lecturers. Thank goodness I have found such an abundant source of material. 

 

 

"Walpurgisnacht"

Walpurgis Nacht

William James had a very strange experience on this date [July _] in 1898. He called it his Walpurgis Nacht. (Walpurgisnacht is the night before May Day, when spirits are said to walk the earth.)

It was a rare “marvelous”  mystical moment for James, strange by any account. But stranger still, to me, is the fact that the New York Times recently wrote a story about it and the place where it happened (on Mount Marcy in sight of Mount Haystack and Panther Gorge, in the Adirondacks) called “The Geography of Religious Experience”. It recounts the odd letter James wrote his wife about the episode:

“The moon rose and hung above the scene, leaving a few of the larger stars visible,” he wrote, “and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me… the thought of you and the children … the problem of the Edinburgh lectures [which would become Varieties of Religious Experience], all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis nacht.”

James didn’t have or report many (perhaps any) more mystical experiences of his own, if indeed this counts as one, but he was always willing to credit the testimony of others who did. Or at least, to extend the benefit of the doubt. There’s something very admirable in that, something much finer than a mere credulous “will to make-believe,” in Bertrand Russell’s sneering put-down.

But  I wouldn’t call the sort of momentous, amorphous, inexpressible experience he couldn’t find words for but still (like a poet) tried to communicate and point at, a religious experience. It was an experience, thoroughly human and natural (and debilitating, literally heart-rending in this instance). I’ll bet I’d have something like it myself right now, if I went and hiked a mountain. Especially if I’d hiked one the day before yesterday, and the day before that too, as James had. That wouldn’t diminish the exceptionality of it for me, but it ought to make me hesitant to  bring supernature into the account. Oughtn’t it?

Mountains and ecstatic philosophizing seemed to go together for James. That’s one thing he had in common with Nietzsche, who admired Emerson’s nature intoxication. You can keep your feet on the ground when your head enters the clouds. U@d 7.7.09

 

The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me…the thought of you [wife Alice] and the children...the problem of the Edinburgh lectures [which would become Varieties of Religious Experience], all fermented within me till it became a regular #Walpurgisnacht.”

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) May 1, 2021

WJ's vision

LISTEN. What is the living center of William James's vision?

That's the question we'll end our James Independent Readings course on, my very senior student and I. (Congrats to you, Graduate, on your latest degree!) 

In the spirit of James, it's important to stress, we're ending the course but not the inquiry. Nothing has "concluded that we might conclude in regard to it"--that was central to his vision, right up to his terminal breath not long after he'd published those words in A Pluralistic Mystic and set Henry Adams straight on thermodynamics and what it has to do (not much) with our capacities for delight. "In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.'"

Robert Richardson rightly effuses over "this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!”

A will to believe in the universally instructive force of direct personal experience is part of the vision James shares with Emerson. “The point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person’s act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.” James and Emerson took everyone's experience seriously. Richardson begins First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process with Emerson's arrestingly emboldening statement of encouragement to young scholars.

“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”

 James applauded the sentiment. We each possess a unique and original relation to the universe, though so many of us sadly neglect to own it.

Richardson spoke here of James and Emerson as possessed of similar spiritual yearnings. And here he was (and so was I, see the discussion after the lecture) at the James centenary in Chocorua in 2010.

A commitment to hope, "the thing with feathers," is definitely on target too. Avian imagery is big in James, with all our conscious and instinctive flights and perchings, and with the gulls skimming the Amazon etc. 

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos. (Letters, 1868)

Birds also symbolize poetry for James, with its valiant attempts to supplement our inadequate volleys of new vocables with songs that transcend words."Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation..."(VRE)

"It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." (Letters, 1892)

And, a resolve to be as healthy-minded as temperament and circumstance allow is near the center ring of James's aim.

So what is dead-center, the ultimate pragmatic-pluralist-radical empiricist bullseye? 

I think it must be pretty close to what he said was Henri Bergson's: sympathy, the heart of life and hope. He explored that in On A Certain Blindness, and in A Pluralistic Universe. "Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say." 

"When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or d'emblée, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost. So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a post-mortem dissection, and can follow any order we find most expedient. We can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever we wish to. But place yourself at the point of view of the thing's interior doing, and all these back-looking and conflicting conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand. Get at the expanding centre of a human character, the élan vital of a man, as Bergson calls it, by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see it from without interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify it stably with any of these single abstractions. Only your intellectualist does that,—and you now also feel why he must do it to the end. Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works! What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt the movement of this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the devenir réel by which the thing evolves and grows. Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results." APU

That's it. Drop the excessive post-mortem conceptual analysis and the "dead external way" which is our native blindness to one another's springs of delight, try and place yourself at another's angle of vision. Catch the movement of reality, return to life--"the music can commence again;--and again and again..."-- And soar.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -