Americana
It's been fun exploring the intersection of American life & culture with classic American philosophy, about which there's much to be said. "Wildness" runs deep in these barely-united states...
Approaching the halfway mark, already, of our post-midsummer MALA* Americana course at MTSU**. We’re speed-reading:
John McDermott, Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture
Carlin Romano, America the Philosophical
Doug Anderson, Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture
Other saliently emerging themes, besides wildness: experimentalism, naturalism, wandering (“the nectar is in the journey,” McDermott always said.) We’re not lost, just exploring.
As always, I’ve got questions:
Jy 16 - Anderson, ch3-5; McDermott, ch4-7; Romano, Part 2
"Thoreau spoke of wilderness as a metaphorical expression of the inner wildness necessary for us to overcome the deadening effects of overcivilization." /50 Time spent in literal wilderness, the great and beautiful outdoors, can help us access our "inner wildness"... What else can? How have you experienced "overcivilization" and what have you found useful in overcoming it? OR, do you not experience this at all? Does such a feeling even register, in your experience, with most people?
William James definitely understood "overcivilization," do you have any comment on this passage from his essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"? ..."we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys. The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life... 'the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.' The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception..."
William James found that learning to take control of his own attention was key to exercising free will and living his best life. We now live in a social media environment that tries to seize and command (and profit from) our attention. Any comment on Jenny Odell's "resistance movement"?: “In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy"The practice of walking establishes something I can count on in my own experiences--a general feature of my own being." /71, 87 Anderson is echoing Thoreau's essay "Walking," in which he says not only that "wildness is the preservation of the world" but also that "I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements." Comment? AND, any comment on this short essay about walking philosophers (aka "peripatetics")?
"It is folly rather than wisdom to include in the concept of success only tangible material goods and to exclude those of culture, art, science, sympathetic relations with others." --John Dewey /77 Do you agree? What do you think of what William James said about success in a 1906 letter to H.G. Wells?
Do you think Thoreau would recognize his own conception of wildness in the likes of Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, and George Jones? /94ff., ch6
Romano points out that sermonizing in America [like politics] has often appealed to fear, going back to Jonathan Edwards warning that god "will crush you under his Feet without mercy" etc. /163 Why has that been so "persuasive" to so many?
Do you think Paul Fussell was right about the class structure in America? /267-72
Was Hugh Hefner's "playboy philosophy" really a search for wisdom? /272-80
McDermott...
More coming soon...
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Previously:
Anderson says bookstores' philosophy sections are usually poorly and misleadingly stocked with "a large dose of California Zen, self-help, and spirituality books. We professional philosophers joke about this phenomenon but don't take seriously enough what it says about our own invisibility." (11/1-ebook/pb) How do you think philosophers in America (and Canada, Jada?) could make themselves more visible and appealing to the general public? Is it their fault if they're not? AND: what is a "spirituality book"? What is your definition of spirituality? What does it mean to you to be SBNR, "spiritual but not religious"?
"One gets release time from teaching as a reward for research production, but one does not get release time from research for excellence in teaching." 11/2 Why? Does American culture generally under-value teaching, at every level? Why do so many public school teachers have to supplement their needed classroom resources with their own money?
"American scholars and philosophers are strange and culturally estranged... My most memorable picture of this estrangement came when a group of American philosophers, in full tweed, met for a conference in the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas." 23/15 I was at this conference, in 2001, and was similarly struck. But shouldn't everyone feel estranged, when in Vegas?
Notice Anderson's shout-out to John McDermott, my mentor John Lachs (27/19) and others, and his notice of James's and Dewey's explicit meliorism. (29) Are you a meliorist? Or an optimist (thinking that nothing needs our ameliorative energies)? Or a pessimist (thinking that there's nothing we can do to make things better)? Do you think of progress as possible but not inevitable? (35)
"The problem of Emerson's American Scholar-his Man Thinking-is essentially McDermott's problem, how to use the past without becoming trapped in it, how to make culture a tool for amelioration and improvement." (xiii) Do you think some Americans today are "trapped" and are using the past in a way that does not ameliorate or improve our present situation?
What do you think McDermott/Emerson means by saying "not the literal but the symbolical character of life is the source of our humanity"? (xvii) Do you agree?
"The message of William James is that there are possibilities 'not yet in our present sight.' That is also the message of philosophy." 26 Are the real "troublemakers" those who call our attention to possibilities for change, amelioration, and progress? Or those who reflexively defend the status quo as the only possibility?
Was Santayana right about "the good things" in America? 41
What do you think of young William James's diary entry of April 30, 1870? 48 Do you agree that what we call our essential "self" is largely a construction of will and not an "act of intellect"?
Any comment on the Carlin Romano videos?
Why do you think Romano says, after making a compelling case for America's general indifference (compared to Britain, France, Norway et al) to philosophy, that it is "a perfectly designed environment for the practice"? 16 Do you agree?
Would you ever consider consulting a philosophical counselor like Lou Marinoff (in addition to, or instead of, a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst)? 27-31
Do you like James's borrowed definition of free will? 75 Do you think you possess free will in this sense? Has the Internet (among other modern inventions) made it harder to be free? And what do you think of his view of "success" in America?--“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease."
"[F]or a generation no major issue was clarified until John Dewey had spoken." 86 Would America benefit from the presence of such a philosopher today? Are there any public figures now, other than celebrity entertainers and maybe Trump (although his supporters seem less interested in his views than in what they apparently see as his charisma] whose views a wide swath of the populace cares about?
Any thoughts on John Rawls' theory of justice as fairness? 105-7
Any thoughts on Richard Rorty's account of "the key pragmatic move" to regard truth and objectivity as dependent on "intersubjective agreement within a particular community"? 148
Any comment on Richard Ford’s Independence Day,*** The American Philosopher film, "On Bullshit,"or Monty Python’s Philosophers' Song? [For the record: Immanuel Kant was not “a real pissant.” He was very rarely unstable.]
*Master of Liberal Ats
**Middle Tennessee State University
***“The impulse to read Self-Reliance is significant here, as is the holiday itself—
my favorite secular one for being public and for its implicit goal of leaving us
only as it found us: free.”