Summer fading fast
It's back to the classroom next week. If I were in charge, that wouldn't happen before Labor Day. But since I'm not, I'm reminding myself why I want to be there.
A gathering of recent dawn posts at my Up@dawn blog:
Bah, humbug!
Next week the Fall '25 classes start and I resume my vocation as a distributor of bibliographic information and a communicant of truth (*see below).
I'm very much looking forward to getting back to both functions, as summer fades, and am still a couple years away (I hope) from receiving congratulatory retirement messages. But I do understand WJ's aversion to humbug in philosophy and in academia generally. There's so much of it, still.
To Theodore Flournoy.
CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1907.
Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really happy for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write about me. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about himself, when you want to talk about yourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy...
*I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The 1st function is the essential one, officially considered. The 2nd is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only meant to write a line! Love to you all from
W. J.
Why I'm (still) here, and why we pragmatists are devout
Still in the process, pre-Fall '25 Opening Day, of screwing my head on straight for the task at hand.
(Still, I say, because most of my old cohort have already hung it up. Retired. Begun to bask in the pleasures of uninterrupted-by-alarms morning sleep not followed by stressful vehicular commutes.)
The task at hand for me on Tuesday, then, is of first asking neophyte students who they are and why they've come to a philosophy course, and then conveying to them why I think they've come to the right place.
I do myself believe, with William James, in philosophy. Devoutly. ("Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers..." - Pragmatism Lec.I))
But I also share James's ambivalence about the whole professional/academic philosophic enterprise.
He liked to say his "religious act" was to defend experience (including the varieties of religious experience) against philosophy, whenever the latter became too imperious and dismissive of the former... and never mind the fact that so many religious creeds and theories are patently absurd. (Letters, April 12 1900)
In another letter he declared, at least a bit facetiously and referencing himself in the third person, his hatred of philosophy... "especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being." (Letters, July 17 1895)
But we're not at the beginning of a vacation, we're at the end of it. This is the time of year when we must all set aside our various ambivalences about the philosophy teaching vocation and get on with it, with as much overt enthusiasm as we can muster. WJ concluded that same letter with the concession that "at present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year."
Next year is here.
All good pragmatist philosophers always want to do it better next year, whether we say so in public or not, because we really do believe devoutly (albeit secretly, sometimes) in what we're doing.
And what is that? It's nothing less than attempting to inspire and empower the next generation to step up and care about "the really vital question for us all-What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
And in caring, to be impelled to doing.
Nature's enduring zest
"The scourge of life is responsibility—always there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous prostration" be suffered to be without it—they have trouble enough in any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my temper is liable to break; but I walk somewhat as in old times, and that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful as ever—it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature." Letters of William James, Aug 29 1902
Perambulation is by far the best way to access natural zest, but those who find their ambulatory possibilities constricted by illness, age, or circumstance, or who are just postponing a dispiriting encounter with the latest "news" (which I do every morning), are fortunate to live in a time when it is possible to enjoy a vicarious experience of "landscape and the aspects of Nature."
You can go to Bluesky, for instance, and dial up "Beach Sunrises" or "Landscape Photography"... and you're virtually there. Zest mediated is better than none at all. How else was I going to get to Australia and back in time for this morning's dogwalk?
