Royce wj soc

The Spirit of Modern
Philosophy Revisited: A
Committed Jamesian
Reconsiders Royce
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.ed
u

2020 Central Division
Meeting
William James
Society, Feb 26

NOTE, Feb. 2020. The APA Central meeting in Chicago is the
second iteration of my recent public efforts to reflect upon and
possibly, partially reconstruct my past thinking on the relationship
between William James and Josiah Royce with an eye to giving the
idealist his pragmatic due. I intended to present this slideshow,
originally constructed for the Royce Society conference at Vanderbilt
last Fall, in Chicago; but conference logistics for procuring the
requisite hardware failed to eventuate. So I’m going to just talk
through it, and will post it so that anyone who cares to do so can
access it via the APA app. It will also be posted at Slideshare.net,
where all my presentation slideshows reside under my moniker
Osopher”...-https://www.slideshare.net/osopher

DOUGLAS
MACDONALD
CONFERENCE on the
Life and Work of Josiah
Royce, his Colleagues
and Students
OCTOBER 18-20, 2019
Vanderbilt University
Philosophy Department
111 Furman Hall
Nashville, TN 37212

I told the Royce Society last Fall: First let me say that this, particularly in
present company, is very much a humble first draft of an effort to begin
critically examining the habitual assumption of my career as a
professional student, scholar, and teacher: that a Jamesian cannot be a
Roycean. I took that idea on board early. Maybe it’s not too late to
jettison whatever part of it is false. I look to you seasoned Royceans for
wise, kind, patient guidance in this endeavor.
==
To my James Society peers I would just add: my ongoing attempt to give
the James-Royce dynamic a more fair and balanced appraisal than had
been my custom is still in its early-draft stages. I welcome your guidance
too.

May I also add a word, for the record, about my long association with the James
Society. I was an early advocate for its creation, when in the mid-to- late ‘90s I
conducted an extended e-correspondence with one Randall Albright
(“independent scholar”) via an AOL chat forum. Once the academics got involved,
I had an opportunity to join the first executive board. So I’m quite pleased that the
Society is still here, and I’m delighted to join you tonight.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020
A bigger picture
When the big picture keeps getting darker, writes Margaret Renkl (as paraphrased by a Times headline-
maker) it helps to zoom. Chance the Gardener was right, there will be new growth in spring. That's the
bigger picture. But zoom in, for a closer peek into dark corners, or out, for a more expansive view? In
reveals life in fine-grained detail, the not-quite-micro world we normally miss.
Bigger still is the cosmic perspective that only comes into focus when we zoom out, so effectively refracted
in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. "The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of
nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to
it.” Well, we bring our capacity to notice and appreciate the beauty, and to talk about it. There are always
better things to talk about than most of what preoccupies us day to day. We must put the news in its place...

...I'll be continuing my reflections on James and his pal Josiah Royce, and whether
I've long tilted too far to the former's corner without giving the idealist his due. In
other words, have I missed a bigger picture in which pragmatist and idealist stride
together in affirmation of naturalism, meliorism, and "the beloved community"?
Probably.
“Unless you can find some sort of loyalty," said Royce, "you cannot find unity and
peace in your active living.” My advocacy of James is some sort of loyalty, but it
doesn't (I now think) require or gain from a repudiation of his friend's mostly-
complementary non-competing views.
“If this life is not a real fight," said James, "in which something is eternally gained
for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from
which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
There's still room in Royce's world for nobility in the fight for liberty and justice for
all. I didn't see that before, now I do. I'm finally seeing a bigger picture.

Asked what my work on
William James is about, I am
always challenged to find a
pithy reply. So wide was the
range of James's concerns,
so enduring is his broad
relevance, and so
habituated am I to finding a
Jamesian slant on
everything, that any terse
statement feels irresponsibly
shallow and misleading.

But summaries are helpful, especially to prospective readers.
This book is, therefore, about the centrality for life of personal
enthusiasms and habitual "delights" and their power to make our
days meaningful, delightful, spiritual, and even transcendent.
Such enthusiasms, or subjective ways of reacting to life and upon
it, are natural for us. They are at the heart of a vision of life at
once spiritual and deeply rooted in "the open air and possibilities
of nature." When our days become pale, tedious, or abstract, they
sponsor our "return to life" in all its rich, robust, and personal
concreteness. The natural provenance of such enthusiasms
distinguishes them from the putatively supernatural incursions of
convulsive "Enthusiasm" that Harold Bloom finds at the core of
"the American Religion…

And as the following excerpts tend to illustrate, I tended then to
group Royce indiscriminately with the supernaturalists and
Enthusiasts of that broad-tented American Religion.
I can report this pilgrim’s progress now as the dawning recognition
that Royce was in his way a naturalist and an evolutionist whose
metaphysical idealism was offered in service of “the beloved
community” and the amelioration of human life in its natural
abode.
Who knew?
(Well, plenty of Royceans knew. Jamesians too, I’m expecting to
hear.)

James lived and worked among some of the most adamant and
undaunted metaphysical absolutists in the history of Western
philosophy, in their hey-day. While he would therefore agree that their
worldview was "strange," it was, a century ago, anything but odd or
unfamiliar to him or anyone else to whom philosophy mattered. They
were the mainstream traditionalists, not he. And James befriended
most of them, even sponsoring the fledgling career of possibly his most
intractable opponent, Josiah Royce, who had utter confidence in a
"Plan" of rational, absolute, universal salvation.12 Those of us who
relish the fight and fire of James's polemics are glad for the resistance
that ignited his philosophical passion: concepts and philosophical
fashions whose vogue is mostly long past and which can seem to
exude a certain quaint mustiness that fails to match James's fire:
monism, absolute or transcendental idealism, monolithic "block
universe" cosmologies, and so on...

James is concerned not so much to battle the talkers as to offer
an alternative to the snares and seductions of intellectualism, or
the habit of forgetting and losing ourselves in talk that misses what
is real. "Over-subtle intellects" want a conceptual understanding of
self and the world not as a supplement and aid to primary
perception but as a substitute for it; but we should not fool
ourselves into thinking that Royce, Bradley, et al. are the only
over-subtle intellects in James's purview. His point is that we are
all over-subtle intellects until we learn to attend our own
experience with minimal preconception...

Curiously, the editors of this volume identify Royce as one of
the "developers" of pragmatism, and there are subtleties of
scholarship that might vindicate the claim in some limited
respects. But Royce's absolute idealism was largely
antithetical to Jamesian pragmatism. More startling is the
editors' claim that "the philosophical tradition to which James
actually belongs is [not English empiricism but] to a lineage that
is more uniquely American and underived; namely, that of
Swedenborgian and transcendentalist thought. . . .

A note on the text and slideshow: It’s
great to be back in Furman Hall, where I
first saw John Lachs hand out full-text hard
copies of his lectures. He did that
habitually, accompanied by the explanation
that on his view information makes a
greater and more lasting impression when
it enters the hearer’s mind through more
than one portal. That’s why this, like most
of my presentation slideshows, includes
most of my text. Feel free to read along or
not, as you prefer. (That can be a
challenge, I do tend to depart and drift from
the script.)
And feel free to revisit the
slideshow later, posted at
https://osopher.wordpress.com/,
slideshare.net, and
DelightSprings.blogspot.com.
Comments welcome.

Like Lachs, I find that “age
clarifies…” For him it was the happy
marriage of stoicism and
pragmatism. For me, it’s the belated
understanding that Royce and
James are also a partnership - not
an irreconcilably duelling duo.
Or, if it’s too soon to declare and
sign off on that insight, it’s the eager
reconsideration of a committed
Jamesian’s old prejudices. More on
those shortly.
Stoic Pragmatism preview

Also like Lachs, I’m drawn to the
exercise of comparing and
contrasting Royce with one of his
prominent and preferred peers
(Santayana, for Lachs)... not to
vanquish the former but to enlist
him - or what we may see as the
more salutary parts of him - as
an ally of sorts, if not of James’s
exactly, then of ours. But a broad
and strategic alliance with James
was more than possible.

This is not to deny the profound distinctiveness of each philosopher, but to yoke
those differences in a harness capable occasionally of pulling a load together
and effectively.
The “load” I’d like to think Jamesians and Royceans can in conscience recommit
themselves to pulling is some version of pluralism (though not the kind that says
pragmatists can’t be pluralists), and just about any version of meliorism.

“Deep philosophical differences” notwithstanding, Lachs says, “the differences
between Santayana and Royce are not nearly as final as they seem. And
examining their arguments, their divergences, and their similarities yields
lessons for us today.”
That’s also the spirit, I find, of Royce’s Spirit of Modern Philosophy, and it’s the
spirit in which I propose to explore the Royce-James connection as well.
“Someone viewing these thinkers from a great distance may see only the
differences. But the closer we get to them, the more similarities emerge.”

One more Lachs riff: “Divergent as their views of the nature and fate of
individuals may be, Santayana and Royce are in remarkable agreement about
the way persons stand apart from others. ‘An individual is unique…’”
Quite so. James harmonizes with his friendly antagonists and completes the
trio, on this fundamental point of human dignity. Theirs is a cosmopolitan, nee
cosmic perspective. Make it a quartet, if we can time-hop forward to another of
my personal heroes...

As a callow undergraduate four-plus decades ago I
somehow won an essay contest on a subject whose
opacity continues, to this day, to mystify me: the
Idealistic metaphysical systems of Johann Fichte and
Friedrich Schelling. I received the delightfully
unexpected news from my equally mystifying
Heideggerian professor, who cryptically informed me
that I wrote like T.S. Eliot. Still don’t know if that was
meant to flatter or insult, but I took it gratefully.
AVS, Plutarchian
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The mind is not a
vessel to be filled, but
a fire to be lighted.
Plutarch

My old prof, as I say, was a
Heideggerian. I was almost seduced.
I’m not very churchable, but I’ve set
foot in Unitarian establishments a
handful of times over the years. One
of those times, one of our now-grown
daughters was captured in possession
of Sein und Zeit.
“Yearn to learn throughout your life”...
and you may learn that some
philosophers are more compromised
than you knew.

The prize-winning paper took a
generally sympathetic view of
Schelling, as I recall. The next
year I came to Vandy...
So, where I’d started was with a
professorially-encouraged predisposition
to think well of post-Kantian metaphysical
idealism, and to think not at all of classic
American philosophy. I didn't know there
was any such thing.

...where James's name was in the air,
spoken frequently by my new teachers
Lachs, Hodges, and Compton. His
pragmatic approach to thinking came as
a revelation, and Royce became a
convenient stand-in for Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. Through this new lens the
"Absolute," the Idealists' sacred ground of
Being and source of universal unification
and rational order, flipped in my mind
from great to awful. At some point in the
‘80s that old paper went missing,
probably cast out in a purge of what I
thought was merely a record of youthful
intellectual indiscretion. Full circle

I might also have caught Royce’s name in
the air at Vandy in those days, and
developed an appreciation for the subtlety
and complementarity (to James) of his
thought. Evidently just wasn’t listening.
It was John Kaag’s American Philosophy:
A Love Story, and his discussion of
Royce, that eventually caught my
attention. “I had come to Chocorua, New
Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a
conference on William James…”

The Spirit of Modern Philosophy
“For our life is in this world…”452

It’s a memoir of discovery, both personal and
professional: he discovers that life becomes truly worth
living when he recognizes the inadequacy of a philosophy
of total self-reliance, and opens himself to community. In
his personal/family life, he discovers the joy of new love.
In his professional life, he discovers the joy of a
community of scholarship that transcends time and place.
The catalyst for both discoveries is the long-neglected
personal library ("West Wind") of philosopher William
Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), which Kaag and his
colleague Carol (now his wife) work to restore and
catalog.

William Ernest Hocking
(1873-1966)
Hocking's Gifford Lectures,
1938-9... A Hocking
Reader...
The Meaning of God in
Human Experience: a
philosophic study of religion
(1912)

Lately I’ve noted Royce’s name in the air, and in other books.
For instance,
“Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to
the world after we die. If self-interest were the primary source
of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour
after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from
the face of the earth…
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as
part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If
you don’t, mortality is only a horror. Loyalty, said Royce,
‘solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us
outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and
inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service,
and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such
service’…” Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What
Matters in the End

Suppose you knew that, although
you yourself would live a normal life
span, the earth would be completely
destroyed thirty days after your
death in a collision with a giant
asteroid. How would this knowledge
affect your attitudes during the
remainder of your life?
...few of us would be likely to say…
‘So what?’ Samuel Scheffler, Death
and the Afterlife

“Rippling does not necessarily mean leaving behind your image or your name.
Many of us learned the futility of that strategy long ago in our school curriculum
when we read these lines from Shelley's poem about a huge shattered antique
statue in a now barren land: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on
my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.
Attempts to preserve personal identity are always futile… Rippling, as I use it,
refers instead to leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait,
some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes to others, known
or unknown.” Irv Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore
alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into
shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must
resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way
means that philosophic questions will fall to be
treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than
heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in
their tone yet not irreligious either…” William James,
Pragmatism lec. 3 - Some Metaphysical Problems
Pragmatically Considered
“...see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into
facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, What is this
world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?

“The solid meaning of life is always the
same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely,
of some unhabitual ideal, however special,
with some fidelity, courage, and endurance;
with some man’ s or woman 's pains.—And,
whatever or wherever life may be, there will
always be the chance for that marriage to
take place.” WIlliam James, What Makes a
Life Significant
Marriage to a cause: that’s loyalty.

My essay drew heavily on Royce's 1892
work The Spirit of Modern Philosophy,
before I really had any clue about who
Royce even was. But in grad school I
learned that he was William James's
friendly antagonist, colleague, and
neighbor, an expositor of a perspective in
philosophy that James found reprehensible
and that our age has all but forgotten.
Many of my own colleagues have worked
tirelessly to revive and extend Royce's
legacy. Until now, I've been content to
leave them to it while I continued mostly to
circle James's pedestal...

Among the many arresting things Royce says there, wherein I
now hear a Jamesian resonance but that I somehow missed
back in the 70s:
(Of Schopenhauer: “he is proud to be a naturalist, who studies
men and beasts and art and flowers, merely to find out what
the Will is doing.”
“Not only the order of nature, but the very content of nature is
spiritual… ‘I therefore have a right to seize hold upon and to
master the very deepest mysteries of this whole spiritual
creation.”

“We want our idealism to do a manly work… of transforming, of
enlivening, of spiritualizing, the concrete life of humanity.”
“We return to the world of science to enrich its postulates by our idealistic
interpretation, and to enrich our own too abstract fashion of conceiving
the rationality of things through the wealth of nature’s facts.”
“...empirical research and the truly philosophical spirit have been bound
in a close marriage tie… [whose] most noteworthy offspring and
illustration of this marriage tie has been the vast industry that has
gathered about the idea of evolution…”

“Surely if the great Spirit is anywhere to be manifest to us, then it should
be in the growth of humanity.”
“...how unvital, how unspiritual, how crude seems to us now all that 18th
century conception of the mathematically permanen, the essentially
unprogressive and stagnant human nature… when compared with our
modern conception of the growing, struggling, historically continuous
humanity… Not a special creation but a living organism is our nature…
needing our constant care lest it lose all the spiritality and all the rights it
has thus far acquired.”
This is a naturalistic spirituality, whatever else you may think of The
Great Spirit.

“The doctrine of evolution took its rise in… an effort of humanity to
write its own autobiography…” 282
“This meaning lay in the physical dependence of man , for his whole
civilization and culture, upon the former generations of men… Our
language, our institutions, our beliefs, our ideals… is a slow and hard-
won growth, nobody’s arbitrary invention, no gift from above… but the
slowly formed concretion of ages of blind effort, unconscious, but wise
in its unconsciousness, often selfish [Richard Dawkins?], but humane
even in its selfishness… Your deeper self is plainly a sort of abstract
and epitome of the whole history of humanity.” 283

‘Superstition you outgrew, the customs of your ancestors you prudently
forgot… It was coming into an historical age that made Darwin’s book
so great a prize, and the idea of natural selection so deeply suggestive
to philosophy… no single book of empirical science has ever been of
more importance to philosophy than this work of Darwin’s.”
“...a philosophy of evolution must face the ultimate question, Has the
world a meaning?”
And here the waters part, between pragmatists and idealists (with their
talk of a Divine Self behind evolution. (And here I might like to digress ,
to my Winterton Curtis connection.)

But… “I imagine no world-maker far back in the ages, beginning the
course of evolution… I await the verdict of science about all facts and
events in physical nature.”
If he’d stopped right there we could call a total truce. But of course
Royce wants to affirm something ideal (and supernatural?) beyond the
facts and events of physical nature.
And to that I say good. May the conversation continue.

https://jposopher.blogspot.com/

...Also this weekend: Monty Python turned 50,
Naomi Klein was on BookTV, the Cards lost twice
to the Braves... and Augustine, Boethius, Anselm,
and Aquinas remained long dead, though not
forgotten.
Not quite so long dead, but largely forgotten until
a recent small revival of interest got him a shout-
out from David Brooks in the Times, is Josiah
Royce...

"The ability to give or withhold assent"
based on reason and evidence, not
arbitrary preference or whim, is what
makes rational animals potentially
logical. Exclusive devotion to logic,
though, can seem to deny our humanity.
All of us, like Spock, are at least half
human. (But some humans ain't human,
says John Prine.) We must cultivate our
emotional intelligence too. As young
Josiah Royce learned, "emotion cannot
be deleted from life, even the coldest
opinions are motivated by feelings... the
life of reason is partly emotional."
A new Stoicism

“...surely the climax of this phase was the publication of his fourth major work, The
Spirit of Modern Philosophy.” John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce

The Spirit of Modern Philosophy is history
with a thesis: "You philosophize when you
reflect critically upon what you are actually
doing in your world. What you are doing is
of course, in the first place, living. And life
involves passions, faiths, doubts, and
courage. The critical inquiry into what all
these things mean is philosophy.”
Clendenning 178

How strange a worldview, which denies the need (in this, of all worlds) to employ
able and willing hands in ameliorating the conditions of life and growth, and in
altering the "normal" course of events. But James lived and worked among some
of the most adamant and undaunted metaphysical absolutists in the history of
Western philosophy, in their hey-day. While he would therefore agree that their
worldview was "strange," it was, a century ago, anything but odd or unfamiliar to
him or anyone else to whom philosophy mattered. They were the mainstream
traditionalists, not he. And James befriended most of them, even sponsoring the
fledgling career of possibly his most intractable opponent, Josiah Royce, who had
utter confidence in a "Plan" of rational, absolute, universal salvation.
So, here’s the sort of thing I was prone to say as a committed Jamesian who
assumed that a Roycean must necessarily take up a sharply contrary position. My
present project is to moderate these statements, in search of common ground.
(Your suggestions welcome.)

And
Those of us who relish the fight and fire of James's polemics are glad for the
resistance that ignited his philosophical passion: concepts and philosophical
fashions whose vogue is mostly long past and which can seem to exude a
certain quaint mustiness that fails to match James's fire: monism, absolute or
transcendental idealism, monolithic "block universe" cosmologies, and so on.
Yet, we see the absolute temper and disposition still, in contemporary garb. It
might even be argued that some of the neopragmatists and so-called
postmodernists who would lay claim to James's intellectual legacy are, in
some ways, representatives of the very patterns of rigidity and a priorism
that James derided...

And
In the end, James is concerned not so much to
battle the talkers as to offer an alternative to the
snares and seductions of intellectualism, or the
habit of forgetting and losing ourselves in talk that
misses what is real. "Over-subtle intellects" want
a conceptual understanding of self and the world
not as a supplement and aid to primary perception
but as a substitute for it; but we should not fool
ourselves into thinking that Royce, Bradley, et al.
are the only over-subtle intellects in James's
purview. His point is that we are all over-subtle
intellects until we learn to attend our own
experience with minimal preconception.

And
How do we break down our preconceptions about
the world's real elements, and overcome doubts
about our own perceptual and cognitive abilities
to encounter them directly? How do we disabuse
our intellects of overweening subtlety? James's
answer is that first we must resist the temptation
to find an intellectual--or an intellectualist--
solution. Rather than thinking our way around
skepticism, he proposes that we just allow
experience to run its course and that we not
impose artificial roadblocks in the form of
stipulated theoretical expectations to which
our experience must then conform, or else be
disavowed...

And
Curiously, the editors of this volume identify Royce as one of
the "developers" of pragmatism, and there are subtleties of
scholarship that might vindicate the claim in some limited
respects. But Royce's absolute idealism was largely
antithetical to Jamesian pragmatism. More startling is the
editors' claim that "the philosophical tradition to which James
actually belongs is [not English empiricism but] to a lineage
that is more uniquely American and underived; namely, that of
Swedenborgian and transcendentalist thought. . . .

And here are some of the kinds of things I rediscover in Royce’s Spirit that incline
me to consider a more sympathetic interpretation.
“A future humanity will, if civilization healthily progresses, inherit the old
kingdom, and re-embody the truly essential and immortal soul of its old life…”
Common ground with James: the human future is not presaged, healthy progress
not guaranteed, “Shipwreck” is possible.
“...the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to
have been refuted by death...”
Personal identity does not endure. Good work “ripples” (see Irv Yalom, above).

“This game of reflection is like all the rest of our insight, indirectly valuable
because from it all there is a return to life possible,”
Return to life is a phrase I associate with James. “The return to life can not come
about by talking,” etc. I’ll bet James and Royce talked about it.
“...the optimist, who declares this world to be divine and good, and the
pessimist, who finds in our finite world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and
who calls it all evil, may be, and in fact are, alike right, each in his own sense…”
But both are bettered by the meliorist’s commitment to applied philosophy’s
practical gains.

“...the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure house of
experience; and hence no individual experience, whether it be the momentary
insight of genius recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation of
years of professional plodding through the problems of philosophy, will ever
fully tell all the secrets which life has to reveal.”
We need to gather all the experience there can be, to get a full account of the
reality of things. We must remain open to new experience, not block the way of
inquiry or draw premature conclusions. “What has concluded, that we may
conclude…? Etc.

“...when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, willing to look
at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be
even dangerous doctrines, patient in listening to views that look even abhorrent
to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so
paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life.”
Look at the world from many sides = (rudimentary) pluralism
“...this variety, better studied, is on its more human side largely an expression of
the liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments of strong men...”
Temperament places us where we are on the tough-and-tender spectrum.

“It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life…”
Pluralism.
“All the philosophers are needed, not merely to make jarring assertions about it, but
to give us embodiments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth and its
eternity.”
"The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other
philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-
William James

“...the whole universe, including the physical world also, is essentially one live
thing, a mind, one great Spirit…”
A large unverifiable claim, but --like James Lovelock’s earth-scale Gaia
Hypothesis-- a useful proposal whose value a pragmatist will weigh in terms of its
fruits.
“The justification of consciousness is the having of it.”
“...a serene and childlike confidence is justified,”
“...plunging back again into life.”
Jamesian attitudes.

“...a noisy atheist would be, of course, a cause of scandal, and might even bring
philosophy into discredit.”
I’ve been teaching a course called “Atheism & Philosophy” for many years, more
or less quietly. No scandal yet, or discredit to our vocation. On my reading,
James was a quiet (but eagerly-receptive) atheist.
“We are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy of the period of
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something very remote from the philosophy of our
own day.”
Already, in 1892? But if we perceive their question as being whether ideas (good,
bad, honest, fake…) contribute to the creation of perceived reality, what could be
less remote from 2019?

“...if you were young, and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only
question was what sort of a genius…”
A very stable one? But, you had to be young?
“Only a poet can understand nature…”
Because nature includes us, and we include the poets. Our best philosophers
understand that.

“...to study nature is to sympathize with nature, to trace the likenesses between the
inner life and the magnets, the crystals, the solar systems, the living creatures, of
the physical world. It is the part of genius to feel such sympathies with things; it is
the part of philosophy to record your sympathies.”
Royce the transcendentalist? “Declare your intuitions, though no one share them”-
William James liked the attitude.
“Feeling is an indispensable guide to reason.”
Not quite reason’s master, but this is a major concession from a rationalist.

"The deepest truth known to me is that erelong my present truth will change.”
Against rigid dogmatism.
“..man is indeed simply an evolution from nature”
Indeed!
“...a theory of the evolution of consciousness is needed as a complement to
Fichte's theory.”
Any theory.

“...the way from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse way.”
At least.
“To complete the undertaking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of
nature.”
And you need the facts themselves.
“Schellingian sketch of a process of evolution which, proceeding through the
animals, culminates in us.”
Evolution doesn’t culminate in anything, but it leads to (and through)...

“The end and crown of this whole process is man, in him the spirit comes to
himself..”
“What has concluded…?” etc. But, the focus on evolution is exactly what I must
have found compelling about Schelling. I have a personal history with evolutionary
contention dating to my first landlord, a Scopes witness who used to pull dollars
from my ears. (Ask me to elaborate, it’s one of my favorite topics.)
“Therefore religion I forsake, All superstitious ties I break, No church will I visit to
hear them preach… in my heart am I freed from fear, Instead of losing my way in
the air, Here on the earth, in her blue eyes see The deepest depths that exist for
me…”
The earth of things must resume its rights...

..."You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing
in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life
involves passions, faiths, doubt, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all
these things mean and imply is philosophy." And, as his biographer
summarizes,
"We live like those who stand on the shore of a limitless ocean of appreciation;
we describe a pebble and a wave or two, but know that vast depths, solitudes,
and storms remain beyond unexplored. The meaning is seen only as waves
breaking on the beach, as evidences of a restless life. We call these waves
evolution, but to the extent that we are in touch with our own depths, we
know also that much remains undescribed."
Thursday, October 17, 2019
CRISPR, STEAM, and science for the sake of happiness

“Much remains undescribed” is a good note to end on (but not “conclude”). Much
remains to learn and discover. The “philosophy of ‘co’” needs all hands on deck,
Jamesians and Royceans alike. As John Kaag quotes Royce, “What worth could
you find in an independence that should merely isolate you, that should leave you
but a queer creature, whose views are shared by nobody?” Or by nobody but
others of your tribe? We must grow the tribe. The spirit of Royce’s Spirit is
inclusion, and collaboration. It too is a philosophy of ‘co’.

“We need a new restoration story.” George Monbiot

“Disorder afflicts the land”
George Monbiot:
“Now, we are creatures of narrative, and a string of facts and figures, however
important facts and figures are -- and, you know, I'm an empiricist, I believe in
facts and figures -- but those facts and figures have no power to displace a
persuasive story. The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot
take away someone's story without giving them a new one. And it's not just
stories in general that we are attuned to, but particular narrative structures.
There are a number of basic plots that we use again and again, and in politics
there is one basic plot which turns out to be tremendously powerful, and I call
this "the restoration story." It goes as follows...

03:08
Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working
against the interests of humanity. But the hero will revolt against this disorder,
fight those powerful forces, against the odds overthrow them and restore
harmony to the land.
03:30
You've heard this story before. It's the Bible story. It's the "Harry Potter" story.
It's the "Lord of the Rings" story. It's the "Narnia" story. But it's also the story
that has accompanied almost every political and religious transformation going
back millennia. In fact, we could go as far as to say that without a powerful
new restoration story, a political and religious transformation might not be able
to happen. It's that important.”

David Brooks’s “Ridiculously Optimistic History” of the 2020s
The most important cultural change came to be known as the Civic Renaissance.
During the first two decades of the century, hundreds of thousands of new civic
organizations came into being — healing political divides, fighting homelessness,
promoting social mobility and weaving communities. But these organizations
were small. They did not grow into the big national chapter-based structures that
had repaired America’s social fabric a century earlier — the Y.M.C.A., the Rotary,
the Boy Scouts.
By the 2020s, philanthropists and community builders realized the only way to
change culture and weave the social fabric was by creating an A.F.L.-C.I.O. of
civil society, with big national voices and large, decentralized national
organizations so that people across America had easy and practical pathways to
get involved in community revival. Nyt 1.2.20

On Being with Krista Tippett
Brené Brown
Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart-on the importance of
“points of connection with strangers”
Last Updated
January 2, 2020
Original Air Date
February 8, 2018
● Play Episode
● Download
● Play Unedited
● Brené Brown

“...the research participants who had the highest levels of true belonging sought out
experiences of collective joy and collective pain. Durkheim, the French sociologist,
called this experience “collective effervescence.” And interestingly, he was trying to
understand the voodoo magic that he believed happened in churches: What is this
thing where people seem transcendent? They’re connected. They’re moving in
unison. There’s a cadence in song and rhythm. And he tried to understand what it
was, and what he realized is — and that’s what he named “collective effervescence”
— it’s the coming together in shared emotion.
And we have that today. We have opportunity — trust me. I’m from Houston…”

“Everything else has been torn down since Harvey. Everyone lost everything…
Never once during this tragedy, which is still unfolding here in Houston — we’ll be
in pain for a long time around it. But never once did someone say, ‘Hey, I’m here to
help. Who did you vote for?’”
“...And then you fast-forward to baseball season, and we’ve had this incredible
experience of collective joy, with the Astros winning the World Series… the
connection between people — you can’t sever it, but you can forget it. So to find
moments of collective joy and pain and to lean into those, with strangers, reminds
us of that something bigger.”
transcript

Robert Talisse also urges “points of connection with strangers” in
Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place…
(OUP 2019)
We live in an age of political polarization. As political beliefs on the
left and the right have been pulled closer to the extremes, so have
our social environments: we seldom interact with those with whom
we don't see eye to eye. Making matters worse, we are being
appealed to--by companies, products, and teams, for example--
based on our deep-seated, polarized beliefs. Our choice of
Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, Costco or Sam's Club, soccer or
football, New York Times vs. Wall Street Journal is an expression of
our beliefs and a reinforcement of our choice to stay within the
confines of our self-selected political community, making us even
more polarized. Letting it bleed into these choices in every corner of
our lives, we take democracy too far and it ends up keeping us
apart. We overdo democracy...

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund
(Pantheon 2019)
Community depends on our mutual dependency and commitment in light of
our shared vulnerability and finitude...

"...climate change and the possible
destruction of the earth cannot be seen as
an existential threat from the standpoint of
religious faith... If you have religious faith,
you believe that all finite life can be
terminated and yet what is truly valuable will
remain." This Life: Secular Faith and
Spiritual Freedom

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