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In his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Walter Kaufmann wrote:
Philosophic propositions mean more than they say, and the reader who reverences the proposition is always in danger of missing its meaning. The philosophic reader realizes the inadequacy of all propositions, their fragmentary character - and nevertheless takes them seriously as clues to the author's meaning. The esoteric meaning of philosophic propositions is revealed by their context. The unit of greatness in philosophy is never a proposition; rarely, it is a proof; a little more often, a refutation; usually, a book.
Much as I admire Kaufmann and his devotion to philosophy as a way of life, I must disagree with him here, for I hold that the unit of greatness in philosophy is not a book but a life.
(Yes, there are great books of speculative philosophy; but speculation - howsoever fascinating it may be - does not exist for its own sake, because it is subordinate to the practice of admirable and sagacious living. Indeed, whether you agree with them or not, some of the world's greatest philosophers and sages - Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, Pyrrho, Pythagoras, Jesus, Epictetus - wrote nothing at all; instead, the tales of what they said and did were written down by friends and disciples, who recognized the primacy of a life well lived.)
In a similar vein, Henry David Thoreau (born on this day in 1817) once wrote:
My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.
The unit of greatness in philosophy is a life.
The realization is both inspiring and sobering...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Here are a few more thoughts on the flavorful gumbo that is American culture. This time I'll introduce a different metaphor: a great river that is formed from numerous streams, each with its own sources, rapids, eddies, and, ultimately, individual droplets of water.
It is, of course, individuals and families who have migrated to America from all over the world since 1600 or so. At some places and times (e.g., New England 1629-1640 and Pennsylvania 1675-1725), immigrants were mostly families; at others (e.g., Virginia 1640-1675), they were mostly single men. Sometimes enough people have migrated from one place to another that we identify them as a major tributary of the American river: Puritans to New England, Quakers to Pennsylvania, Dutch to New Amsterdam, etc. Sometimes a rivulet was sufficiently large to identify (e.g., about 2,000 French Huguenots settled in and around Boston, New York, and Charleston SC in the years 1680-1690) yet too small to have survived for long because of ethnic attrition, even though some members of the group are known to history (e.g., both Faneuil Hall and Bowdoin College are named after successful Huguenots). Sometimes a stream had led to local or regional (but not national) influence, such as the Acadians in Louisiana. And over the last 400 years there has been a steady rain of folks who have trickled into American society without being part of a significantly identifiable group; an example might be Scots before 1700 or immigrants from relatively small countries today (a naturalization ceremony I attended a few years ago included new citizens from places like Bhutan and Belarus).
Historian David Hackett Fischer calls the major tributaries "culture hearths" because they have set the tone for whole regions of American geography and for large swathes of American culture. In his book Albion's Seed (which I finished re-reading the other day) and its sequel African Founders (which I've just started), Fischer identifies five culture hearths: New England settled by Puritans from East Anglia, eastern Pennsylvania settled by Quakers from the English North Midlands, Virginia settled by Anglicans from Wessex and Sussex, Appalachia settled by Presbyterians from around the northern reaches of the Irish Sea, and the whole eastern seaboard sadly settled by enslaved men and women from western and central Africa. He doesn't count Dutch New Netherland as a culture hearth, but Russell Shorto (The Island at the Center of the World, Taking Manhattan) makes a strong case for the centrality of the Hudson Valley to the identity and development of American culture. These days one might identify another emerging hearth: Latin American (especially Mexican) people who are now thickly settled throughout America, but it might be too early for historians to provide their perspective on that phenomenon of high complexity.
One of Fischer's key observations is that these culture hearths have never completely melded: there is no single American river but five or more major streams flowing through the same watershed. The supposed melting pot has never even produced a full amalgamation of the peoples who were here before the Revolution! Indeed, Fischer provides a tantalizingly brief account of the American Revolution as four separate but interlocking revolutions, beginning with the rebellion of New England to start the war and ending with Quaker diplomacy to settle the peace. (For related thoughts, see also my 2004 essay on Ayn Rand and American Culture.)
Here I'll put all my cards on the table: echoing Heraclitus, I'd say that you can't step into the same river twice because "different and different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers" (Fragment 12). Less cryptically, although we can identify cultural streams and tributaries, fundamentally American culture at any one time is made up of the individual human beings who live here. Or as Walt Whitman put it in Democratic Vistas: "This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate." It is the never-ending interplay of individual and society, droplet and river, that makes the study of history and culture so endlessly fascinating.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While slowly writing a long poem about America as the nation of many nations, I've been reading widely about the peoples who have come together to form the American people - the numerous tribes of indigenous American Indians of course, and then a vast, continuing, 400-year migration of East Anglian Puritans, West Country Cavaliers, Dutch Calvinists, North Midland Quakers, German Pietists, enslaved Africans, British convicts, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, Irish Catholics, Norwegian and Swedish Lutherans, Jews, Italians, French Canadians, Portuguese, Finns, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Cubans, Brazilians, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Hmong, Lebanese, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Ethiopians, Nigerians, and folks from every other nation of the world.
Although there is some truth to both the monocultural "melting pot" and multicultural "salad bowl" metaphors, lately I've become fond of the "gumbo" metaphor: a delicious stew containing many ingredients that cooks for a long time to yield a classic American dish from the great state of Louisiana. Naturally, no metaphor completely captures reality, but perhaps the "gumbo" metaphor does greater justice to the reality of American life - and, appropriately enough as a description of what Albert Murray called the inherently mulatto culture of America, the word 'gumbo' is likely of African origin.
One factor that speaks in favor of the "gumbo" metaphor is the phenomenon of ethnic attrition. In his 1781 essay "What Is an American" in 1781, J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur noted the emergence of a sort of an original American "stock", formed at that time from English, Dutch, Swedish, Welsh, German, Scotch, Irish, and French immigrants. Aside from the Amish (who still call everyone else "the English"), few if any people whose ancestors came to America 200+ years ago can be said to be ethnically Dutch or Welsh or German (etc.), primarily because of widespread intermarriage but also through the simple course of time, the passing of generations, the loss of personal connections to the old country, etc. Moving forward to 1920, in his essay "Trans-National America" Randolph Bourne drew attention to "vigorous nationalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians, and Poles", yet those too have disappeared for the same reasons. Metaphorically speaking, as we cook more ethnic "ingredients" for hundreds of years, the basic American "stock" becomes ever more tasty yet it's ever more difficult to distinguish each contributing flavor.
I see no reason why these trends won't continue. Just as today there are no 20th-generation Dutch-Americans or 10th-generation German-Americans, and not even many 5th-generation Mexican-Americans, so (if the USA lasts until its quincentenary) 250 years from now it will be rare to find a 10th-generation Cuban-American, Indian-American, or Nigerian-American. In the meantime, these people from all over the world are continually adding to the inimitable stew that is American culture.
Here's to the gumbo!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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I've just started reading David Hackett Fischer's massive book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, a worthy follow-up to the magisterial Albion's Seed (which I also happen to be re-reading as background to my in-progress poem "Song of the Nations"). In the introduction, Fischer cites three rules for historical research that were originally formulated by Francis Parkman: "Go There", "Do It", and "Write It" (advice that Parkman followed in spades, for example in his well-known work on the Oregon Trail).
Parkman's rules are strikingly similar to my own process for encountering great philosophers.
For me, "Go There" means to immerse myself in the ideas and thought patterns of a philosopher by reading and thoroughly understanding all that they wrote, preferably in the original language. It also involves reading the prior thinkers who most influenced my subject (e.g., with Aristotle that is primarily Plato) and large swathes of the scholarly literature. Ideally I might also travel to places of interest, but I'm a homebody so I haven't done that.
In the search for wisdom, I interpret "Do It" as "Live It": put the ideas into practice and reflect on the results. This is an iterative process of applying the insights over time in a wide variety of situations.
Although "Write It" sounds straightforward enough, distilling years of reading and experience into a brief, engaging book is a difficult task because every word counts. Naturally, producing a book is not the only way to "Write It" - blogging or journaling might be just as effective in accounting for what you've learned and how you've lived. I just happen to be partial to the jewel-like beauty of a well-crafted book.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In §32 of Walter Kaufmann's 1958 book Critique of Religion and Philosophy can be found this magnificent paragraph:
The aspiration for truth and the love of philosophy can represent escapes into remote abstractions or into the study of the thoughts of others about the thoughts of others. In its inception, however, philosophy is a way of life and, as the Greek word suggests, a kind of love and devotion. It is the life of reflective passion - penetrating experience, unimpeded by accepted formulas, thought about. That was what philosophy meant to Socrates, and if we want to bring philosophy down to earth again, it can mean nothing less than that to us.
Although all-too-often this conception of philosophy has been drowned out by various forms of scholasticism, scientism, historicism, et al., it has always resurfaced eventually among thinkers as diverse as Pyrrho, Montaigne, Spinoza, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Jan Patočka, and Kaufmann himself. In my own small way it is an ideal to which I, too, aspire.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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About 2500 year ago, Heraclitus said: "the way upward and the way downward are one and the same" (Fragment 60). As always with the enigmatic and evocative fragments of Heraclitus - I've written before about his statement that "you can't step into the same river twice" - there are multiple interpretations of this one, from the mundane (the road up a mountain is the same as the road down a mountain) to the mystical (humanity's way up to god is the same as god's way down to humanity). For today I'd like to link this saying to the Aristotelian theme of practical wisdom (φρόνησις).
Ancient philosophy scholars are fond of talking about the "practical syllogism" - i.e., the few times that Aristotle lays out a semi-formal reasoning process leading to a decision and subsequent action (to choose a trivial example, "I'm hungry", "This apple is edible", "I'll eat this apple"). As David Wiggins says in one of his papers on weakness of the will: "Aristotle calls such patterns of reasoning "syllogisms" because of an analogy that interests him between deductively concluding or asserting and coming to a practical conclusion or acting."
Typically this analogy is held to proceed in a downward direction: the "real" kind of syllogism is abstract or theoretical (as in formal logic) and the "practical" syllogism is a pale imitation of the original. Yet, looking at things from the bottom up, I suggest that the formalisms of logic in fact derive from the everyday reality of action-oriented deliberation, not the other way around.
I see are several reasons for leaning in that direction. First, the English word 'syllogism' is merely a transliteration of the Greek word συλλογισμός, which means "thinking things together" - i.e., reasoning plain and simple, not necessarily the kind of reasoning one experiences in logic, science, or mathematics. Second, deliberation was central to human existence long before Aristotle invented formal logic, so it stands to reason that the former served as a model for the latter: formalizations are dependent on that which they formalize. Third, we engage in everyday reasoning much more frequently than logical reasoning: our lives and activities are literally suffused with thinking, whether we're talking about the work we do, the relationships we nurture, the crafts we learn, the places we go, the foods we cook and eat - the list is endless.
Naturally, if the way upward and the way downward truly are one and the same, then in fact there is only one form of reasoning, which manifests itself in somewhat different ways depending on the context, the objects we're thinking about, the level of formalization and detail involved, the intended outcome, the emotional resonance of the matter at hand, etc. This is why, for instance, Aristotle argued that wisdom (φρόνησις) and statecraft (πολιτική) are the same thing but "differ in being" (i.e., making wise decisions differs from providing leadership even though the two activities involve the same skills). Just as the ancients proposed the unity of virtue (whereby all forms of character-thriving are interconnected), there is, I suspect, something like a unity of thinking in human experience.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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