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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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In my post about Alasdair MacIntyre the other day, I expressed admiration for his recognition that we need to learn the principles of action from the practices life. Here is a quote on the topic from his last essay:
We need to begin again and to do so by returning to the social context in which we learned the use of good and its cognates. What we first had to learn was how to make the distinctions between what we desire and the choiceworthy, and between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy. We characteristically and generally learn — or fail to learn — to make these distinctions, as we emerge through and from the family into the life of a variety of practices: such practices as those of housework and farmwork, of learning Latin and geometry, of building houses and making furniture, of playing soccer and playing in string quartets. What we can learn only in and through such practices is what the standards of excellence are in each type of activity and how our desires and feelings must be disciplined and transformed and our choices guided by the standards of excellence in each type of activity if we are to achieve such excellence and through it the goods internal to each type of practice.
I might add that what we learn through these practices and activities is first and foremost that there is such a thing as excellence. As Aristotle put it at the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "Every craft and every inquiry, and similarly every action and commitment, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."
It was Socrates whom Aristotle followed in frequently asking not only "what is this thing?" (e.g., in Plato's Republic "what is justice?") but also "does this thing exist?" The latter question is more fundamental, because if a thing is nonexistent (say, unicorns or centaurs) then it doesn't make sense to puzzle over its nature and identity. But once we have the experience of excellence - say, witnessing athletic excellence at the ancient Olympic games or dramatic excellence at the Athnenian Great Dionysia - then we can start to talk about it, think about it, give an account of it, define its standards, compare examples of it, seek commonalities in excellence across different forms of craft and inquiry, and so on.
Moreover, I would posit that the best way to learn excellence is from the inside. As we say nowadays, "life is not a spectator sport" - and neither is excellence. To take a personal example: while it's true that I'll never be nearly as great a guitar player as my musical heroes (such as Julian Bream, Steve Howe, and Michael Hedges), it's also true that I have gained a stronger grasp of excellent playing by striving to improve my guitar skills, in part by attempting to emulate their excellence. The same principle applies in the visual arts (which is why at museums you sometimes see students painting works by the Old Masters), dance, tennis, woodworking, the experimental sciences, medicine, law, warfighting, etc. The basic rule is that one's knowledge becomes stronger to the extent that it is embodied and thus turned into a kind of second nature.
All of this takes time, for life is a process of ripening. This is one reason why philosophical reflection and instruction is somewhat wasted on the young. It is said that at Plato's Academy, students of philosophy could not begin the curriculum until they were forty years of age (and even then they had to start off with years of mathematics) - before that, they simply didn't have enough experience of life to make it worthwhile. MacIntyre echoed this sentiment in his focus on learning principles from practices. Thoreau said something similar in Walden:
The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While reading today the final essay published by Alasdair MacIntyre, I was struck by the following two passages:
[J]ust as Aristotelian moral and political theory provides us with resources for interpreting and redirecting our practical lives, so too our practical experience provides us with reasons for criticizing and sometimes rejecting some of Aristotle’s own concepts, theses, and arguments. We learn to identify that in Aristotle which derives from the limitations and prejudices of Athenian and Macedonian elites. So we develop Aristotle beyond Aristotle and in so doing may find — as I found — that our Aristotelianism has had to become that of Aquinas.
and:
Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism....
I agree that most of (what we perceive as) Aristotle's faults derive from the "limitations and prejudices of Athenian and Macedonian elites" - or, more broadly, from the significant differences betweeen classical Greece and the 21st-century Anglosphere, as well as the simple passage of time and advancement of science and history since then. Yet I find it curious to focus on the motes in the eyes of the ancient elites rather than the beams in the eyes of current elites. To my mind, two of those modern beams are Christianity and Marxism, the very foundations of MacIntyre's outsider perspective!
As previously noted, I plan to revisit MacIntyre's work in the years ahead, so I don't want to pre-judge what I might find there. However, I have to wonder if there might be more constructive "margins" from which to gain a clearer sense of the way things are today; aside from Aristotelianism itself, there certainly are plenty of vantage points to choose from, such as Buddhism and Pyrrhonism in philosophy, classical liberalism in political economy, and numerous strands of research in psychology such as evolutionary psychology, ecological psychology, and humanistic psychology.
More positively, I should add that I perceive much to like in this last essay of MacIntyre's, especially his dual emphases on learning principles of action from the practices of one's life and on looking at the problems of living from outside of academic or theoretic philosophy. I'll have more to say about both topics in the near future.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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