MALA-Community

Week 2 Quiz below...*

NOTE TO MALA STUDENTS: Don't worry if you can't find answers to all of the quiz questions, some of which may refer to text omitted from our selection. Write down the answers you do find on a piece of paper, and bring it with you on Thursday. We'll go over them all in class. Do post responses to at least two discussion questions each week, before or after class. Post your discussion question responses, and anything else you'd like to share, in the Comments space below this post. 

NOTE TO Spring '19 MALA STUDENTS: This was originally posted in August, for the Fall '18 MALA Community class... hence, the comments from last semester. Feel free, Spring '19 students, to engage with them as well as those of your current classmates. 

Quiz, week one. Read Kaag excerpt, answer posted quiz questions, come to class and discuss. Reply in "comments" below to at least two discussion questions. If you don't like my DQs, feel free to formulate your own.

1. Before starting his career in philosophy, what was William Ernest Hocking's occupation? What major rebuilding project did he engage in? 155

2. What did William James write in 1910? What did James say college-educated men should do?

3. What philosopher liked to say "Here we are"? What philosopher's views in particular were challenged by that phrase?

4. What kind of experience did Hocking prefer to that implied by Descartes' famous cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)?

5. Work by what author helped Kaag move "beyond self-imposed loneliness"? 160

6. Who is Carol's favorite philosopher, and why?

7. What problematic 'ism did Hocking think neither Descartes nor Kant overcame?

8. Who wrote The Spirit of Modern Philosophy? With what earlier thinker does Kaag compare him favorably?

9. Who went to Germany at age 20 to search for an escape from alienation? What kind of worldview was he interested in developing? 166

10. What German philosophers resisted Descartes' approach? Why? How did they think we come to know ourselves?

11. What did Hegel think a life of absolute solitude would show to you, about your identity?

12. What, for Hegel and Royce, is the point of life? What must I do, on their view, to "realize what I am"?

13. What virtue did Royce consider absolutely necessary for one's moral growth?

14. What was the most painful of Royce's multiplying "afflictions"? What did he write, in response?

15. What question of Royce's had Kaag failed to silence by studying Thoreau?

16. What was the fundamental disagreement between James and Royce?

17. When, in the views of Royce and Hocking, does loyalty become more than an abstraction, and when is solipsism overcome?

18. We look at one another, said Hocking in The Meaning of God, from behind what?

19. What does Kaag come to believe can't be accomplished in isolation?

20. What important question(s) have we not yet considered, when thinking about the relation between being an individual and belonging to a community (when "community" involves association with at least one other person whose well-being you do not distinguish from your own)?

Discussion Questions

• [MALA students: feel free to suggest and reply to your own Discussion Questions, in the Comments space below]
• Do you know any philosophers, either of the professional/academic sort, or just a "lover of wisdom" without academic credentials or portfolio? If so, would you describe them as in any sense practical or worldly? Are they more individualistic, communitarian, or somewhere in between? What do you make of  this statement of Thoreau's, in Walden? "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." 
• What do you think of William James's "moral equivalent of war" idea, that we should seek, and encourage young college graduates in particular to seek, "a shared objective that can elicit the same willingness to sacrifice, and the same disciplined and purposeful ethos, as military conflict does, yet direct them toward entirely peaceful purposes"? Would that contribute in positive ways to community-building?
• Does it seem reasonable to you to wonder about the reality of other persons? Do you naturally presume that others have as rich an inner life as you have, with hopes, dreams, worries, fears, etc., like your own? Does this already predispose you to be more or less individualistic in your general philosophical outlook?
• What do you think of Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am"? What do you think it means?  Do you think it is misleading or mistaken in any important way?
• Have you read David Foster Wallace? Does his own tragic end in any way compromise or invalidate his message?
• How important is the concept of "duty," to self or to others, in your own philosophy of life?
• Do you agree with Hocking that the modern age is "infected with the relativity and the warping of the disparate egos"? If so, can you give an example of such "warping" in our day? 162
• Have you experienced alienation or loneliness at any stage of your life? How have you dealt with it? Have you discovered successful strategies for overcoming such feelings?
• Is philosophical "meditation" - picture Rodin's famous "Thinker" sculpture - the best way to achieve wisdom and self-knowledge?
• Can you say who you are without referring to other people, especially the people closest to you?
• To what "meaningful communities" do you belong? 168
• Is there a risk of losing oneself, in the name of devoted service to community? 172
• Do you think you present yourself honestly and transparently to people? Should you?
• What does "salvation" mean to you? Is it a personal or a communal aspiration? Which should it be?
• 
  

Week One:

Readings: Excerpt from American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag - p.158-174 (NOTE: John Kaag is a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts. This book is his 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. In our excerpt, Kaag discusses American philosopher Josiah Royce, whose philosophy "loyalty" extolled the virtues of community and challenged the limits of individualism.

Kaag's most recent book, interestingly, is Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.Nietzsche was the most individualistic and anti-communitarian of philosophers, and yet Kaag still engages with him (and with his own youthful Nietzschean infatuation).

Also recommended:

• David Brooks' recent column on Josiah Royce in the New York Times, "Your Loyalties Are Your Life"
• Is Josiah Royce "America's Philosopher"?
• Kaag's Atlantic article, "The Philosopher and the Thief"-

Dozens of times over the past four years, I’ve made the drive from my home in Boston to a long-forgotten library in the middle of New Hampshire, accessible only by dirt road and hidden behind White Mountain pines. It once belonged to William Ernest Hocking, the last great idealist philosopher at Harvard, and though it contains irreplaceable volumes, it was known until recently only to a few of Hocking’s relatives and one very fastidious thief. And me.

I had come to Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a conference on William James. But I’m not a particularly dedicated philosopher and in general bore easily, so I soon found myself elsewhere: specifically, considering the virtues of the Schnecken at a German pastry shop. And this is where I found, browsing the scones, a man of ninety, wiry and sharp, who introduced himself as Bun Nickerson. Nickerson moved slowly, like most old philosophers do, but unlike most old philosophers his hobble wasn’t a function of longstanding inactivity. Instead, he explained, it was from farming and professional skiing... (continues)

•  The Spirit of Modern Philosophy... old "Chocorua" posts... 8/12/10... 8/18/10...
• Review of American Philosophy: A Love Story  

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)

==

 John Kaag's website... Kaag on twitter... Kaag on Thoreau, with Nigel Warburton (podcast, iTunes)... The Philosopher and the Thief (Atlantic)... How a Philosophy Professor Found Love in a Hidden Library-"a spirited lover’s quarrel with the individualism and solipsism in our national thought" (nyt)... A Neglected Library Leads to Love (npr)...

Robert Richardson at the Chocorua conference, August 2010 (& in conversation w/me at abt 26"):

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Quiz, week two - on Emerson, James, Dewey, & Lachs (see links below)... Meanwhile, post your comments on the readings or anything else here (including videos). Also, I encourage you to comment on one another's posts. Let's have a virtual conversation, while waiting to resume the real one in class next Thursday.

For me, the interesting challenge emerging from last Thursday's class is to try and fashion a useful working definition of "community" that respects individuality, resists misanthropy, and acknowledges our shared mutual relatedness and dependency. My own definition of community begins with the notion of two or more people who do not distinguish their own interests and welfare, one from the other, and who intend no deliberate or inadvertent harm to anyone. I'd add that those people need not share the same time/place - communities can be virtual, historical, trans-historical etc. What would you add to that?

I just saw this tweet, I think it makes a good point. What do y'all think?

Mike Dailly‏ @mikedailly Nov 1

I’m Scottish. Tax me more if it means no-one goes hungry. It’s called community. Society. I’m in. Are you?

433 replies2,265 retweets9,603 likes

Also of possible interest:
In my Environmental Ethics class we're currently reading Bill McKibben's Radio Free Vermont, a novel that imagines Vermont seceding from the US in an attempt to rediscover the virtues of small-scale community living. Among other things, it considers ways in which corporate interests like Wal-mart have displaced traditional small businesses in rural America (Vermont was the last hold-out against Wal-mart.)  You may wish to comment on some of the Discussion Questions we've raised in that connection...
==
Henry David Thoreau's experiment in solitude, both at Walden and in his daily saunters (as reflected in Walking), may seem to  pose an implied challenge to ideas of community that do not value "the individual in his/her solitude"... Thoughts on Thoreau?

John Kaag on Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond

On July 4th 1845, David Henry Thoreau went to live in a small cabin near the shore of Walden Pond, in Massachussetts. He stayed there alone for two years, and wrote about his experiences in the book that became Walden. John Kaag, an expert on American Philosophy, author of American Philosophy: A Love Story, discusses Thoreau and Walden with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Sitespodcast.
Philosophy Sites

• “An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” 
• “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” 
• “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” 
• “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” 
• “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” 
• “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
• “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” 
• “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” 
• “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” 

==
“The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning,” said John Dewey. So, I hope these two sessions have inspired you all to go on learning about community, individualism, and the philosophers and ideas we've begun discussing. If you're not already familiar with the websites "Brainpickings" and "Arts and Letters Daily," it's my pleasure to introduce you:

"Brainpickings" (Maria Popova)- 

Search results for “thoreau”... for "emerson"... for "john dewey"... for "william james"... for "individuality"... for "individualism"... for "society"

Arts & Letters Daily-

search results for “community” (14)... for “john dewey” (2)... for “emerson” (14)... for “thoreau” (22)... for “william james” (4)

2016-01-23 | John Dewey argued that publics never simply exist; they are created. Intellectuals should create the public for which they write. Few of them do more »

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2016-08-02 | A philosophy of education. Influenced by Hegel and Darwin, John Dewey launched a revolution that overthrew the methods of the day. Hannah Arendt was not pleased more »

==
John Lachs has instructed and inspired generations of Vanderbilt students, and an impressively large community of scholars (including your humble instructor) who profess respect, gratitude, and love for him and the extent and depth of his caring  mentorship. His personal history, as a young Hungarian refugee from Soviet tyranny, informs his staunch defense of personal liberty and his advocacy of its energetic exercise. His commitment to personal freedom in the context of caring communities is unwavering. He believes communities are strongest when peopled with  strong individuals. I've mentioned him on the Internet a time or two...

"There is something devastatingly hollow...

...about the demonstration that thought without action is hollow, when we find the philosopher only thinking it." 

"Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends."

"Normally it is quite within our power to regard our doings as so many ends. This could render each of our acts self-validating and joyous."



*  Quiz, Week 2 
   
1. What ideal has haunted western ethics and political thought, according to John Lachs?

2. What does Lachs consider  "identifiably American" in his approach?

3. What must any satisfying idea of an afterlife include, for Lachs?

4. What did George Santayana say?

5. What view of philosophers' social role does Lachs find "wrongheaded"? When does he think philosophy becomes marginalized?

6. What was Emerson's definition of "genius"?

7. "Great men have always done" what?

8. What does Emerson say about the relation between society and its individual members?

9. "Whoso would be a man must be a" what?

10. "To be great is to be" what?

11. What does Emerson say about prayers and creeds?

12. What passionate desire does Dewey attribute to human nature?

13. Dewey says we must choose  between what two alternatives?

14. Upon what "operations" does Dewey say knowledge depends?

15. Dewey says we are all a link in what community?

16. What condition is prerequisite for the existence of ethics, according to James?

17. Moral concepts like good, bad, and obligation spring from what?

18. What is the inherent tragedy of The Rock?

19. The Rock is an analogy for what?

20. Ethics applies in our world with or without what?

Discussion Questions:

• Please add your own
• Do you think most sectors of American society have historically attempted to strike a sane and mutually respectful balance between the rights of individuals and the public interest of communities?
• Is education better or worse than other social institutions, in terms of "problems of establishing centers of decency and mutual support"?
• Do we, and/or the medical profession, "value life too highly" and gratuitously prolong unhappy lives? 
• If an afterlife were experienced either in solitude or in the eternal company of strangers, would or could it still be paradise?
• Do you think academics are too timid, in speaking out about public issues, calling out dishonest politicians, noting troubling historical patterns, etc.?
• Can you name any contemporary public intellectuals or philosophers (besides John Lachs)?
• If children were taught to philosophize in the early grades, asking such questions as whether we are just separate individuals or are also a community, might our society be more cohesive?
• Would a society of self-reliant Emersonian individuals be a true "community of individuals"? Or would they be too self-assured, too possessed of their own "latent convictions," to contribute positively to any democratic community?
•  Have you had the experience of hearing opinions you were reluctant to voice, because they were not yet those of the majority, articulated effectively by others? Were you "ashamed" not to have expressed them yourself? Why didn't you? 
• In our time, is the tension between individuals and society a healthy one? Is our society tolerant of non-conformism? Do Americans generally value eccentricity, dissent, and the unbridled exercise of 1st amendment rights? 
• Do our civic professions of allegiance, to flag and country etc., reflect an admirable patriotism or a stifling parochialism? Why do so many of us feel threatened by the spectacle of a professional athlete raising a fist (remember Tommie Smith and John Carlos?) or "taking a knee" during ceremonial performances of the national anthem?
• Is membership in a faith community (or a no-faith community) problematic, for a self-reliant individual? Is self-reliance ever blasphemous?
• What do you make of the fact that the Castaway felt compelled to personify the inanimate objects that were his only companions? What does it say about human nature, individuality, and personal identity?
• Does Dewey's "continuous human community" have important implications for communities in general, in terms of how we should think about our mutual obligations and interests?
• Does James's "Rock" clarify the place of individuals in society?

==

Identity and Truth: summer 2019

MALA 6030, Topics in Culture and Ideas: Identity and Truth. Philosophy's perennial questions surrounding issues of personal and communal identity (Who and what am I, who are we, how do we understand continuous identity through change, does the public interest transcend individual rights, what do we owe one another, to whom and to what should we direct our ultimate allegiance...) are joined in our time by pressing questions about our commitment to truth, facts, and reality as something independent of partisan or "tribal" membership in parties, sects, and states. This course explores such questions, in the context of the thesis that a more cosmopolitan ("citizen of the world") identity is crucial to reclaiming civility and honesty in our public discourse. Texts include Identity: A Very Short Introduction (Coulmas); The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (Appiah); The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity (Tarver); On Bullshit (Frankfurt). June-July term, Wednesdays 5-9 pm, COE 148. CRN 51422

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William James (1842-1910) 

Robert Richardson bio... Letters 1... Letters 2

• “We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”
• “Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.” 
• “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” 
• “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.”
•  “The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.” 
• “Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.” 
• “It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.” 
• “Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?” 
• “If this life is not a real fight, 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.” 
• “Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation..." (see sidebar)
• "Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors,—the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."
• "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'"...

 The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life -excerpt

II. First of all, it appears that such words [as "obligation," "good," and "ill] can have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists. Imagine an absolutely material world, containing only physical and chemical facts, and existing from eternity without a God, without even an interested spectator: would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? Or if there were two such worlds possible, would there be any rhyme or reason in calling one good and the other bad‑good or bad positively, I mean, and apart from the fact that one might relate itself better than the other to the philosopher's private interests? But we must leave these private interests out of the account, for the philosopher is a mental fact, and we are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in, in a purely insentient world.. How can one physical fact, considered simply as a physical fact, be "better" than another? Betterness is not a physical relation. In its mere material capacity, a thing can no more be good or bad than it can be pleasant or painful. Good for what? Good for the production of another physical fact, do you say? But what in a purely physical universe demands the production of that other fact? Physical facts simply are or are not; and neither when present or absent, can they be supposed to make demands. If they do, they can only do so by having desires; and then they have ceased to be purely physical facts, and have become facts of conscious sensibility. Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see that no merely inorganic "nature of things" can realize them. Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

          The moment one sentient being, however, is made a part of the universe, there is a chance for goods and evils really to exist. Moral rela­tions now have their status, in that being's consciousness. So far as he feels anything to be good, he makes it good. It is good, for him; and being good for him, is absolutely good, for he is the sole creator of values in that universe, and outside of his opinion things have no moral character at all.

        In such a universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the question of whether the solitary thinker's judgments of good and ill are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity, subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he inhabits a moral solitude. In such a moral solitude it is clear that there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the god‑like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order his life with them      as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly discordant and un­ happy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle, though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is nothing moral in the world.

           If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.

           One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral sense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from which the values   of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts. Multiply the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics conceived of‑-in which individual minds are the measures of all things, and in which no “objective” truth, but only a multitude of  subjective” opinions can be found.

            But this is the kind of world with which the philosopher, so long as he holds to the hope of a philosophy, will not put up. Among the various ideals represented, there must be, he thinks, some which have the more truth or authority; and to these the others ought to yield, so that system and subordination may reign. Here in the word “ought” the notion of obligation comes emphatically into view, and the next thing in order must be to make its meaning clear.

Since the outcome of the discussion so far has been to show us that nothing can be good or right except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good, or thinks it to be right, we perceive on the very threshold that the real superiority and authority which are postulated by the philosopher to reside in some of the opinions, and the really inferior character which he supposes must belong to others, cannot be explained by any abstract moral "nature of things" existing antecedently to the concrete thinkers themselves with their ideals. Like the positive attributes good and bad, the comparative ones better and worse must be realized in order to be real. If one ideal judgment be objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh by being lodged concretely in some one's actual perception. It cannot float in the atmosphere, for it is not a sort of meteorological phenomenon, like the aurora borealis or the zodiacal light. Its esse is percipi, like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it obtains. The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated, must trace the ought itself to the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the universe, he as a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go. This consciousness must make the one ideal right by feeling it to be right, the other wrong by feeling it to be wrong. But now what particular consciousness in the universe can enjoy this prerogative of obliging others to conform to a rule which it lays down?

If one of the thinkers were obviously divine, while all the rest were human, there would probably be no practical dispute about the matter. The divine thought would be the model, to which the others should conform. But still the theoretic question would remain.  What is the ground of the obligation, even here?

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to prove that this pre‑existing order is more accurately reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves‑we follow our usual habit, and imagine a sort of de jure relation, which antedates and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to that effect, and though we preferred de facto to go on thinking for ourselves.

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true "in themselves," is therefore either an out‑and‑out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due.

    I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have called the superstitious view, to realize that every de facto claim creates in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think that something which we call the "validity" of the claim is what gives to it its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass‑needle the influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness, additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself, exist? Take any demand however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring.  But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands.

            If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say that "the universe" requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action, whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness, then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are the greatest in amount. But it is even then not abstractly right that we should respect them. It is only concretely right-‑or right after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made. Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this queer world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an a priori ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this a priori blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal? But the only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the "everlasting ruby vaults" of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which no thought of an "ideal" backing can render more complete; while if, on the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims which the universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can glaze over or dispel. An ineffective a priori order is as impotent a thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy it is as hard a thing to explain.

We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we have learned what the words "good," "bad," and "obligation" severally mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support. They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.

Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features. Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good thing and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations, claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments; compunctions, and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.

           We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. "The religion of humanity" affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.

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John Dewey...

• “Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.” 
• “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.” 
• “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.” 
• “The only way to prepare for social life is to engage in social life. To form habits of social usefulness and serviceableness apart from any direct social need and motive, apart from any existing social situation, is, to the letter, teaching the child to swim by going through motions outside of the water.” 
• "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."

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John Dewey, A Common Faith
(Conclusion) There is such a thing as passionate intelligence, as ardor in behalf of light shining into the murky places of social existence, and as zeal for its refreshing and purifying effect. The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that may not deeply stir engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion, so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action. But this is only part of the scene. No matter how much evidence may be piled up against social institutions as they exist, affection and passionate desire for justice and security are realities in human nature. So are the emotions that arise from living in conditions of inequity, oppression, and insecurity. Combination of the two kinds of emotion has more than once produced those changes that go by the name of revolution. To say that emotions which are not fused with intelligence are blind is tautology. Intense emotion may utter itself in action that destroys institutions. But the only assurance of birth of better ones is the marriage of emotion with intelligence. Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernat justice, equality and freedom. It remains to weld all these things together. It is of no use merely to assert that the intrenched foes of class interest and power in high places are hostile to the realization of such a union. As I have already said, if this enemy did not exist, there would be little sense in urging any policy of change. The point to be grasped is that, unless one gives up the whole struggle as hopeless, one has to choose between alternatives. One alternative is dependence upon the supernatural; the other, the use of natural agencies. There is then no sense, logical or practical, in pointing out the difficulties that stand in the way of the latter course, until the question of the alternative is faced. If it is faced, it will also be realized that one factor in the choice is dependence upon enlisting only those committed to the supernatural and alliance with all men and women who feel the stir of social emotion, including the large number of those who, consciously or unconsciously, have turned their backs upon the supernatural. Those who face the alternatives will also have to choose between a continued and even more systematic laissez faire depreciation of intelligence and the resources of natural knowledge and understanding, and conscious and organized effort to turn the use of these means from narrow ends, personal and class, to larger human purposes. They will have to ask, as far as they nominally believe in the need for radical social change, whether what they accomplish when they point with one hand to the seriousness of present evils is not undone when the other hand points away from man and nature for their remedy. The transfer of idealizing imagination, thought and emotion to natural human relations would not signify the destruction of churches that now exist. It would rather offer the means for a recovery of vitality. The fund of human values that are prized and that need to be cherished, values that are satisfied and rectified by all human concerns and arrangements, could be celebrated and reinforced, in different ways and with differing symbols, by the churches. In that way the churches would indeed become catholic. The demand that churches show a more active interest in social affairs, that they take a definite stand upon such questions as war, economic injustice, political corruption, that they stimulate action for a divine kingdom on earth, is one of the signs of the times. But as long as social values are related to a supernatural for which the churches stand in some peculiar way, there is an inherent inconsistency between the demand and efforts to execute it. On the one hand, it is urged that the churches are going outside their special province when they involve themselves in economic and political issues. On the other hand, the very fact that they claim if not a monopoly of supreme values and motivating forces, yet a unique relation to them, makes it impossible for the churches to participate in promotion of social ends on a natural and equal human basis. The surrender of claims to an exclusive and authoritative position is a sine qua non for doing away with the dilemma in which churches now find themselves in respect to their sphere of social action. At the outset, I referred to an outstanding historic fact. The coincidence of the realm of social interests and activities with a tribal or civic community has vanished. Secular interests and  activities have grown up outside of organized religions and are independent of their authority. The hold of these interests upon the thoughts and desires of men has crowded the social importance of organized religions into a corner and the area of this corner is decreasing. This change either marks a terrible decline in everything that can justly be termed religious in value, in traditional religions, or it provides the opportunity for expansion of these qualities on a new basis and with a new outlook. It is impossible to ignore the fact that historic Christianity has been committed to a separation of sheep and goats; the saved and the lost; the elect and the mass. Spiritual aristocracy as well as laissez faire with respect to natural and human intervention, is deeply embedded in its traditions. Lip service—often more than lip service—has been given to the idea of the common brotherhood of all men. But those outside the fold of the church and those who do not rely upon belief in the supernatural have been regarded as only potential brothers, still requiring adoption into the family. I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed. Whether or no we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. The potential religious significance of this fact is infinite. In the opening chapter I made a distinction between religion and the religious. I pointed out that religion—or religions—is charged with beliefs, practices and modes of organization that have accrued to and been loaded upon the religious element in experience by the state of culture in which religions have developed. I urged that conditions are now ripe for emancipation of the religious quality from accretions that have grown up about it and that limit the credibility and the influence of religion. In the second chapter, I developed this idea with respect to the faith in ideals that is immanent in the religious value of experience, and asserted that the power of this faith would be enhanced were belief freed from the conception that the significance and validity of the ideal are bound up with intellectual assent to the proposition that the ideal is already embodied in some supernatural or metaphysical sense in the very framework of existence. The matter touched upon in the present chapter includes within itself all that has been previously set forth. It does so upon both its negative and positive sides. The community of causes and°consequences consequences in which we, together with those not born, are enmeshed is the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe. It is the embodiment for sense and thought of that encompassing scope of existence the intellect cannot grasp. It is the matrix within which our ideal aspirations are born and bred. It is the source of the values that the moral imagination projects as directive criteria and as shaping purposes. The continuing life of this comprehensive community of beings includes all the significant achievement of men in science and art and all the kindly offices of intercourse and communication. It holds within its content all the material that gives°verifi-able verifiable intellectual support to our ideal faiths. A "creed" founded on this material will change and grow, but it cannot be shaken. What it surrenders it gives up gladly because of new light and not as a reluctant concession. What it adds, it adds because new knowledge gives further insight into the conditions that bear upon the formation and execution of our life purposes. A one- sided psychology, a reflex of eighteenth-century "individualism," treated knowledge as an accomplishment of a lonely mind. We should now be aware that it is a product of the cooperative and communicative operations of human beings living together. Its communal origin is an indication of its rightful communal use. The unification of what is known at any given time, not upon an impossible eternal and abstract basis but upon that of its bearing upon the unification of human desire and purpose, furnishes a sufficient creed for human acceptance, one that would provide a religious release and reinforcement of knowledge. "Agnosticism" is a shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural. Of course, acknowledgment that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity. But°gener-alized generalized agnosticism is only a halfway elimination of the°supernatu-ral. supernatural. Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook is directed wholly to the natural world. When it is so directed, there are plenty of particular matters regarding which we must say we do not know; we only inquire and form hypotheses which future°in-quiry inquiry will confirm or reject. But such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence. They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism. We doubt in order that we may find out, not because some inaccessible supernatural lurks behind whatever we can know. The substantial background of practical faith in ideal ends is positive and outreaching. The considerations put forward in the present chapter may be summed up in what they imply. The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson-
complete works...

• “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” 
• “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” 
• “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” 
• “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” 
• “Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.” 
• “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” 
• “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do..."
• “Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another."
• “Envy is ignorance, 
  Imitation is Suicide.” 

Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. READ MORE
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James on The Rock

...Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good thing and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations, claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments; compunctions, and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.

           We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well... https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.90386/page/n7

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"...But one thing has made it easier: Others in what she described as a rural neighborhood outside Kansas City are doing the same thing.

“It takes a community to support this,” she said. “Like I was just talking to my neighbor last night — ‘Am I the worst mom ever?’” -The Digital Gap...
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It's A Wonderful Life: Individual vs. Community (YouTube)... Noam Chomsky on American individualism... John Dewey & His Relevance-Richard Bernstein... Richard Rorty on Dewey... Politically torn between individualism & community (E.J. Dionne)... TED Talks on community...
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Josiah Royce in Focus (Kegley)... Royce on loyalty/community in American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia... James & Royce Reconsidered... "William James and Josiah Royce a Century Later: Pragmatism and Idealism in Dialogue"... Royce on James, & other essays ("both Royce and James thought philosophy too important to be left to specialists; they both wrote with the hope that philosophy, the love of wisdom, had something of importance to give to the nonspecialist")...  William James (Pajares)... Royce entry, SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)... John Dewey's books... Dewey quotes... Democracy & Education... "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself"... "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children"... Dewey's natural religion... James & Dewey on "natural piety"... James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"...
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James on Whitman
Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but circulations—things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels:—
Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations,
      than you might suppose...
"On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"

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Topics in Culture & Ideas - MALA-6030-002
88309.201880Fall 2018
My contribution to the course:

Block 5: November 1 and 8
“Communities of Individuals: Independence & Inter-dependence, Self-reliance & the Public Interest”

Dr. Phil Oliver (Philosophy and Religious Studies)
Dr. Phil Oliver received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1998. His academic specialty is American Philosophy, in particular the thought of William James and John Dewey. His book William James's "Springs of Delight" (Vanderbilt Press, 2001) explores "personal enthusiasms and habitual 'delights' and their power to make our days meaningful, delightful, spiritual, and even transcendent...[and] to sponsor our "return to life" in all its rich, robust, and personal concreteness." His other research interests include the philosophy of childhood and education, biotechnology, ethics, the environment, and philosophical ideas in contemporary literature. He was born near St. Louis, Missouri - which possibly explains his unreasoning love of baseball (about which he has also published), and his partisan preference for the Cardinals. He lives with his family in Nashville.

Block Description:

This Block will provide reflections on the relation between individuals and their various communities, how we may strike the right balance of personal independence with mutual support, of self-reliance with the public interest, and what we all owe one another as persons, citizens, and human beings.

Week One:

Readings: Excerpt from American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag - p.158-174.

Activities/Assignments: Read, answer posted quiz questions (coming soon), come to class and discuss

Week Two:

Readings:

Selections from American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, & John Lachs, tba

Assignments: Read, answer posted quiz questions, come to class and discuss

Grade Distribution:

• 1/3 participation/attendance
• 1/3 posted responses to discussion questions, week 1
• 1/3 posted responses to discussion questions, week 2

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“The so-called Mind-Body problem is one of the greatest and most quietly painful conundrums in philosophy – and more importantly, in everyday life. The problem is rooted in the fact that in the eyes of other people, all of us are automatically and stubbornly associated with our bodies (which includes, of course, our faces). The way we look is the overwhelming factor that dictates how others assess our natures and our characters. Whatever lip service we might pay to less punitive ideologies, in the practical world, who ‘we’ are is taken to be how we look…” (continues)

• American Philosophy: A Love Story, by John Kaag-pages 165-171 (via Google Books)
  

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• John Lachs, A Community of Individuals - introduction (via Google Books)
  

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• Self-reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  

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• The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, by William James
  

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• A Common Faith, by John Dewey
  

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