(Spring 2019. By the end of my junior spring I knew I was leaving Harvard, and I was sort of wilding out. I was also on fire intellectually. I had to write a lot of huge final papers, and this was one of them; I was allowed to choose the topic, so I just combined a bunch of the things I’d been reading that term for myself into one paper: Whitman, Emerson, Eliot, and George Herbert Mead. I had been thinking a lot about time that term, time and timelessness. Whitman and Emerson talk about it, and I was obsessed with TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, which are brilliant meditations on time and timelessness. I’d also just read, for myself, George Herbert Mead’s Philosophy of the Present. So, my head was whirring with these ideas of time (you can see some of this in my paper American Democracy: Memory, Prophecy, Education, Religion.) I took some modafinil and wrote this paper in a manic two day writing bender. I collected way more quotes than I needed from way too many sources, and when I was about halfway through this paper I realized the arc I had plotted out connecting everything would bring the paper well over double the 25 page count. And, it was due imminently. So, sadly, about halfway through the paper I had to cut my losses and wrap it up with what I already had. I had to abandon over a dozen batshit crazy but also interesting pages explaining the Philosophy of the Present, as well as abandon my plans to deeply discuss the relationship between Whitman and Eliot (including the very juicy quote ascribing Eliot’s ‘modernism’ to a repressed debt to Whitman’s phanopoeia.) However, I do plan on finishing this epic look into American conceptions of time someday. Until then, I kind of dig the idea of sharing the unfinished paper. I mean, there is a finished paper here, but also I’ve included the dozen pages of Mead that I cut out, as well as allllll of the quotes I had copied on the bottom of my Google doc as material to work with. These quotes themselves are really cool, and many of them were unused in the paper as submitted. I just think its interesting to see what a document looks like while it’s being worked on, seeing all the different directions and raw materials and stuff. If you find that interesting, read on! Or if you find concepts of time and timelessness and the eternal present interesting, read on! But be warned: this post is long as fuck and, although I received an A, I give no guarantees of quality after the official end of the paper.)
The United States Constitution is the oldest written national constitution still in effective supremacy today. Yet America has long been thought of as a “young nation” due to its unique post-colonial history and nation-building efforts. Is the United States of America becoming old, or is it still young? Was it ever young, or was it always old? American history and culture uniquely places an eternal question into stark relief against a fresher background: what is the nature of the relationship between the past and the present, the dead and the living, the tradition and the individual, the culture and the self, the east and the west, the father and the son? Without strictly endorsing these binary concepts, we can see the monumental importance of this question and how it can inform the decisions made by historically, socially, biologically, existentially constituted individuals. In this paper, I will explore the theme of mediation between past and present in the history of American thought, using major American philosophers and poets as my resources. My argument proceeds down what I would argue is the “main line” of American thought: the spawn point of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and to a lesser extent his transcendentalist friend Henry David Thoreau, gives way to the divine materialism of Walt Whitman, which then gives way to the uniquely American philosophical school of pragmatism by the end of the 19th century, as represented in this essay by the later philosopher George Herbert Mead. I first argue that the best American thinkers in the 19th century embraced ideals of radical newness with an emphasis on breaking the chains of the past and of traditional culture in order to be truly novel, individualistic, and generative. This was in no small part a reaction to the unique existential situation of young America, as discussed in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” I then will discuss a pragmatist philosophy of time which will complicate and expand our understanding of the relationship between the present and the past— this work is the pragmatist George Herbert Mead’s “Philosophy of the Present,” which names the present the “locus of reality.” In a way that Europe, with her feudal inheritances, didn’t, America situated the present strongly in the center of thought about time; yet, it mustn’t be forgotten that America could only do so through the roots planted by Europe, especially as translated through the mind of Emerson. Through this essay, I will track the interrelatedness between all of these thinkers’ conceptions of time, and their influence on one another; this interrelatedness in itself makes a meta-argument about the relationship between the past and the present. Ultimately, while all of these early American thinkers hold slightly different priorities and attitudes regarding the question of how to conceive of the mediation between the past and the present, or between the culture and the self, binary narratives are insufficient in explaining their views, which are all concerned, ultimately, with renewal and generation through an integrated present moment.
It is easy to see why the problem of how to “equilibrate the relation of the self to culture and of the present to the past” (Helmling 68) has been uniquely explored by the American mind. America’s material, cultural, and political situation all serve to highlight these relationships of influence and origination in various ways which are all metaphorically related. Materially, the situation of the colonists and the first few generations of “Americans” in relation to the physical continent on which they found themselves made the distinctions between old and new, “East” and “West,” stark. They were, after all, in a “New World,” largely unfettered by what Europeans thought of as history or culture. Early Americans took pride in the concept of America as a new Eden, a world of untouched nature waiting to meet civilization. On one level, the New World was separated from the Old by a vast ocean. On another level, the settlements along the East Coast were separated from the wild West, at least at first, by the failed Proclamation Line of 1763 which attempted to prevent settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Nowhere is the American conception of the relationship between old and new more obvious than in the relationship early Americans had to the vast “West,” which it was their “Manifest Destiny” to tame and to develop. The impact that the mere presence of the “Wild West” had on the American character is explored in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner wrote that “[t]he existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development… The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people…This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character,” (Turner). Fluidity, expansion, continual adaptation and re-adaptation are all characteristic of American institutions; think of our infinitely reinterpretable Constitution, or the experimentalism built into our federalism. These are, of course, not exclusively American concepts; continual readaptation is the mode of life itself in evolution, and human society evolves like any other living thing; however, in America this general truth became more clearly visible due to its unique space for development.
In an even deeper sense, the unique American situation engendered patterns of thought which would resonate through the American intellectual tradition. It is to “the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom— these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier,” (Turner). Resonating with Marxist thought, which endeavors to relate the superstructure to material bases, the material situation of Americans as they spread across the American continent led to a uniquely American character of mind, orientation to thinking, sense of priorities, and style of philosophy. As John Kaag writes in his book American Philosophy, “Transcendentalists and pragmatists alike made this departure in their insistence that philosophy should not be exclusively concerned with abstract concepts and “pure reason,” but was meant to help individuals work through the trials of experience in their New World” (Kaag 95). Compared with European philosophers like Kant, holed up in Konigsberg his whole life, American philosophy has always reflected the need to incorporate thought into real, pragmatic experience; to work, survive, and thrive in a world with fewer constraints and assurances and with greater room for experimentation with life.
The material situation lends itself to analogies with the political and cultural situation of America, which also serves to highlight distinctions between old and new. The American colonies were all British colonies, and for a long time thought of themselves as British. Their language was English, and their culture was imported from England. Their politics were English, and they were under the rule of the old British Crown. Thus, the old, the past, the tradition, the Father, culture, custom, authority, are represented not only by the East in its relationship to the West, but by England (and Europe at large) in its relationship to the entire “New World.” Thus, the “advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines,” (Turner). This break from the influence of Europe is embodied, politically, in the famous opening lines of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” There is a deep American tradition of attempting to emphatically separate from paternalistic powers in order to assert independence. This is reflected, culturally, in an American preoccupation with individuality, the bucking of custom and tradition. “At the frontier,” Turner writes, “the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifferent to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier,” (Turner). The irrepressible urge to grow, to start fresh, to reject any subordination to the past, and to transcend all restraints is an ineluctable feature of American life, and it is reflected in many major American philosophies and works of art. This is arguably most visible in the first generation of truly “American” thinkers, the generation of Americans born after the American Revolution, who came to define the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s.
However, before we move into discussions of these thinkers, it is important that I point out that Turner argues that in “the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics,” (Turner). The adversity of encounters with the novel frontier, in other words, had a nationalizing tendency; historically, this tendency asserted itself in the nationalizing projects of Hamilton and Clay, which had large support in the West because they meant the creation of infrastructure that would connect the West back to the East. The developing character of the West, then, according to Turner, was always “folding back upon” the East, changing the East in a reciprocal relationship, creating a new, individualized, sui generis essence of “America” distinct from the mere fruition of English seeds. The new, then, changed the old, creating a new and cohesive whole. This complicates the binary, unidirectional view of the relationship between past and present, at least as far as the Turner Hypothesis is concerned.
Now, to return to the thinkers of the American Renaissance: American philosophers and artists of the mid-19th century were preoccupied with the idea of the New World as a chance to “escape from the bondage of the past,” and this urge to transcend all restraints had no greater exponent than the founder of American transcendentalism and the most influential American philosopher of the century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson developed during a time in which America had no major philosophy or art to truly call its own; all of its high culture seemed to be imported from Europe. Emerson’s philosophy, and that of his close admirers, represents a reaction to this perceived dependence on the aristocratic cultures of the Old World; his philosophy is one of radical newness, of emphasizing the value of the present compared to the inherently degraded past. He represents the experimentalist and past-escaping attitude of the frontier when he writes that “I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back,” (Circles). In the New World, there is room for experiment and independent discovery, free of the past. “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” says Emerson in his American Scholar speech; this has been called America’s intellectual declaration of independence. This emphasis on valuing the present over the past is apparent from the very first lines of his famous first essay, “Nature”: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, can invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship,” (Nature). In the New World, there ought to be new thoughts, thoughts which are the result of insight from interaction with nature, and which do not depend directly on the inherited European tradition.
This fecund quote implicates many important Emersonian concepts in one place. Essentially, Emerson views nature as inherently generative; for him, nature is the primary teacher and the words of the past are secondary to learning through direct experience with nature. Nature, furthermore, is “new” in its relationship to the “old” of Boston society: “In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth,” (Nature). Furthermore, all men are blessed with “the spirit of prophecy” because the “sources of nature are in his own mind,” (The Over-Soul). There is an essential quality of nature and life that is always generating, always burning, always expanding, always overcoming, and this essence is in man as well; this quality is inherently transcendent of the contours that it operates within: “The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand,” (The Over-Soul). The self-overcoming nature of this life-force, emergence, nature, soul, or whatever you want to call it implies that its operation will reveal goods that “shall be wholly strange and new,” due to the generative function; “[y]ou take the way from man, not to man,” because, while the materials may come from without, the fire is within, and, like a star, it burns from in to out (Self-Reliance). This life-force is inherently tied to action and power, and is expressed best as a verb rather than a noun: “Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame” (Self-Reliance). Emerson is a philosopher of becoming, of an ever-expanding and complexifying universe, a Heraclitean world of continual flux and change. The only fixed truth is change. He describes this law of the transcendence of all laws in his key essay “Circles,” where he argues that “[e]very action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning” (Circles). Given a Becoming universe, to continually draw an ever-larger circle is, for Emerson, the Good. “Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names— fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward…” (Circles). Inertia, age, or oldness are inherently bad (although not negative, because according to Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” good is positive while evil is merely privative, like heat and cold.) This continual generation, for Emerson, is a truth of the world and of the human mind. “Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceed, the eternal generator abides,” he says. In the mind, the operations of the eternal generator, the soul, are revealed in intuition, which Emerson sees as divine, “that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions” (Self-Reliance). Intuition, obtained in the present moment, through direct and active experience of nature, is superior to any mere tuition. The present is where individuality can be cultivated, if man separates himself from society by withdrawing into nature, where he can be more in touch with the true ever-changing present of nature, and so ever-change himself, instead of falling into a pitiful and static conformity with society.
Emerson’s best friend, Henry David Thoreau, sometimes took this early American allergic aversion to the stench of the past and of dead customs (which they both probably developed in reaction to the stifling conformity of Puritan Harvard) to extremes. Thoreau too believed in the primacy of the present and in the experimentalist attitude towards life. He saw more danger in tradition than value; he wrote that “[i]t is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!” (Walden Spring). This shows the inertial character of the past; the past, in a sense, wants us to keep reliving it; the Emersonian life-force in us must actively resist that. Thoreau sees the reverence paid to old men as misguided, and takes this antipathy to a bold, if disrespectful, fervor: “Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe… What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new,” (Walden Economy). “You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,” he writes, “I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises or another like stranded vessels” (Walden Economy). This willingness for a full abandonment of the enterprises of previous generations encapsulates the extreme of the early American desire to remove itself from the shadow of England, to dissolve the bands. Of course, it may not be possible to fully extricate oneself from the past, especially if that past gave you the English language with which you write and think. For Thoreau, furthermore, a focus on the present and a distrust of the past is essential to enacting the sort of experimentalism that is necessary for the discovery of truth, and which is a core aspect of the American character. After all, “[n]o way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof,” and that proof must come from one’s own, personal, present experience; “[h]ere is life,” he wrote, “an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about,” (Walden Economy). An attitude of “radical newness” is necessary for an empirical and experimental exploration of the New World.
However, while Emerson and Thoreau do view the unfolding present as the proper conceptual priority, and orient their thinking accordingly, this does not mean that they ignore the obvious value that the past has, or the impact of the past on the present. According to Thoreau, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in” (Walden); he does not have to accept all of it; he can take what he pleases for use in the present, and it is worthy to mine for value in the past, for “[w]ho knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society?” (Walden Conclusion). It is precisely his aversion to society and conformity that impels him to attempt to personally save valuable bits of history that could have a living potential if they were to become a part of his present for purposes of empirical experimentation. The most valuable voices of the past to search are contained in books, “the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations”; and, he asks, “[h]ow many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?” (Walden Reading). Books have the power to change our lives, because they were written by those with the same questions as us, but in different circumstances, and so may have different answers that may be useful to us. “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones,” writes Thoreau. “The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occured to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life,” (Walden Reading). The translation of their life into our own life is direct, based on Emerson’s idea of the shared Over-Soul; the best books “impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads,” according to Emerson, and return to us with a sort of “alienated majesty.” When Thoreau gazes upon a revealed glory in a book, it is uncannily familiar to him, “since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision,” (Walden Reading); Thoreau must have felt precisely this way when he got this idea from Emerson. This idea of a shared intelligence that can remind us of something we, in a sense, knew, is itself reminiscent of Socrates’ conception of learning as memory as explicated in Plato’s Meno. Of course, for Thoreau, it is the reviewing that is important when dealing with the past, since you can’t take the past’s word for it; you must submit all to the test of the present moment, for “[n]o method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” This general theme of eternal alertness to what is to be seen in the present is echoed by Emerson and other American thinkers.
Despite radical claims to have “no Past at [his] back,” Emerson deeply acknowledges his debt to the past, while still emphasizing his overriding orientation to the changing present moment and continual transcendence. While the most important influence on the Emersonian mind is nature, the mind of the Past in the form of books is the second most important. Books can inspire the active soul, can spark us to new thoughts of our own, by launching us from a point already outside of ourselves; in Emerson’s language of circles, “[l]iterature is a point outside our hodiernal circle, through which a new one may be described” (Circles). This is because books transmit the experienced thoughts of past genius— “It came into him, life; it went out of him, truth” (American Scholar)— and these truths can stimulate us to new thoughts of our own; these tuitions from others, themselves the desiderata of past intuitions, can spark intuitions of our own, in our own present time, and in relation to our own present environment and concerns. However, there are two inherent problems with the transmitted knowledge of the past, according to Emerson. Firstly, no writing can ever achieve a perfect distillation of truth, given man’s fallibility and nature’s Becoming, and so “[e]ach age, it is found, must write its own books; or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this,” (The American Scholar). Secondly, there is something in the process of setting truth down in words that inherently makes it somewhat of a lie, because of man’s tendency to idolatry and dogmatism, which Emerson excoriated in his famous “Divinity School Address” in relation to the Bible, a sentiment which John Stuart Mill echoes in “On Liberty.” Words ossify and enervate over time, becoming less true, while men ascribe more and more sacrality to them; the “sacredness which attaches to the act of creation— the act of thought— is transferred to the record,” and men believe the book to be perfect, which it never is. They accept the timid tyranny of dogma, or, like the English dramatic poets with Shakespeare, a stifling amount of “over-influence” that restricts original genius. Emerson says that most people’s “reading is mendicant and sycophantic” (Self-Reliance) due to idolatry of writers and institutions, which looks backwards, while “genius looks forward.” The solution, thinks Emerson, as thinks Thoreau through Emerson’s influence, is to bring any encountered past to bear on the present, Becoming soul; this involves active interpretation of a book through the lens of present experience: “One must be an inventor to read well” (Circles). This present knowledge must necessarily be made relevant through action, which, as a verb, is aligned with Becoming and vindicates knowledge: “I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning,” (Circles). Emerson understands the importance of the past, but only when it is made active in the present, and when it is seen in the light of that present; he says this most beautifully when he asks “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day,” (Self-Reliance).
Emerson felt that his divine calling in life was to act as the refreshing conduit between the Old World and the New; he saw the unique opportunity for fresh genius to arise on the virgin American soil, but, because he did truly value the past as represented by figures like his beloved Plato, he felt that he had to plant the seeds he loved from Europe, in new forms, in America. “Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind,” he wrote in his essay The Poet; his job was to repair the decay of Europe and replant his transfigured philosophy in the New World in order to help cultivate the new soil, so that art and thought could flourish here free from the encumbrances of the Old World. “The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off,” (The Poet). This transmutation of old, reanimated materials into new inspirations via their present interaction with a new environment is analogous to what Emerson believes occurs when a mind full of Boston books ventures out into Hawthorne’s wilderness to the West of civilization; the mediation is itself generative; in the language of George Herbert Mead, the sociality implied in this venture is emergent. “Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?” Emerson asks. “Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul” (Self-Reliance). Emerson sees America as the budding oak, the child, which he would like to see surpass himself; he himself feels that he is “not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art,” (The Poet). He must use the “old largeness” of Europe a bit longer, if only to sow the seeds of the American poet that is needed for the new age, the generative voice of Truth that can create what is truly new out of its soul,“[f]or it is not metres, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem– a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing… The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet,” (The Poet). While Emerson was a poet, his poetry is far less brilliant than his essays; but Emerson’s tilling of the soil was not in vain, for, one day, he gave his lecture on “The Poet” to a crowd in Manhattan, a crowd that happened to contain a soul more expansive and expressive than even his.
The greatest of Emerson’s students was not Thoreau, but Walt Whitman, who answered Emerson’s call for “The Poet,” and who proved his master’s greatness precisely by surpassing him. Whitman fulfilled, extended, and also contested aspects of Emerson’s philosophy; importantly, he took Emerson’s philosophy of perfection and becoming and made it materialist rather than idealist, and of the people rather than elitist; he is the full-blown Marx to Emerson’s Hegel. Whitman studied Emerson’s essays intensely while he ate from his lunch-pail on break from work; Whitman’s intellectual relationship to Emerson is well known, and his extensions of and reactions to Emerson’s thought themselves provide further development to this idea of mediation between past and present, between tuition and intuition, between books and generative souls. For example, Emerson writes that the “poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say ‘That is yours, this is mine’; but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you.” This is the idea that all ideas are the common property of the Over-Soul, and that the unique creations of the poet are not owned by him alone. Emerson further writes “[a]ll the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air, for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted” (The Poet). This idea of all of nature and man contributing to the poet’s generation, as an atmosphere for the respiration of the soul’s fire, is itself the fuel, the inspiration for the central image of Whitman’s life work: the leaves of grass. Whitman’s sublime stanza 17 of Song of Myself declares: “These really are the thoughts of all men in all languages and lands, they are not original with me, / If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, / If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, / If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. / This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, / This the common air that bathes the globe.” Whitman’s “leaves” are his poems, his creations, which grow out of him as he respires the air, and which are each simultaneously common and perfectly divine. Speaking of contradictions, we could also reference the Emerson quote from two paragraphs ago about contradictions, which shows itself directly in Whitman’s famous assertion “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” (Song of Myself 51).
Whitman, like Emerson, prizes the present experience. “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, / You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) / You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, / You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self,” (Song of Myself 2). This filtering through the self is a task of the present Becoming soul. Like Thoreau, he believes that “[y]ou must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life,” (Song of Myself 46), and he sublimely describes the relationship between his generative, star-like soul and the received light or materials from nature when he writes “[d]azzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me,” (Song of Myself 25). Whitman deeply values creation, personality, and the burning present of the self. His radical new form of free-verse, a reflection of the greater freedom for development in the New World, epitomizes this; he writes that “the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new… Here the theme is creative and has vista,” (1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass). He intends to make his mark here and now: “As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times!” (1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass). Furthermore, his lack of poetic influences is unique relative to most major poets, who have clearer genealogies; Whitman’s originality and genius, beyond his Emersonian influence, is largely a product of his lived experience in the youthful American democracy, of his travels in the West, of his adventures in the teeming streets of New York City among the masses. Europe is relatively absent.
It is precisely this common-man, democratic sensibility that distinguishes Whitman from his predecessor; he is able to take Emerson and Thoreau’s basic lesson of integrating experience and past learning into the “thousand-eyed light of the present” and radicalize it by opening his concept of “self” to expansively integrate all contributions. While Emerson and Thoreau are in some ways open people, Whitman makes openness a lived ideal. He recognizes the inherent interconnectedness of all, and accepts it joyfully and ravenously, constantly expanding, disintegrating, and reintegrating himself. Whereas Emerson and Thoreau are more introverted, withdrawn, formally educated, and narrowly individualistic in the classical liberal sense of negative freedom, Whitman is a true man of the people, extroverted, a cavorter with workers and prostitutes, a truly liberal-democratic individual, a lover of the world and all its people, in all baseness and all glory; he is not only of the world, but, moreso than the Boston intellectuals, in the world, in all its dirt and disgrace. This is reflected, firstly, in his conception of a holy materialism; he removes Emerson’s ambiguous and flawed Hegelian distinction between Nature and Soul by fully reintegrating the two principles into the single life-principle which they always implied, and this leads him to seeing all of Nature and all of Space and Time as truly a part of his “self”; he writes that “I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, / And am stucco’d with quadropeds and bird all over, / And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, / But call any thing back again when I desire it,” (Song of Myself 31). “I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be. / My feet strike an apex of the apices of stairs, / On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, / All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount. / Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, / Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there… All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me, / Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul,” (Song of Myself 44). It is not merely some abstract divine force that was present at the inception of the universe— he, Walt Whitman, the self, was there; or, the divine self that was there is him. Whitman takes Emerson’s system and draws radical conclusions from it which he truly lives by, and lives deeply; this also has social implications for his expansive self. Whereas Emerson, and especially Thoreau, engage in various forms of valuation and discrimination, permitting only the best voices of the past to become a part of them, Whitman is the enthusiastic voice of the untouchables and unspoken-fors: “Through me many long dumb voices… Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured,” (Song of Myself 24). This is the democratic poetic voice, whose past is universal, unselective. While Emerson values the expansion of circles, he reserves the right to draw a restrictive circle around his self, in order to preclude influence from undesirable society; Whitman, on the other hand, says that “[i]n all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, / And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. / I know I am solid and sound, / To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, / All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means,” (Song of Myself 20). Whitman’s circle is simultaneously selfish and selfless; he considers himself already implicated in every other, and he shares every value and judgment with them openly and without possession. He lives up to Emerson’s ideals more than Emerson.
The last two lines of that previous quote illuminate an essential aspect of Whitman in his relationship to Time and Space; Whitman conceives of all Time and all Space, all conceivable events and meanings and existences, as fundamentally reachable and connected to his self. While Emerson may have gestured toward this, he never made it explicit, nor did he act as if it were true; Whitman’s conception of self directly implies that all conceivable things are graspable, are already implicitly within his world, already in a sense possessed or at least possessable. In my favorite poem, he tells us “[t]o see nothing anywhere but you may reach it and pass it, / To conceive no time, however distant, but you may reach it and pass it” (Song of the Open Road 13). All things can be part of his self, not only in the abstract sense, but in a real, living sense, at least from the point of view of the Whitman character presented in his art. All touches all. This theoretical, illimitable, and possibly fantastical reachability of all times and objects will be relevant later through the lens of American Pragmatism. But it is relevant now in considering the way Whitman develops transcendental thought on time, because his illimitable reach to include everything as potentially part of himself makes him much more cognizant of certain aspects of the past and of the present and certainly of the future than Emerson and Thoreau. He writes of the “impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, / The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, / The similitudes of the past and those of the future, / The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings” (Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 2). We have here an image of the connectedness of all things, the similitudes of all things, the unifying sameness in difference and in relationality, the self as Atman and Brahman, soul and Over-Soul, at once. Unlike Emerson and Thoreau, he is willing to disintegrate, indeed already considers himself truthfully both fully disintegrated and fully integrated; accepting Whitman’s ability to hold contradictions as true, his valuation of different and even opposite things with equally enormous value, is essential to understanding his thought.
Whitman’s ability to hold and value two opposing concepts allows him to make statements that orient him to the past, to the future, and to the present, and to have them all be true. He still prioritizes the way the self changes in the present, since only in the present can he act and absorb, but he is more broadly aware than the others of the massive reality of the past and the future as they connect to his present. Thus, in his legendary 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, he speaks of America and of the ideal American “greatest poet” as integrating the past and future in their fullness into the present. I will largely let Whitman speak for himself to demonstrate this. He begins by declaring that “America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions… accepts the lesson with calmness… is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms… perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house… perceives that it waits a little while at the door… that it was fittest for its days… that its action has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches… and that he shall be fittest for his days.” “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him other continents arrive as contributions… he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit… he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes.” “To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events” “The greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read… Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet… he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson… he places himself where the future becomes present… he glows a moment on the extremest verge.” “Flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides… himself the age transfigured… opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of today, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour,” (1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass). The role of the generative poetic soul is to appreciate all time for what it is and what it could be, to integrate the present to the rest of the fullness of time with all its essences and implications, to live the role of the past and live the role of the future so as to better realize what is needed in the present, to be the acting point through which time and meaning work in the world. Deeply valuing the past and future do not devalue the present; they imbue it with more universal value. We are seeing, here, a synthesis of time philosophy in American thought, one which appreciates the similitudes of all time with openness and with an orientation to integration, to continuity, and to facilitating the passage of the present into the future through present mediation, realization, incarnation. Whitman, or the ideal poet to come after him, is to understand the real lessons of the past and the real possibilities of the future, and use them, in the present, to help create that future. His present is, by sheer muchness, value, or connection to the whole of Time, a richer present than that of one who focuses on the present for its own sake.
Whitman plays his role here by announcing his role, by projecting his “ideal poet” into the future, so that it may be realized; he does the same thing in his attempts to spawn a necessary future “Democratic Literature” and even a “Religion of Democracy,” which he indicates in his essential essay on democracy and democratic culture, his Democratic Vistas. These visions have yet to be realized, but, thanks to Whitman’s broad hind-and-foresight, his sense of the living reality of the past and future, exemplified by the way he says that “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” (Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 3), a person like me can read Whitman with a sense of immediacy and essence unmarred by the decay of time that Emerson attributes to all written words. Of course, many of Emerson’s words have similar effects, but Whitman takes it to a richer level due to his comparative lack of dependence on the past, his broader and deeper absorption of past and future, his grander and more loving personality, and his unique poetic soul, the poetic soul Emerson prophesied. Whitman has this miraculous power over time that allows him to speak seemingly timelessly, seemingly directly to me and others in the future, to tell us to realize the idea of a Democratic Literature and Democratic Religion; he tells us this as if he were really with us; and, in the sense that all souls contribute to the Over-Soul, he is; he at least truly lived and acted as if he were of and for all times, and perhaps it is precisely this belief in its reality that allowed him to actualize it, to at least approach the role that he imagined the “greatest poet” as having with regards to time. As Emerson said, the progress of books imperfectly refines truth over time, and the best books “impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads… caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses,” (American Scholar) — indeed, this all points to the possibility of approaching the creation or revelation or incarnation of a “timeless” form or essence, a synchronic truth that can survive the passage of time undecayed, a deeply true thought that finds its perfect form in expression. Maybe Whitman, through sincere belief in the connection of his self to all self and all Space and Time, through thinking deeply about it, through acting as if it were true, through taking it all as fully into himself as he could, was able to integrate part of his soul towards some mean, some bell-curve peak, some approach to an integral Truth, some merging of his Atman to the limit of an aspect of Brahman that is widely, near-universally knowable and shareable by the self or selves, even in times and spaces distant from his; maybe, writing that “[i]t avails not, time nor place— distance avails not, / I am with you,” Whitman was, in the very act of writing it, creating something durable across or through time and/or space, or durable across or through the incessant changes of the Over-Soul, something eternally True within or astride one or all of these confusing metaphysical substances, or something conceptually similar to these inaccurate propositions; in short, through acknowledging the reality of and attempting to absorb all “time,” (albeit, inevitably, imperfectly), maybe Whitman was able to approach T.S. Eliot’s dream of transcendent “timelessness.”
I wrote about 14 pages on George Herbert Mead after this, but had to cut it in order to get closer to the page count; I was over-ambitious and grandiose with my excitement for this paper, and it led me to write too much and to push myself too far; I didn’t restrain the arc of my vision the way I should have; I spent all of a crucial night digging through the “Philosophy of the Present,” learning so much awesome yet complicated stuff, and I eventually realized that my detour was too long and difficult and that most of it, although very cool, did not fit directly into the main argument here. If you are interested in it, it will be below the bibliography. Before we bring the Mead system back to bear on the general system of this paper (in a meaningful, creative, and not-too discordant sociality, I hope), I ought to sum it all up, in order to better remember how to play this role. In pragmatism, there is only consciousness within the broader world of possible experience and action, and no concern with anything transcendent of that; we are within the system, and our concern is always relative to taking meaningful action within the system, ideally in cooperation with others, because their perspectives help make up the system in which we are all mutually implicated. The present is the locus of pragmatic reality; past and future are only so real as they are viewed from the standpoint of a present. Only in the present can we see and act, and only in the present is there emergence. Given a Becoming universe, in which novelty emerges that is not strictly determined by what comes before it, the present always has a new and seemingly discontinuous quality to it; as the present continually emerges, it implies new pasts, which are seen as accounting for and rationalizing the previous emergences into a causally determinative relationship to the emergent present. “The relatedness is real, and the perspective past it generates, the past of the new present, is the real past of that present, and only for a present can the past be real at all,” (Mead 16).
The emergent poses problems of relativity, for it creates a new present time-perspective every moment, any two of which could be related to the “same” moment or object in a contradictory way. This opened our discussion up to the more general problems posed by the Minkowski space-time paradigm, which relativized all values and undercut the ability of the scientist to measure confidently, but which also allowed Mead to help us re-conceptualize four-dimensional relative concepts like “perspective” and “present” with regards to our own ever-moving time-systems and the pasts they create. This larger discussion of relativity led to the startling progression from recognizing the human social process of reciprocal role-taking, reaction-anticipating, and self-observing as a fruitful starting point from which to approach knowledge in a relativized world. The process by which man achieves social objectivity through the organization of relative perspectives is a general expression of nature’s equilibrating sociality, which always adjusts to fit every system it finds a shared object implicated in, and which necessarily then alters all of those systems; this sociality is the natural character of emergence, because every emergence implicates at least two temporal systems with different perspectives on a shared object, and sociality is an object’s relative existence within different systems. Mead argues that this general nature of emergent sociality is, in fact, a fundamental principle which gave rise to various dimensions of evolution and meaning. Emergent sociality is expressed in the way stars and space-time mutually relate and adjust over relativistic distances as if adjusting to a “generalized other” and, in a more complex, if less perfect way, the way that human meaning adjusts when brought into relation with other people’s perspectives and meanings. The mediation and integration of a lot of different objectified “perspectives” is a good thing, because it provides one with a larger view of whatever situation they are in, and allows them to act in a way which relates more of the past and the future to the present from the standpoint of the “widest social meaning,” which is the ideal to strive for in this theory of knowledge that judges the value of knowledge by its efficacy within the shared world of experience. In sum: “It is in a present that emergent sociality occurs. And we can now see that such a present is no mere moment of time, arbitrarily cut out from an otherwise uniform ‘passage of nature.’ A present is a unit of natural becoming; it is the period within which something temporally real can happen. What has been and what may be have their focus and actualization in a present standpoint and it is from such a standpoint that creative intelligence, transforming the novelty of emergence and the fatality of mere repetition into a measure at least of meaningful development, brings to articulate and self-conscious expression the pervasive form of natural process. It is as the scene of such process that the present is the locus of reality,” (Mead 29). In a higher dimensional conception than we are typically aware of, the present moment is more than a mere moment of time; it is the medium for Becoming, wherein emergent sociality creates something new in the universe, and the universe wiggles to make room for it. The present is our unique position in spacetime as we all fly past one another with complex relativities; it is the only perspective we can ever inhabit; it is where all reality takes place.
It should be clear that George Herbert Mead’s pragmatic “Philosophy of the Present” fits in with the general theme I have been laying out of American thinkers privileging the present. However, I have been particularly struck by the way in which Mead seems to vindicate the reading of Whitman I gave beforehand, with my intuition about Whitman’s approach to timelessness through his conception of his self as deeply and meaningfully tied to everything else. I previously sketched how Mead develops his philosophy with ideas of relativity, social role-taking and objectifying, emergence, and sociality. It is this sociality that concerns Whitman; for, when role-playing with meaning-objectifying relativity, one is always better off involving more past and more future in their present, because that means more possibility and information for action, more relationality and sociality, more emergence, more Becoming in the present; more sociality is what enables one to be and do more within our pragmatic world of experience. In this world, there is no “Truth” underlying reality, only what is given in wider experience; however, this experience is shared, relative, and demands action, and in this we can still approach something like truth, which is a relative and emergent “way of acting which relates past and future to the present from the standpoint or perspective of its widest social meaning, (Mead 21), meaning that it accounts reciprocally for the most other perspectives and the most possibilities in order to act most effectively within shared experience. Within this framework, the “highest level of conscious experience is, of course, that in which the individual can apprehend meanings in their fullest generality, and can thus command so wide a variety of standpoints toward his world as to isolate that which is common to all and would hence be valid for any rational individual. This is the role of the ‘generalized other,’ and the meanings which the sciences find in the world are those which so impersonal a standpoint will reveal. And yet it is just in this impersonality of standpoint that the individual becomes a ‘person’— a real member of the community of rational beings. To participate in the life of the community he must see himself as a participant and must respond to its claims and responsibilities as his own. In its person he can survey the ‘perspectives’ which individual attitudes engender and can relate them all to the demands of the common purpose in which they are equally involved,” (Mead 28). This vindicates the view I took earlier about Whitman’s approach towards timelessness through the attempted identification with all times, except in different, more accurate language; it wasn’t in attempting to absorb all time that Whitman approached timelessness, for time is merely one aspect of a perspective in Minkowski space-time; rather, by identifying with all people, Whitman was able to approach the perspective of the generalized other by attempting to absorb all perspectives. He truly strove to live in the ‘thousand-eyed light of the present,’ and reveals a deeper meaning to that line.
It is at this crucial breakthrough that I must now begin drawing this version of my paper to a close. It is certainly unfinished, as America is perpetually unfinished; however, the difference is that I will finish it, for myself, in time. My thesis, that early American thought celebrated the present as the essential element in time, as the mediator of everything, is undoubtedly true. But it is incomplete. I desired to do much more with this paper, but I am already well over the page count, and now it is late. I wanted to talk about American novels, like Catcher in the Rye, which represents young America’s anxiety at being touched by those who have grown up; I wanted to talk about Lolita, which represents the beautiful and perverted desire of European letters to touch and mold the pretty young nation; and, of course, I wanted to talk about Gatsby. I wanted to talk about dozens of articles I absorbed. But most of all, I wanted to talk about T.S. Eliot, and how he should have been the heir apparent to Emerson and Whitman, but who instead, for various personal and historically contingent reasons, turned himself away from their influence and escaped to a sad life in England. Eliot’s thought represents a reaction to the radical American newness in his orientation towards the veneration of the “tradition,” and the tradition he chose to create was a European tradition, even though genius had already flowered in his homeland, and even though his father loved that genius and wanted his son to love it more. Eliot also represents a reversal of temperament, for he was depressive, and he ridiculed the exuberance of Emerson and especially of Whitman. Eliot hid his debt to Emerson’s image of the eternal rose and to Whitman’s lilacs, and he especially masked the phanopoetic imagery style he inherited from Whitman, and which he re-presented as “modernism” in his Waste-Land. The mature Eliot came back around somewhat to his source, as especially evidenced in the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, which is set by the waters of the Mississippi from his youth in St. Louis and the waters off the rocky shore of Massachusetts where he spent his summers and his early education. However, it was too little, too late; he was thoroughly Anglicized, having cast himself away to a terrible marriage too young in order to escape Harvard and America. Eliot represents an antithesis to Whitman; he turned away from America and moved to Europe, representing the general drift of a whole generation of Americans who felt that everything cool was happening in Europe, or who passed through the thoroughly Europeanized Ivy League of the turn of the century, at a time when the elites of Europe and the elites of America intermingled and shared the colonial project. Whitman is the greatest lover, and embraced all; Eliot had trouble with love, and ran from his problems, including his wife; he was sexually and emotionally repressed, and always spiritually seeking, but without cheerful success. His masterpiece, the Four Quartets, are brilliant meditations on time and timelessness, and reveal a largely unfulfilled yearning for transcendence from the fallen state of metaxy. If only he had loved Whitman better, for Whitman would have taught him that transcendence can be found by loving freely and deeply, by extending one’s soul to genuinely embrace everyone possible; maybe Eliot would have found the timeless with less anguish if he had developed a more democratic sociality of perspectives, rather than a faux-aristocratic reverence for an artificial tradition. I wish to say more, so much more, but I made the mistake of, after completing my Whitman work, reading George Herbert Mead before I worked on Eliot, even though Eliot would have provided more straightforward arguments. Mead’s “Philosophy of the Present” consumed my mind, and, even though I already had a lot of pages, I wrote a lot more working through the brilliant ideas of Mead’s philosophy before I even realized how far I had gone, and how long the arc of my argument was extended by it, and how over the page count I was, and how tired I was, and how, fittingly, out of time I was. I was forced to cut a lot of my hard work; I was forced to restructure, and Eliot did not receive his planned due; I suppose, as the only thinker who was not purely American, it was better him than anyone else. I will give him his due another day, although he may not like what I have to say.
America’s central philosophical thread, at least before the Depression, was primarily optimistic, original, and oriented towards action, thought, and creation in the present. The present was the primary concern of the American thinker. This present could, of course, be informed by books and the influences of great thinkers, both home-grown thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau or imported minds from Europe. No matter what, though, these influences would not be received as dead dogmas to be subordinate to as an aristocratic culture would prefer. American thinkers recognized the importance of bringing all past to judgment by their own present souls, in the “thousand-eyed light of the present,” to be reborn and remade for use in the New World. John Kaag writes that “American philosophy— from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century straight through to Cornel West in this one— is about the possibilities of rebirth and renewal,” (Kaag 67). America’s land, politics, and culture early on embraced its symbolic youth and independence from the stifling influences of Europe. America has always symbolized the chance of a fresh start to millions of immigrants yearning Westward. It is this history of immigration, coupled with the ideals of democracy, that indicate what is best about America, and this is represented by the most American thinker, Walt Whitman. He spawned free verse and democratic literature, and he was primarily concerned with the infinite power of sunrise present always in his ever-renewing self. However, it is not Whitman’s relationship to mere time that makes him the most American thinker— it is his expansive, all-accepting receptivity. He absorbs any and all into his self, and knows he is the better for it. He accepts all voices, dumb, smart, old, young, nature, gossip. He represents the integrative diversity of America, the open self, which is its truest strength, and which has been retained long after America could be considered youthful. It is not time that renews and makes new ideas; my intuition about Whitman’s integrative self as approaching timelessness through absorbing all time was inspired and partially true, and it germinated in a way which both he and Emerson would appreciate. However, it took my close reading of a difficult book to show me the deeper truth of what I intuited, to refine it, to rebirth it. It is not emergent youth, but emergent sociality, that makes Whitman great, and makes America great. It was not the absorption of all times, but the absorptions of all perspectives, that allowed Whitman to apprehend more general and eternal truths within experience. The youthfulness of early America created a laboratory for experimenting with ideas of time; however, the deeper experiment has always been the democratic experiment, and it is still ongoing today. It is sociality, the mixing of various perspectives— perspectives of time, space, and identity— that drives emergence, and this sociality has long burned in the American soul.
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The American intellectual preoccupation with the present proceeds from the transcendentalists and Whitman to reemerge through American Pragmatism in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the end of the Depression. Pragmatism is often hailed as America’s most original “serious” philosophical contribution to the world. IEP describes the primary threads of pragmatism thus: “There is a strong naturalistic bent, meaning that they look for an understanding of phenomena and concepts in terms of how they arose and how they play a part in our engagement with the world. Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim” captures this stance as follows: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” There is a rejection of a foundationalist view of knowledge. All knowledge claims are fallible and revisable. The flip side of such fallibility and revisibility is that no inquiry is disinterested. Beliefs are fundamentally instruments for us to cope with the contingencies of the world. In addition, there is an enunciated commitment to intersubjectivity and community. So, while rejecting the notion of any pure “givens,” of experience, pragmatists also reject any pure subjectivism or abandonment of standards or criteria of adjudication beyond the individual,” (IEP). I would add to this that pragmatism places the essential basis of thought on human action and adaptation, both individual and collective. Pragmatists, along with their related contemporaries, the “process philosophers” like Alfred North Whitehead, were concerned with an ongoing “revolt against dualism” that “sought to objectify those features of experience which a dualistic philosophy had regarded as merely subjective. This meant that what had previously been allocated to ‘mind’ must now find its place in ‘nature’ and that nature must be reconstructed accordingly,” (Mead 14). (We can already, hopefully, see the affinity with Whitman here, contra Emerson.) It is this reconstruction that George Herbert Mead, the influential yet underrated philosopher, social psychologist, and “Chicago Pragmatist” (who was best friends with John Dewey) undertakes in his posthumous “The Philosophy of the Present.” “The Philosophy of the Present” assumes Mead’s pragmatic theory of knowledge, which holds firstly that “knowledge is concerned not with any “antecedent” or “ulterior” reality, but rather with the direction of activity in shared experience, and with objects in so far as they organize such activity around any meaningful objectives of cooperative action.” Secondly, since consciousness, with its ideas and meanings, might seem to imply problematic reference to some ulterior layer, Mead asserts that “[c]onsciousness is a development within experience, and not [necessarily] the final or inclusive form of our relation to it. This wider experience, the world which is ‘there’ and with respect to which the problem of an external or transcendent reference does not arise, is assumed throughout,” (Mead 13).
The central argument of “The Philosophy of the Present” incorporated pragmatism, the concept of “emergence,” the contemporary physics of Minkowski space-time, and the concept of “sociality” to argue for three entwined theories: “a theory about the nature of time and emergence, a theory about relativity and its social implications, and a synthesis of these in a theory of emergence as social and of sociality as a character of emergent evolution,” (Mead 15). The primary thesis is that “the present is the locus of reality.” This means that “to consider anything as real is to consider it as existing in, or in relation to, a present,” (Mead 15). We can only view time, pragmatically, from the present, for only in the present can we think and act. To ask about the past of any present is not to ask what it was when it was present, for then it was not past and did not stand in that relation by virtue of which it acquired the status of pastness. “The past of an event is not just an antecedent present,” he asserts; the idea is conveyed best when he writes that “[w]hen one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably existing as presents would not constitute a past,” (Mead 58). Mead complicates this by revealing two seemingly competing doctrines; on one hand, the doctrine of scientific determinism demands that the present conform to a settled past by a relationship of causal determination; on the other hand, the doctrine of emergence, in which the interaction of existing elements results in the emergence of some new element or property that was not present in the parts, “asks us to believe that the present is always in some sense novel, abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose. A present, if it is really new at all, will have in it an element of temporal and causal discontinuity. Recent quantum physics has taught us to believe that such indeterminism is quite consistent with rigorous physical analysis. But how is it possible to reconcile this novelty with scientific determinism?” (Mead 16). The answer, which, due to its philosophical complexity, I am unable to paraphrase, is that “[b]efore the emergent has occurred, and at the moment of its occurrence, it does not follow from the past. That past relative to which it was novel cannot be made to contain it. But after it has occurred we endeavor to reconstruct experience in terms of it, we alter our interpretation and try to conceive a past from which the recalcitrant element does follow and thus to eliminate the discontinuous aspect of its present status. Its abruptness is then removed by a new standpoint, a new set of laws, from which the conditions of our new present can be understood. These laws could not have been [wholly] part of any previous past, for in the presents with relation to which those pasts existed there was no such emergent element… [The emergent] can be rationalized after the fact, in a new present, and in the past of that present it follows from antecedent conditions, where previously it did not follow at all. As the condition of the present, the past, then, will vary as the present varies, and new pasts will ‘arise behind us’ in the course of evolution as each present marks out and in a sense selects what has made its own peculiarity possible” (Mead 16). The world of emergence, similar to Emerson and Whitman’s view of a Becoming world, is constantly creating synthetic novelty; this emergence of novelty in the present, in which our perspective is always situated, forces the revelation of a new past that causally accounts for that emergence; “what is here new is precisely the way in which what, in the older present, was merely novel and abrupt has become a part of the world of causal objects, hence a part of the past through which they are supposed to operate. The relatedness is real, and the perspective past it generates, the past of the new present, is the real past of that present, and only for a present can the past be real at all,” (Mead 17). This process of reconstructing the past in light of present novelty occurs continuously, as the “past” understood through every present is reconceived anew in order to relate to the ever-changing present point of view.
This leads Mead into discussions of the problem of relativity. “We seem, then, to have discovered in temporal transition itself a unique sort of relativity, and a set of what we are now to describe as ‘temporal perspectives’ or ‘systems.’ Each such system is distinguished by the temporal center from which its relations to past events are organized, and they differ primarily in this, that what is external, contingent, hence ‘emergent’ for one such standpoint will ‘follow from’ and hence be reflected in the past of another,” (Mead 17). The physicists of his day were busy unravelling the difficulties posed by Minkowski space-time, which relativized all dimensions of objects from different points of observation. This undermined the ability of scientists to directly measure values; it meant that no object could be isolated from what was happening to it; it meant that there was no permanent character to objects independent of the changes happening to them; it meant that our locality, and the locality of anything we wanted to measure, precluded us from truly measuring it “as it is,” or as “having an inside.” We were afloat in a soup of relativism, unable to approach any essences as they really were, lest the very approach watch the object careen away into a new location, time, or form. Mead’s way to overcome this relativism was brilliant; he radically reconceptualized “that whole relation of experience to its ‘real’ or standard objects of which the problem of space-time is but an instance” by starting from the model of human social interaction by which an actor learns to act and react within a relational system, and begins to “come to take a socially objective attitude toward his own behavior. The meanings that this relationship confers upon experience are real and important facts about it. But they arise only for an individual who… can react to his own reactions in the role of his fellows, and can take the standpoint thus achieved as authoritative for the direction of his own activity… Thus to ‘take the role of the other’ is to see all experience in a new context, in terms of what it means or portends relatively to the objects– or objectives– which this standpoint defines as central. The more of the past and future such a standpoint commands, the more it will transform experience into the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen and the more, above all, will it enlighten action by giving a present relevance and value to occurrences not literally given in immediate experience. The ordinary function of standard objects is to mediate action by bringing within the range of conscious selection alternatives that only this wider standpoint can encompass.” (Mead 21). In our temporal perspectives, the more of the past and the future that a perspective can “role-play” with, the more successful that standpoint will be in apprehending greater possibilities for action. These complex systems organize in relation to one another by a simulated series of back-and-forth pushes, as each party takes the role of every other party and tries to triangulate the truth between their inextricably relative positions.
Mead extends this account to show that our knowledge of physical objects, and even the nature of relativity itself, all reflect “that process by which man achieves social objectivity through the organization of relative perspectives,” (Mead 19). The four requirements defining such social organization of relative perspectives are that:
-The meaning to be explained must be such as an individual experience could not possess in itself or in its immediacy; it must arise out of its interaction with external agencies
-It must nevertheless be possible for the individual to distinguish in experience between what is merely his own contribution and what comes from other parties; it must be able to identify some activity of his own which can react as other
-The achieved standpoint must become so authoritative within (pragmatic) experience that the meanings data take on in relation to it will be the index of their objective value
-“Experience, as mediated by such meanings, will include the past and future, thus introducing into the present the conditions and consequences of the alternative reactions between which an individual must choose. To bring the conditions of action into the range of conscious deliberation in such fashion that we can direct conduct in the light of them is the goal of this whole development,” (Mead 21).
It turns out that they both pass the tests; “[i]n each case it is to be shown that the correction and organization of relative experiences in terms of the ‘real’ objects to which they refer involves not a non-empirical reality to which they must somehow correspond, but rather a way of acting which relates past and future to the present from the standpoint or perspective of its widest social meaning.” “Widest social meaning” is how you get away with saying “closest approximation to truth” when you’re working within a pragmatic paradigm that only appeals to a world of experience as such, with no reference to any underlying reality of “truth.” Truth is what works in shared experience. In a world of experience in which you are relative to and involved with other actors, to act from a present standpoint of the “widest social meaning” is the best thing you can do, pragmatically; it means your action will take into account the most possible perspectives and reciprocities, and thus will be the most effective, the most aware of possibilities, the most responsive to and impactful on the whole, the most “objective.”
Social organization of relative perspectives is thus a principle instantiated not only in human relations, but in our interaction with objects of knowledge, and, surprisingly, in spacetime itself. With objects of knowledge, we can’t discover them alone; we only discover them through interaction with them, through the feeling of equal and opposite resistance to a searching push, which is analogous to a role-switch. If we can situate the thing within all its contexts and (pragmatic) relations, then we have standpoint, a relational focus of meanings, which, if we act in the role of the physical thing, becomes authoritative as against other perspectives or standpoints. “There are many contexts in which our experience is involved. The one we accept as a standard will determine the direction of activity and its meanings. It is by seeing the world as it would be for the fully realized values of thinghood that this standard is in fact applied.” This power of the human animal to discover meanings in objects like Whitman’s Broad-Axe, by attempting to see from the point of view of those objects, “transforms present experience into a world of objects whose potentialities are the possibilities of action,” (Mead 23). With spacetime relativity, however, a more general principle is revealed; that of the “generalized other” which is “an attitude which enables us to pass from any physical perspective to any other, occupying each–or any– in passage, and identifying in each only that which is in fact identical, the formula that justifies the transition from one to another. We have, then, in space-time, not a curious and unattainable new sort of object, but a generalization of that social objectivity which extends the generous capacity of seeing ourselves as others see us to include the views of our stellar neighbors. In this context of meaning the world of spacetime has its locus and function,” (Mead 23). After all, in Minkowski space-time, all stars are related to one another, but exist in different time-systems. In the socially-related world of spacetime, all stars are more perfectly “aware” of their own role in relation to every other role implicated in the fabric of spacetime.
Now, Mead’s ultimate goal is revealed: “to present mind as an evolution in nature, in which culminates that sociality which is the principle and form of emergence,” (Mead 105). “We have found relativity occurring in the perspectives that emergence implies,” and some sort of reciprocal organization of such perspectives seems to have been required. If, then, “this readjustment should turn out– on all levels of development– to be a form of sociality, we should have succeeded in linking up sociality with the whole time process and putting mind back into nature with a vengeance,” (Mead 25). This is a grand proposition, a startingly metaphysical proposition for a pragmatist social-psychologist to make; yet, to me, he seems to succeed. This hypothesis depends on his ability to demonstrate the sociality of emergence and then, through emergence, the evolution of sociality into higher and more complex objective expression. He first gives an understanding of the sociality of emergence: “In emergence, as in the theory of relativity there is a plurality of “systems,” that is to say of distinct standpoints, and we have the consequence that the “same” object must be in different systems at once” (Mead 25), since “the body that moves in one time-system is as truly at rest in an alternate system– it is as much in the one as in the other. And its character in either is only adequately grasped when we understand its status in the other as well,” (Mead 26). Sociality is “the situation in which the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity for being several things at once,” (Mead 75). The readjustment of each implicated system related to a shared object is “sociality” in the most general sense. As Murphy puts it, the “abruptness of emergent process is reflected in a plurality of relational systems irreducibly distinct yet so mutually implicated in ‘passage’ that an object, belonging to two such ‘systems’ at once will import into each a character with which its presence in the other has endowed it. The process of readjustment in which the object maintains itself in each system, through being also in the other, is sociality,” (Mead 27). This entanglement of sociality is the “form” of emergence, if I understand correctly, because every emergence necessarily implicates multiple systems, or temporal points of view, since there will always be an old and a new system resulting from emergence, and these systems will necessarily share an object and both change in the process.
Mead believes that “the appearance of mind is only the culmination of that sociality which is found throughout the universe,” (Mead 106). If we accept that latter claim, based on the deep relationship between emergence as such and sociality, then we now only need to show that the human mind emerged through sociality. Mead asserts that the “vital system” of organized life “emerged” from the “physical system” of chemicals, and that the living animal belongs to both at once in a form of sociality; for example, poop means something different to the dog than to the ground. “Primarily living forms react to external stimulation in such fashion as to preserve the living process. The peculiar method that distinguishes their reactions from the motions of inanimate objects is that of selection. This selection is the sensitivity of the living form.” The next step of higher-dimensional sociality emergence is the emergence of consciousness from the living or organic forms. Mead writes that the “conscious animal carries selection into the field of its own responses… Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism’s own responses enter into the objective field to which it reacts” (Mead 95). This ability to respond to one’s own responses, to be aware of the way your interactions with your environment can change that environment, recalls our earlier discussion of the power inherent in the socially objectifying view of one’s own behavior from outside; this is the origin of consciousness, this feeling of oneself as both agent and environment, crystallized in the perspectives gathered from others. This is sociality at work; we are ourselves the shared object, and the point of view is our own mediated with that of a specific other, or many others, or a well-generalized other, or ourselves in the past, or ourselves in the future. It is here, in this reflexivity, in this need to keep track of a “self,” that “meaning” arises; meaning is a higher-level system. “To respond to such meanings, to treat them, rather than mere immediate data, as the stimuli for behavior, is to have imported into the world as experienced the promise of the future and the lesson of the past. Meanings are now the very essence of what an object really is and in seeing it in terms of its meanings, in reacting to what it can do to us under crucial or standard conditions, we are bringing organic sensations into a new and emergent context. The human individual is alive and also conscious. His conscious behavior organizes his sensations–in themselves mere organic reactions– into qualities and meanings of things,” (Mead 28). Our conscious system can influence our vital system (say, through a large paper assignment inducing anxiety), and our vital system can in turn influence our conscious system (say, through the sensation of caffeine impacting the mental processes that produce meaning). There is thus the emergence of perspective-adjusting sociality from spacetime through to human consciousness, and Mead is vindicated in positing sociality as characteristic of the whole course of natural development.
—Whitman vindicated in being the ultimate generalized Other, the timeless, the still point, truth as a product of increased sociality within experience
-Whitman even went so far as to suggest that present could change past
—Mead as consonant with Emerson, Whitman, continues tradition, meta-question of the relationship between past and present in the story of influence in American thought.
—Eliot should fit in, but despite some similarities, instead falls largely outside– must have missed Mead, but shouldnt have, values tradition, sees struggle with metaxy for timelessness as a depressing, continual, and lonely journey with no clear end, beyond the desire to worship a God, tradition
—Eliot did not take his own advice, crafted own peculiar tradition and then pledged self to it, rejected Emerson and Whitman who were his rightful fathers, attempt to return in Dry Salvages too little too late
—Personal flaws of not having enough love and friendship and goodness. Pragmatic relevance. Time, class, escape, Harvard, War, sexual confusion, antisemitism
Mead
Introduction “It seeks to understand the world as centered in a present, and to locate past and future, meanings and possibilities, in their function with respect to it. To see the past as past, for example, is to see it when it is past, in relation to the present whose past it is. What it, or anything else that claims existence, may be independent of its temporal reference, is not empirically possible, and if Mr. Mead is right, it is not necessary, to inquire.”
In dialogue with contemporary philosophies of “process” “development” and “emergence” Whitehead.
Pragmatic theory of knowledge (p 38-39)
“In opposition to all such theories, pragmatists have held that knowledge is concerned not with any “antecedent” or “ulterior” reality, but rather with the direction of activity in shared experience, and with objects in so far as they organize such activity around any meaningful objectives of cooperative action.” experience itself has no ulterior reference, and this is not a problem
Consciousness uses ideas and meanings, involves reference to some ulterior layer. sp so he says that “Consciousness is a development within experience, and not the final or inclusive form of our relation to it.” “This wider experience, the world which is ‘there’ and with respect to which the problem of an external or transcendent reference does not arise, is foundational to Mr. Mead’s view, and is assumed throughout.”
Worry-scientific bias of objects and methods
Pragmatism and whitehead both part of “revolt against dualism,” “sought to objectify those features of experience which a dualistic philosophy had regarded as merely subjective. This meant that what had previously been allocated to ‘mind’ must now find its place in ‘nature’ and that nature must be reconstructed accordingly. And finally, in the extension of relativity to the objective world, a criticism was required of the notions of ‘perspective,’ ‘time-system,’ ‘sociality,’ and the like, in order to show how these notions, purified of their merely subjective connotations, could take their place in a system of categories as the pervasive characters of reality.” 14 (Emerson/Whitman)
“Social and psychological progress is but an instance of what takes place in nature, if nature is an evolution” extends the social into fundamental property of reality, and human sociality as special case of it, a philosophy of nature, maybe even a metaphysic
Arthur Murphy thinks social might be too subjective for this metaphysic of process
II Present as Locus of Reality
15 subject matter division “There is a theory about the nature of time and emergence, a theory about relativity and its social implications, and a synthesis of these in a theory of emergence as social and of sociality as a character of emergent evolution.”
Present is locus of reality, anything real must exist in relation to a present, not what it was when it was present, did not stand in same relation. “The past of an event is not just an antecedent present,”
“When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably existing as presents would not constitute a past.” 58
“The distinctive character of the past in its relation to the present is manifestly that of irrevocability. As conditioning the present, as making its occurrence possible, the past must have been of a determinate character. It expresses the settled condition to which the present must conform and without which it could not have been what it is. And this means not merely antecedent occurrence, it means causal determination or, as Mr. Mead tends to put it, the ‘carrying on of relations.’”
“Yet this carrying on of identical relations is never the whole story. The doctrine of emergence asks us to believe that the present is always in some sense novel, abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose. A present, if it is really new at all, will have in it an element of temporal and causal discontinuity. Recent quantum physics has taught us to believe that such indeterminism is quite consistent with rigorous physical analysis. But how is it possible to reconcile this novelty with scientific determinism?”
Answer is theory, “Before the emergent has occurred, and at the moment of its occurrence, it does not follow from the past. That past relative to which it was novel cannot be made to contain it. But after it has occurred we endeavor to reconstruct experience in terms of it, we alter our interpretation and try to conceive a past from which the recalcitrant element does follow and thus to eliminate the discontinuous aspect of its present status. Its abruptness is then removed by a new standpoint, a new set of laws, from which the conditions of our new present can be understood. These laws could not have been [wholly] part of any previous past, for in the presents with relation to which those pasts existed there was no such emergent element. To assume a single determinate past to which every present must wholly conform is to deny emergence altogether. But at the same time, to treat the emergent as a permanently alien and irrational element is to leave it a sheer mystery. It can be rationalized after the fact, in a new present, and in the past of that present it follows from antecedent conditions, where previously it did not follow at all. As the condition of the present, the past, then, will vary as the present varies, and new pasts will ‘arise behind us’ in the course of evolution as each present ‘marks out and in a sense selects what has made its own peculiarity possible’”16 and 52
Irrevocable past is the past of any given present, that which accounts for its occurence. When emergent facts change the determining conditions that led to it, the determinism holds for any particular present’s past
— need for scientific determinism possibly misleading?
If the past is this orientation of settled conditions with respect to present data, the past does empirically change as evolution proceeds.
“For a temporalist philosophy the past ‘in itself’ is not a past at all– its relation to the present is the ground of its pastness. And this relation is empirically a causal one. If becoming is real that causal relation is never such as to exclude emergence. When emergence occurs a new perspective of the past, a new relatedness, will ensue– a relatedness which is a natural fact about the new situation, though it could never have occurred in the old. And what is here new is precisely the way in which what, in the older present, was merely novel and abrupt has become a part of the world of causal objects, hence a part of the past through which they are supposed to operate. The relatedness is real, and the perspective past it generates, the past of the new present, is the real past of that present, and only for a present can the past be real at all.”
SpaceTime and relativity taken into human temporal perspectives– what is motion and what is Space and mass and what is Light?
“We seem, then, to have discovered in temporal transition itself a unique sort of relativity, and a set of what we are now to describe as ‘temporal perspectives’ or ‘systems.’ Each such system is distinguished by the temporal center from which its relations to past events is organized, and they differ primarily in this, that what is external, contingent, hence ‘emergent’ for one such standpoint will ‘follow from’ and hence be reflected in the past of another. How are such perspectives related, and how does the transition from one to another take place? The answer can be given only when we have inquired into the nature of relativity, and into its social implications.
III
19 Minkowski space-time, undermines traditional material macro world measured by scientists by experimental manipulatory contact values, puts standard of validity outside material world, crisis for pragmatists, no object can be isolated from what is happening to it, no permanent character independent of changes, all values relative, Energy, like space-time, is a transformation value
Metaphysical question of identity, “can a thing with changing spatio-temporal and energy dimensions be the same thing with different dimensions, when we have seemingly only these dimensions by which to define the thing” 100
It is no longer possible to interpret distance values in terms of possible contact experience or to regard the properties which a thing has where it is as uniquely characterizing it.” Values measured from a distance wont match those that would appear in its local context, cant correct cause the info coming to us would also be falsified by our locality.
“Thus, in the theory of relativity, distance experience, in terms of light signals, comes to have an autonomous value not reducible to contact or local values.”
21 “Alternative is to reexamine that whole relation of experience to its ‘real’ or standard objects of which the problem of space-time is but an instance.” Illustrated first by familiar type of social interaction model, next from physical field, finally by relativity itself. “In each case it is to be shown that the correction and organization of relative experiences in terms of the ‘real’ objects to which they refer involves not a non-empirical reality to which they must somehow correspond, but rather a way of acting which relates past and future to the present from the standpoint or perspective of its widest social meaning.” pragmatically
Example of “The rights of property are objects of a present experience in so far as any individual surveys his situation as an owner, in relation to the claims of others, and of the law, and reacts accordingly. To understand the implications of his conduct from this standpoint he must see them as others see them and must, in consequence, have come to take a socially objective atttitude toward his own behavior. The meanings that this relationship confers upon experience are real and important facts about it. But they arise only for an individual who, as Mead would say, can react to his own reactions in the role of his fellows, and can take the standpoint thus achieved as authoritative for the direction of his own activity.”
“Thus to ‘take the role of the other’ is to see all experience in a new context, in terms of what it means or portends relatively to the objects– or objectives– which this standpoint defines as central.The more of the past and future such a standpoint commands, the more it will transform experience into the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen and the more, above all, will it enlighten action by giving a present relevance and value to occurrences not literally given in immediate experience. The ordinary function of standard objects is to mediate action by bringing within the range of conscious selection alternatives that only this wider standpoint can encompass.” child roleplaying knowing the value others will palce on ones conduct.
22 2nd essay attempts to extend this account of objectivity as taking the role of the other to our knowledge of physical objects, then relativity. 4 Requirements:
-the meaning to be explained must be such as an individual experience could not possessin itself or in its immediacy; it must arise out of its interaction with external agencies.
–it must nevertheless be possible for the individual to distinguish in experience between what is merely his own contribution vs what comes from other party, must be able to identify some activity of his own which can react as other
–achieved standpoint must become so authoritative within experience (prag) that the meanings data take on in relation to it will be the index of their objective value
-“Experience, as mediated by such meanings, will include the past and future, thus introducing into the present the conditions and consequences of the alternative reactions between which an individual must choose. To bring the conditions of action into the range of conscious deliberation in such fashion that we can direct conduct in the light of them is the goal of this whole development.”
Our knowledge of physical things checks all these boxes -a things “having an inside” is not something we individually can reveal (Still Point) We can only reach the still point “”together”
We discover our bodies outside-in; It is the experience of resistance that provides the necessary external reference. In pushing and resisting things the organism can regard its own activity as identical in kind with that of the thing upon it. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Thus in resisting the thing we are behaving toward it as it is behaving toward us.” we discover the inside through contact experience “It is in leading up to the object as it exists where it is that distance experience becomes significant. We have here a standpoint, a relational focus of meanings, which, if we act in the role of the physical thing, becomes authoritative as against other perspectives or standpoints… There are many contexts in which our experience is involved. The one we accept as a standard will determine the direction of activity and its meanings. It is by seeing the world as it would be for the fully realized values of thinghood that this standard is in fact applied.
–The power of the human animal to discover such meanings transforms present experience into a world of objects whose potentialities are the possibilites of action
24The application of these 4 to theory of relativity is now easy
-relative values, essentially ‘social’ in that they involve a reference, for their meaning, to that which exists outside their time-system
-search for something identical to enable role-taking, more than mere resistance in this generalization, realm of “generalized other” “an attitude which enables us to pass from any physical perspective to any other, occupying each–or any– in passage, and identifying in each only that which is in fact identical, the formula that justifies the transition from one to another. We have, then, in space-time, not a curious and unattainable new sort of object, but a generalization of that social objectivity which extends the generous capacity of seeing ourselves as others see us to include the views of our stellar neighbors. In this context of meaning the world of spacetime has its locus and function.”
The theory of relativity as a phase not necessarily final in “that process by which man achieves social objectivity through the organization of relative perspectives.”
IV
The most daring development of the theory: “Can sociality– so far considered in its specifically human aspect– be so generalized as to characterize the whole course of natural development? 25We found relativity occurring in the perspectives that emergence implies. And some sort of organization of such perspectives seemed to be required. If this readjustment should turn out– on all levels of development– to be a form of sociality, we should have succeeded in linking up sociality with the whole time process and putting mind back into nature with a vengeance. Thus ‘to present mind as an evolution in nature, in which culminates that sociality which is the principle and form of emergence’ 105 is the final goal of the Carus Lectures.” only developed while lectures were being written
“The sociality of emergence, and the evolution, through emergence, of sociality into higher and more complex objective expression are the parallel themes of this hypothesis.
- In what sense is emergence social?
“In emergence, as in the theory of relativity there is a plurality of ‘systems,’ that is to say distinct standpoints, and we have the consequence that the ‘same’ object must be in different systems at once.” Physical system and vital system which emerges from it, irreducible, living animal belongs to both at once. “Consciousness is additional and irreducible to mere organic behavior, yet a sensation is at once an organic event and also implicated in that system of meanings which, in objectifying the possible future activity of the organism, is the distinctively conscious aspect of experience.”
“Sociality is ‘the situation in which the novel event is in both the old order and the new which its advent heralds. Sociality is the capacity for being several things at once.’ 75 But in its dynamic aspect it is more than this. The novel event must not merely be in two systems; it must adjust this plurality of systemic relations in such fashion that ‘its presence in the later system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs’ 92 while its older relations are reflected in the new system it has entered. It carries over the old relations, yet in its emergent novelty it reflects back upon the older world the uniqueness of its new situation.”
“The readjustment of the new social order to the old, of that which was carried over to that which emerged, is ‘sociality’ in its most general sense.”
“Emergent life changes the character of the world just as emergent velocities change the character of masses” (88, important to Mead) (momentum= mass * velocity)A body’s motion in one time-system is as truly at rest in another, and is in both, need to understand both, “an increase in mass as ‘an extreme example of sociality’, relative, dependent on a special timesystem and ‘emergent’ for spacetime as such, must see event in both system in which increase occurred and in that which it does not and regard event as genuinely in each.” When Mead goes beyond this, he thinks he is mistaken, incomplete. But main thesis not compromise:
“The abruptness of emergent process is reflected in a plurality of relational systems irreducibly distinct yet so mutually implicated in ‘passage’ that an object, belonging to two such ‘systems’ at once will import into each a character with which its presence in the other has endowed it. The process of readjustment in which the object maintains itself in each system, through being also in the other, is sociality.”
b) How does sociality evolve?
Sociality as general principle of nature, mind highest form of it thus far known, but consciousness unique in that “Primarily living forms react to external stimulation in such fashion as to preserve the living process. The peculiar method that distinguishes their reactions from the motions of inanimate objects is that of selection. This selection is the sensitivity of the living form… The conscious animal carries selection into the field of its own responses… Life becomes conscious at those points at which the organism’s own responses enter into the objective field to which it reacts.” 95
“What it means to respond to one’s own environment we have already seen. The relations in which the environment stands to our reactions are its meanings. To respond to such meanings, to treat them, rather than mere immediate data as the stimuli for behavior, is to have imported into the world as experienced the promise of the future and the lesson of the past. Meanings are now the very essence of what an object really is and in seeing it in terms of its meanings, in reacting to what it can do to us under crucial or standard conditions, we are bringing organic sensations into a new and emergent context. The human individual is alive and also conscious. His conscious behavior organizes his sensations–in themselves mere organic reactions– into qualities and meanings of things”… meanings alter sensation, sensation alter meaning, social readjustment. “In reacting to the meaning of his sensations the individual is in both systems at once.”
“The highest level of conscious experience is, of course, that in which the individual can apprehend meanings in their fullest generality, and can thus command so wide a variety of standpoints toward his world as to isolate that which is common to all and would hence be valid for any rational individual. This is the role of the ‘generalized other,’ and the meanings which the sciences find in the world are those which so impersonal a standpoint will reveal. And yet it is just in this impersonality of standpoint that the individual becomes a ‘person’— a real member of the community of rational beings. To participate in the life of the community he must see himself as a participant and must respond to its claims and responsibilites as his own. In its person he can survey the ‘perspectives’ which individual attitudes engender and can relate them all to the demands of the common purpose in which they are equally involved.”
If Mead has succeeded in portraying individual meaning-sociality as a natural ‘emergent’ development from general material-vital animal sociality of systemic plurality, his major task is accomplished.
“The argument returns at the end, as it should, to its point of departure. It is in a present that emergent sociality occurs. And we can now see that such a present is no mere moment of time, arbitrarily cut out from an otherwise uniform ‘passage of nature.’ A present is a unit of natural becoming; it is the period within which something temporally real can happen. What has been and what may be have their focus and actualization in a present standpoint and it is from such a standpoint that creative intelligence, transforming the novelty of emergence and the fatality of mere repetition into a measure at least of meaningful development, brings to articulate and self-conscious expression the pervasive form of natural process. It is as the scene of such process that the present is the locus of reality.”
Goes further to suggest that the generative present can change the past
4 “Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North, Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring, Surround them East and West, for they would surround you, And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you. I conn’d old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me. In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique? Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.”
14 “Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they unite with the old ones”
18 “See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d”
“These States, receivers of the stamina of past ages and lands, initiate the outlines of repayment a thousand fold. They fetch the American great masters, waited for by old worlds and new, who accept evil as well as good, ignorance as well as erudition, black as soon as white, foreign-born materials as well as home-born, reject none, force discrepancies into range, surround the whole, concentrate them on present periods and places, show the application to each and any one’s body and soul, and show the true use of precedents.”
OUTLINE
—Intro
– Fundamental American problem: to equilibrate the relation of the self to culture and of the present to the past
While all these thinkers acknowledge the interrelatedness of present and past, with different qualifications, the general progress is one of Move from aristocratic tradition, to radical newness, a return to the past, to finally focus on situated present redemption
-The interrelatedness of these thinkers itself represents this inextricability
—The mediation between the past and the present is a dominant theme in American thought because…
-Materially (continent, water, west)
-Politically (England and Colonies)
-Culturally (English Language, imported culture vs “native” culture)
— Radical Newness in Emerson, primacy of intuition over tuition, present over past
Thoreau
Whitman
— Emerson/Thoreau/Whitman’s acknowledgments of the importance of the past, towards a more nuanced historicity
—However, the old must always be seen in the thousand eyed present
-Light imagery in all of them, constant rebirth, present at service of past
-America needs newness at this time, why newness is valuable
—Whitman’s nuances of present and past, but still focused on newness
— TS Eliot’s famous essay “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” demotes individual/present in favor of all-powerful “tradition”, antithesis to Whitman, Arnoldian over Emersonian, turn back to Europe/past, reflects cultural moment and personal/class bias, pessimism, contingency
— American Pragmatism, George Herbert Mead, Philosophy of the Present,
-Present as the locus of reality,
-past only exists through present,
-past reshaped by present
-America reshaping Europe
— Comparing Mead’s philosophy of time with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, horizons
—Mead’s correlations with Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau
—Mead’s differences with them
— TS Eliot’s famous essay “The Tradition and the Individual Talent,” demotes individual/present in favor of all-powerful “tradition”, antithesis to Whitman, Arnoldian over Emersonian, turn back to Europe/past, reflects cultural moment and personal/class bias, pessimism, contingency
—TS Eliot as the perfect figure through which to examine the culmination of American thought on Time mediation, Four Quartets as ultimate mature meditations on time
-St Louis to Harvard to England, desire for roots
-TS Eliot as an American poet, love for European Tradition, repressed relation to Whitman,
-speech on “American Literature and American Language,” relationship between American English and English
-Four Quartets move from East Coker (England, ancestral home from which ancestors left for America) to Dry Salvages (Massachusetts, Mississippi), Eliot’s Americanness and Europeanness as mediating past and present
—
—Understanding of Time and Timelessness and the Present from Quartets
—Relation of Quartets to Mead, similarities and diff
—Eliot x Whitman disagree
—Eliot x Whitman reconciled
—Eliot x Emerson disagree
—Eliot x Emerson reconciled
— what to do with supplementary stuff? Frost, slaves, etc
—Conclusion, mention other related poets’ lines about Time (Graham, Gibran)
Whitman
Song of Myself
2 “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”
3 “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”
17 “These really are the thoughts of all men in all languages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe.”
20 “Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious? (Eliot).. In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.”
“I know I am deathless”
“And I know the amplitude of time.”
23 “Here of henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely”
24 “Through me many long dumb voices… Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.”
25 “Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.”
31 “i find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco’d with quadropeds and bird all over, And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, But call any thing back again when I desire it.”
43 “The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same, And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same. I do not know what is untried and afterward, But I know it will in its turn prove sufficient, and cannot fail.”
44 “The clock indicates the moment– but what does eternity indicate? We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any.”
“I am an acme of things accomplished, and I an encloser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apipces of stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount. Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me, Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there… All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me, Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”
45 “Every condition promulges not only itself, it promulges what grows after and out of itself, And the dark hush promulges as much as any.”
46 “You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life”
48 “And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe”
51 “The past and present wilt– I have fill’d them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future”
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
A Song for Occupations
3 “We consider bibles and religions divine– I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life”
4 “The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same, If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be? The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vaccums.” (x Mead +)
To Think of Time
8“But there is more account than that, there is strict account of all” (x Mead)
9 “I swear I think now that every thing without exception has an eternal soul!…I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!”
Song of the Broad-Axe 7 “Served those who time out of mind made on the granite walls rough sketches of the sun, moon, stars, ships, ocean waves… Served not the living only then as now, but served the dead”
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
2 “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings”
3 “It avails not, time nor place– distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” (Eliot, time and place are isolating)
Song of the Open Road 13 “To see nothing anywhere but you may reach it and pass it, To conceive no time, however distant, but you may reach it and pass it”
Starting From Paumanok
2 “See revolving the globe, The ancestor-continents away group’d together, The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus between”
4 “Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North, Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own offspring, Surround them East and West, for they would surround you, And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect lovingly with you. I conn’d old times, I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, Now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me. In the name of these States shall I scorn the antique? Why these are the children of the antique to justify it.”
5 “Dead poets, philosophs, priests, Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, Language-shapers on other shores, Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate, I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left wafted hither, I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,) Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves, Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, I stand in my place with my own day here… Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of materials, Here spiritually the translatress, the openly-avow’d, The ever-tending… the soul”
12 “And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.”
14 “Hereby applying these leaves to the new ones from the hour they unite with the old ones”
18 “See, through Atlantica’s depths pulses American Europe reaching, pulses of Europe duly return’d”
All Is Truth
“I see that there are really no liars or lies after all, And that nothing fails its perfect return, and that what are called lies are perfect returns, And that each thing exactly represents itself and what has preceded it, And that the truth includes all, and is compact just as much as space is compact, And that there is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth– but that all is truth without exception; And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.”
1855 Preface
“America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions… accepts the lesson with calmness… is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms… perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house… perceives that it waits a little while at the door… that it was fittest for its days… that its action has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches… and that he shall be fittest for his days.”
“As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times!”
“The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him other continents arrive as contributions… he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country’s spirit… he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes.”
“To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events”
“For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new… Here the theme is creative and has vista.”
“The greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read… Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet… he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson… he places himself where the future becomes present… he glows a moment on the extremest verge.”
“Flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides… himself the age transfigured… opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of today, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour”
“The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away.”
Letter to RWE
“Authorities, poems, models, laws, names, imported into America, are useful to America today to destroy them, and so move disencumbered to great works, great days.”
“America is not finished, perhaps never will be; now America is a divine true sketch.”
“These States, receivers of the stamina of past ages and lands, initiate the outlines of repayment a thousand fold. They fetch the American great masters, waited for by old worlds and new, who accept evil as well as good, ignorance as well as erudition, black as soon as white, foreign-born materials as well as home-born, reject none, force discrepancies into range, surround the whole, concentrate them on present periods and places, show the application to each and any one’s body and soul, and show the true use of precedents.”
-Catcher in the Rye anxiety about youth being “touched” by adults
-Lolita inverse, desire to impose European words onto virgin American child
-Gatsby, doomed desire to repeat the past as it always changes
Emerson
Nature “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepuchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, can invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”
“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”
“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”
American Scholar “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.”
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.”
“The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is, the mind of the Past” books
“It came into him, life; it went out of him, truth” But never achieves perfect distillation of truth, and so “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”
However a “grave mischief” arises– “The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation— the act of thought— is transferred to the record… The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guise is a tyrant.” Colleges are built on this, books are written on it by thinkers, not Man Thinking, who “start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.” “Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul.” Books “are for nothing but to inspire” the active soul, which every man contains
Institutions and books look backward, but “genius looks forward”
“Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.”
We should read when it’s dark, but when “he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” “We hear, that we may speak.”
The best books “impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads” a pleasure “in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses.” “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.” (Eliot, Essences)
“One must be an inventor to read well.”
Colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame… forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year”
“The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.” (Action, pragmatism, Eliot)
“The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.”
Divinity School Address “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead”
Self-Reliance “Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”
“Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic”
“The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”
“Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away– means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it– one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old and mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.” “Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no les. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tip-toe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.” (Eliot)
The highest truth on the subject: “When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man.”
“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame”
“Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.”
“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
The Over-Soul
Yield “to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man”
“The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand”
“Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.” PLato and Shakespeare remind us of immortality and longevity, refresh
“Revelation is the disclosure of the soul.” “An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.”
“The sources of nature are in his own mind”
“The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.”
“Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity.”
Circles
“Every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning”
“The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.”
“Conversation is a game of circles… The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost… let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls.”
“Literature is a point outside our hodiernal circle, through which a new one may be described.”
“The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations, which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding.” (Mead)
“Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.” (Mead, or Still Point)
“But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”
“Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceed, the eternal generator abides.”
“Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate, and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names— fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity, and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward… In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit… no truth [is] so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
“I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning.”
“The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and trodden ground, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present.”
“The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”
The Poet
“For it is not metres, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem– a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it as an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing… The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.”
“We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use.”
“Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind”
“The new agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent two rods off.”
“But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.”
“The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking, we say ‘That is yours, this is mine’; but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you”
“All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air, for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted.” (Eliot and Whitman)
“The time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.”
Thoreau
“alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never to late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe
6 Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.”
“But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We shoulld live in all ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!– I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.”
“ You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,– you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind– I hear an irresistable voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises or another like stranded vessels.”
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts,; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.”
“And still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.
That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble excercize.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that distrub and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occured to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality.”
“No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”
In view of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society
Four Quartets
Timelessness
Time
Consciousness
The ephemeral, even imaginary, moment of the rose
The failure of words
Patterns
Time of human life always flux
Incarnation, Fire
Intersection of the timeless with time
Attachment, detachment, indifference, love
Burnt Norton
I “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.”
“If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable.”
“What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.”
Never opened door into rose-garden, but can imagine we did. What purpose in disturbing dust on rose-leaves? Eliot can make us see them, make echoes in our minds, follo deception of thrush “into our first world” ‘For the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at.”
Hallucinatory moment with roses and pool filled with water out of sunlight, the roses behind us reflected in the pool, then pool empty.
II “At the still point of the turning world.”
“At the still point, there the dance is, / But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it ficity, / Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, / Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. / I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.”
“The inner freedom from the practical desire, / The release from action and suffering, release from the inner / And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded / By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving, / Erhebung without motion, concentration / Without elimination, both a new world / And the old made explicit, understood / In the completion of its partial ecstasy, / The resolution of its partial horror. / Yet the enchainment of past and future / Woven in the weakness of the changing body, / Protects manking from heaven and damnation / Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future /Allow but a little consciousness. / To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time time is conquered.”
III “Here is a place of disaffection / Time before and time after / In a dim light” neither pure light still form, nor pure emptying darkness, “Distracted from distraction by distraction / Filled with fancies and empty of meaning”
To escape, either descend into darkness of perpetual solitude, deprivation
Or, the other way (light, stillness of form, God) same in abstention from movement; “while the world moves / In appetancy, on its metalled ways / Of time past and time future.”
Image of “Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?”
“The light is still / At the still point of the turning world.”
V “Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness. / Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, / Not that only, but the co-existence, / Or say that the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / Before the beginning and after the end. / And all is always now. Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.”
“The detail of the pattern is movement, / As in the figure of the ten stairs. / Desire itself is movement / Not in itself desirable; / Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring / Except in the aspect of time / Caught in the form of limitation / Between unbeing and being. / Sudden in a shaft of sunlight / Even while the dust moves / There rises the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage / Quick now, here, now, always– / Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.
Clendenning
with a now frequently quoted
phrase: “The essays of Emerson are already
an encumbrance” 126
iny. Compared with
their English contemporaries, Eliot in-
sisted, American writers of the nineteenth
century were products of a starved en-
vironment, a sterile tradition; deprived of
an intelligentsia, they resorted to original-
ity, a quality that might make them more
immediately exciting, more refreshing,
more shocking than their opposite num-
bers in England, but which in the long run
suffered from a world too thin, incorrupt,
secondhand and shallow. If these remarks
show that Eliot was well on the way
toward his distinction between tradition
and individual talent, they suggest further
that his dissatisfaction with American litera-
ture grew out of his belief that great art is
possible only through a reverence for the
past and a conscious suppression of origi-
Nalit
t. Indeed on moral grounds, one could
hardly cite more different views or more
different poems than, for example, “May-
Day” and “The Waste Land.” In one we
find:
April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again . . .
while in the other:
April is the cruellest month, breedi
Hobsbaum-
poems; in, that is to say, ‘Gerontion’, Ash
Wednesday and Four Quartets. Most notably, these are the suppression of
plot in favour of evocative vibration; phanopoeia?that is to say, the
emotive play of images; qualitative progression, whereby properties link
up without following a narrative line; a tendency towards implication by
means of catalogue or montage; free verse. None of these is new to the
English language, though they had not previously been used successfully
by English poets. This is not a conundrum: the inference is clear. What
English critics of the 1920s resisted in Eliot’s verse, and in some cases
denounced, was not its quality of modernism. There is no world in which
Eliot co-exists with Tzara, Dada and the Sitwells. It was not a young
English poet the Georgians were fighting against, but a young American
poet. Once this is taken into account, all becomes clear. The Waste Land
and Ash Wednesday cannot be related with any persuasiveness to English
narrative poems.
indeed ; so that what has been termed
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Eliot, Whitman and American Tradition 247
‘modernity’ in his work should rather be regarded as the development of a
decisively American tradition.
Who, long before Eliot, worked through evocative vibration, phanopoeia,
montage, free verse and the rest? The answer is obvious: Whitman. And
if we further enquire why this palpable fact was not noted by critics and
editors as intelligent as Leavis, Roberts and Empson, we can only point
to one of the salient characteristics of Eliot’s work: that he, more than any
other poet, has succeeded in constructing his own literary history. Unfortu
nately it is largely mythical.
In Eliot, in Whitman, in Pound we have this tendency to collect images,
to try and create a unity out of disparity. And this I have called a charac
teristically American approach. 263 phanopoeia Most frequently the qualities that critics find in their work are
described as modernism. If this paper has done its work, henceforward we
shall recognize that quality as Americanness.
Helmling Emersonian Eliot
TS Eliot as an American Poet Baskett :127 ” When Eliot remarked in
The Paris Review interview in 1959 that “my poetry has obvi
ously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries
in America, than with anything written in my generation in
England. . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes
from America”
in the final paragraph, where Eliot
explains that Whitman “remain[s] a great representative of America,
but emphatically of an America which no longer exists” (“Whitman
and Tennyson 426)
154 westward.” D. H. Lawrence in “The Spirit of the Place” raises the same issues but in a different perspective. The American artist, as Amer ican, has come to the New World in “rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe,” as in “The Gift Outright” a de parture without return, but leading, in Lawrence’s view, to the “masterless” American, who is accordingly a kind of “escaped slave,” the “missing man” differently defined and at an earlier remove. In contrast to Frost’s commitment, Lawrence asks in detachment, “Which will win in America, the escaped slaves, or the new whole men?” — “slaves,” in Lawrence’s figure, fleeing “like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,”
155 r. In 1942 Alfred Kazin pointed to what he considered “the greatest single fact about our modern American writing — our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it. The result is “a terrible estrangement … a yearning for a world no one ever really possessed. …” Acknowledging that all modern writers have known alienation, Kazin focused on “our alienation on native grounds — the inter woven story of our need to take up our life on our own grounds, and the irony of our possession.”
-Kaag, “American philosophy— from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century straight through to Cornel West in this one— is about the possibilities of rebirth and renewal.” 67
“Transcendentalists and pragmatists alike made this departure in their insistence that philosophy should not be exclusively concerned with abstract concepts and “pure reason,” but was meant to help individuals work through the trials of experience in their New World” 95
Josiah Royce’s last written words: “so long as… the spirit of brotherhood enables us to prize what we owe to those who have lived and died for us, the cult of the dead will be an unfailing source to us of new and genuinely religious life.” 233
Gadamer
279 Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle (between unplaced parts and incomplete whole) “possesses an ontologically positive significance”; must keep focus on the things themselves, “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text… Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he pentrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there.” constant process of new projections, even competing ones, striving towards unity of meaning, need openness, 281 “But this openness
-Signficance of the Frontier in American History
“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development”
“The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people”
“This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”
“The advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.”
“In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.” nationalizing tendency of the west, West changing the coast=Present changing the past, create cohesive whole
“To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom— these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”
“At the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gte of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifferent to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.”
-Catcher in the Rye anxiety about youth being “touched” by adults
-Lolita inverse, desire to impose European words onto virgin American child
-Gatsby, doomed desire to repeat the past as it always changes
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 