Self-Help

…what he most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge….It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

I read a good deal of a book last semester (in graduate school you seldom finish everything, if anything) which impressed me arguably more than it should have. Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is just what it sounds like. It is perhaps the first of what is now a lamentable genre, a genre avoided by all persons with a decent appreciation for the redemptive power of irony, and who generally avoid taking themselves seriously enough to warrant a course in self-improvement.

The appreciation of irony is a virtue in itself.

Self-Help is thoroughly unironic. Naturally, I went and bought another of his books, the moral heft of which isn't difficult to appreciate in the one-word title: Duty. 

But moral heft is what we're going for. Samuel Smiles wrote for "the every man"--men who wouldn't turn their nose up at a moral precept or a zinging cliche (of course, turning one's nose up at a cliche requires an ear for irony. One gets the feeling, though, that Smiles's patrons weren't reading Lawrence Sterne deep into the night). Well, Smiles was full of zingers, old and new. His book begins with an old one: Heaven helps those who help themselves. 

Oh I hear you groan, but those old chestnuts can be damn useful, can move men to action. Written at times in rather rosy ink, Smiles's books are full of anecdotes and hyperbolic portraits of all sorts of men (I do forgive him his exclusion of the fairer sex). Smiles wrote the book for those eager enough, yet unlucky enough, to be born socially below their intellectual station: poor in pocket, but not in spirit. Self-Help in particular was written for--and because of--such willful workers. Smiles introduces his 1859 publication "briefly": "The origin of this book may be briefly told..."

Some fifteen years since, the author was requested to deliver an address before the members of some evening classes, which had been formed in a northern town for mutual improvement, under the following circumstances:--

 Two or three young men of the humblest rank resolved to meet in the winter evenings, for the purpose of improving themselves by exchanging knowledge with each other. Their first meetings were held in the room of a cottage in which one of the members lived; and, as others shortly joined them, the place soon became inconveniently filled....

 Though they were for the most part young men earning comparatively small weekly wages, they resolved to incur the risk of hiring a room; and, on making inquiry, they found a large dingy apartment to let, which had been used as a temporary Cholera Hospital....But the mutual improvement youths, nothing daunted, hired the cholera room at so much a week, lit it up, placed a few benches and a deal table in it, and began their winter classes....The teaching may have been, as no doubt it was, of a very rude and imperfect sort; but it was done with a will. Those who knew a little taught those who knew less--improving themselves while they improved the others....Thus these youths--and there were grown men amongst them--proceeded to teach themselves and each other, reading and writing, arithmetic and geography; and even mathematics, chemistry, and some of the modern languages.

About a hundred young men had thus come together, when, growing ambitious, they desired to have lectures delivered to them... (Self-Help, Oxford pp 6-7)

"[A]nd then it was that the author became acquainted with their proceedings," the author, of course, being Smiles himself.  Like Duty, Self-Help fails often by falling into romances of toil; it positively revels in the nobility of hardship. And yet I keep finding myself moved--minding the pitfalls, Smiles can be damn good reading! It's a kind of philosophy, and much more fun (and...edifying...) than sludging though Heidegger or some other treatise of philosophical hand-wringing.

Duty is perhaps even more heavy-handed than its predecessor (the fourth of five in what eventually became Smiles's Self-Help series). But allow the words (or will them) to be fresh, and they will be:

He who has well considered his duty will at once carry his convictions into action. Our acts are the only things that are in our power. They not only form the sum of our habits, but of our character.

 At the same time, the course of duty is not always the easy course. It has many oppositions and difficulties to surmount. We may have the sagacity to see, but not the strength of purpose to do. To the irresolute there is many a lion in the way. He thinks and moralizes and dreams, but does nothing. "There is little to see," said a hard worker, "and little to do; it is only to do it." (Duty, p.31)

This really hits you if you're young, more intellectually inclined than the world has use for, and have a nagging moral urge to do good, useful things with your life. Emerson said that "the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power." Emerson has more credibility today than Smiles, but they're saying something similar.

Reading a book like Duty is hard if you really haven't done anything yet, and feel painfully aware of the fact. Really, I think you could hardly find a more fitting target of Smiles's ire than a neurotically self-reflective intellectual person who thinks without really doing.

While I don't think I'm as paralyzingly self-reflective as I could be, Smiles pushes us to think about weakness of character. I cringed at those parts of myself I like least: hesitancy, ambivalence, uncertainty, contentedness, irresoluteness, impotent (or empty) self-reflection (and we might add a tendency toward redundancy to the list...). Smiles articulates his vision of the feeble-willed, those with "weak wills":

...or no wills at all. They are characterless. They have no strong will for vice, yet they have none for virtue. They are the passive recipients of impressions, which, however, take no hold of them. They seem neither to go forward nor backward. As the wind blows, so their vane turns round; and when the wind blows from another quarter, ti turns round again. Any instrument can write on such spirits; any will can govern theirs. They cherish no truth strongly, and do not know what earnestness is. Such persons constitute the mass of society everywhere--the careless, the passive, the submissive, the feeble, and the indifferent." (33-34)

"Philosophers discuss," says Smiles, "decisive men act." I'm "discussing" resolve and action. My whole journey in philosophy now seems to me to have looped in on itself to begin eating its own tail--from idealization of the "examined life" through the great Western thinkers; through the narrows of questions of power, identity, free will, ontology, epistemology, skyhook universals of God or Nature; to language games, and slippage, and deconstructing binaries and assumptions and norms and the Human and the Nonhuman, and anything that could have once snuggily belonged under the only seemingly solid rock of Common Sense. The play of language, and puzzles, and more puzzles. It's something we need to do: to never take for granted that the world is what it seems simply because it feels right, or it's comfortable, or doing otherwise is a bit painful. I know this, I really do.

And then I'd go home, and something in the blood recognizes that there will always be binaries to live by. Family and not family; city and country; human and not human. And really, who needs shelves and shelves of philosophy discussing the fuzzy borders of the Human when we already have Darwin? The Origin is surprisingly tedious, but there's no doubting the profundity of the details of that book: he says over and over and over Look, look at this. Don't you see what this means? Isn't this wonderful? 

And so I began reading my way away from philosophy: the pragmatists like William James and Richard Rorty. Pragmatism, φρόνησις, phronēsis. Practical wisdom, experience. All of which I am relatively without, and all of which isn't merely to be found on a college campus. Wisdom is found in books, but rhetorical banalities aside, the plumber really does know something the Emerson scholar doesn't; the man who built the chair he sits in knows something I don't. I know nothing, but that's the jewel of Socratic wisdom I cling to. I don't want to abandon the "life of the mind"; I just want to begin walking in a different direction.

I remember a conversation with my parents. I was an undergraduate and just beginning to really get my head around Nietzsche, and Mill, and Shakespeare. I told my parents that people don't really take the time to think, and to look beyond the surface of their own assumptions. That if more people spent more energy examining the way they operate in the world, the world would be a much better place. I asserted that this was the most important pursuit an individual can take: the examined life of the intellectual. If you don't have that foundation, you simply cannot be a truly fulfilled person.

Or something like that. My father looked over his hamburger at me with brown eyes I inherited: "So the intellectual stuff, that's the most important thing?"

I affirmed this, and I don't think he argued the point; but in my faulty memory he keeps eating, maybe glancing at my mother, and says something about family being his most important thing. I probably pinked up and muttered something about not being able to have a fulfilling family life if you haven't yet pursued your own intellectual pursuits. But he paid for our meal with money from the job he doesn't really like, and we drove back to the house he built himself, the house I grew up in.

I'm aware I may fall into the Smiles fault: to romanticize the practical, and generalize; and certainly I risk being anti-intellectual to make an argument too irrational to stand. But I don't think Smiles is anti-intellectual. He wasn't criticizing scholars and intellectuals; he was criticizing those who never dug into anything, those who ever skimmed the surface, those who never pushed by the feckless pursuits to fruitful results.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to say. I'm not criticizing the intellectual life. Such a life gives the opportunity to throw oneself into a life of books and ideas; to enjoy and contribute to The Great Conversation about things that matter. I do think the pressures of professionalization and publication have pushed many scholars to intellectual dead-ends of trivialities and useless minutiae--the publishing of book that are never read, and of articles no one really cares about. Ever since the Humanities began having fits about needing to justify its own existence (give us results!) was when the Humanities began to wilt around the edges.

Ironically (for myself and for my argument here), that pressure was probably deployed though the rhetoric of pragmatics, the very rhetoric I find myself drawn to these days. The humanities don't really have cash value, and that's okay--that's actually a good thing.

George Eliot talked about "the want of regulated channels for the soul to move in--good and sufficient ducts of habit without which our nature easily turns to mere ooze and mud, and at any pressure yields nothing but a spurt or a puddle" (Daniel Deronda, Penguin ed, p157). It's Dorothea Brooke's yearning for a vocation rather than avocation (mere enjoyment, or hobby).

I'm finding I need to get my hands dirty, at least for awhile. I've been in school since I was 5. The idea of staying in school until I die is basically a real soul killer at this point.

And I don't know whether I've come to the point of leaving academia academically, or if this is just a rite of passage for a person in their 20s who hasn't yet found their niche: the place to dig down deep, and find the pains and the joys of doing so. It's not so much finding what you think you're looking for as cultivating some patch of earth to fruition. Maybe life isn't a journey so much as a garden.

You'll pardon that aphorism. But Voltaire had said something to that effect, or Candide did at any rate. Back from the long journey, Candide settled down to a quiet life with Cunegonde. This settlement leaves a bit to be desired since we are told that "At the bottom of his heart Candide had not the lease wish to marry Cunegonde." This generation has been told over and over to achieve, and to shoot for the moon, and reach for excellence; we have been told that we can achieve whatever we can dream. We are told never to settle.

So poor Candide, we first think. Or maybe poor Cunegone who undergoes the narrative inconvenience of a Princess past her rescue plot--she too will grow old, will live beyond the romantic to the ordinary and banal. Pangloss keeps asking his questions; he asks "the best philosopher in Turkey...why so strange an animal as man was ever created." Pangloss gets no real answer, and a door slammed in his face.

They meet an old farmer who knows nothing of the world but is "content...with sending there for sale the produce of the garden [he] cultivate[s]": ""I have only twenty acres," replied the Turk. "I cultivate them with my children; and work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."" The wandering adventurers think about it, and return to the farm on which they had hesitated to settle. Pangloss even beings to philosophically justify such a course. But "Let us work without theorizing," says the cynic Martin; "'tis the only way to make life endurable":

The whole small fraternity entered into this praiseworthy plan, and each started to make use of his talents. The little farm yielded well. Cunegonde was indeed very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry-cook....and Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle, by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here." 

"'Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens."

[work in progress warning]

Just a bit from an essay on Konstantin Kolenda

An Uncertain Scholar

   I am a graduate student, I should say, of literature and not of philosophy. My professor instructed my seminar class to find an archive and to write a paper about the experience. I loved the assignment for its openness—just do something interesting, she seemed to say.  Passing over old log books, a diary, collections of photographs, a beautiful book of paintings, and the delicate letters of Samuel Richardson, I searched a few days for the right project: I needed to be grabbed. Thankfully the Woodson Center has an online database of all archival materials. Every collection, or manuscript, or archival item is listed, usually with a detailed list of its contents. Such a search brought the Kolenda papers to my attention after keying in “American Philosophy” and, on a whim, “William James”.

    I should say a quick word about my attachment to James. English majors of a certain temperament tend to fall in love with dead people more easily than, perhaps, their relatively well-adjusted fellow human creatures. But intellectual backgrounds and erotic attachments notwithstanding it would be fairer to say that certain writers “do it” for us, no matter the temperament. And for me William James, even more than his brother Henry, was one who could “do it.”  As if anticipating my scholarly needs, James articulates this very phenomenon in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.” “The wildness and the pang of life”: I’m reminded here of Rebecca West’s famous observation of the James brothers that philosopher William wrote like a novelist, and novelist Henry wrote like a philosopher. William James was a brilliant thinker and a gifted writer. He insisted on clarity whenever possible, and retained a sense of play as well as a sense of humor in all of his work. John Dewey (a tedious writer with brilliant mind) noted in James’ prose a “clearness and a picturesqueness that will long be the despair of other philosophers.”

    Persons drawn to James’ pragmatic philosophy tend to be simultaneously attracted to what seems to be the nobility of an intellectual enterprise taking for its target the largest and most important questions ever posed, all the while being sensible to the perils of reveling for a lifetime in a project that may have no real application outside the classroom. Philosophizing can sometimes seem “as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together,” as George Eliot told us. But James has an answer: “What you want is a philosophy that will not only exercise your powers of intellectual abstraction, but that will make some positive connexion with this actual world of finite human lives.” [Note 1] If Kolenda had worked on William James I could fulfill the assignment and also read up on American pragmatism: here was the first hook. Admittedly, it was initially strange to me that a man with a foreign name could have been invested in American pragmatism, a strain of philosophy neglected by Americans themselves. Of course, if Tocqueville was right the nativity of any strain of philosophy would make no difference since “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”  

    I scanned the “Guide to the Konstantin Kolenda Papers, c.1950-1990 MS 436.” After spotting some papers on James, I glanced at the Collection’s abstract: “[t]he majority of this collection consists of Kolenda’s own writing (notes, drafts, source material). The next largest group consists of source material only on four philosophers (Peirce, Rorty, Ryle and Wittgenstein)…”  Rorty? Scanning the box index for Kolenda’s business correspondence I found Rorty’s name again, Box 5 Folder 29. I didn’t know who Konstantin Kolenda was but I was certainly familiar with the name Richard Rorty. Arguably the most prominent enfant terrible of the academic philosophic establishment from the 1980s until his death in 2007, Rorty was celebrated and reviled for his abandonment of epistemology-centered philosophy; philosophy, that is, with the central purpose of discovering big-T Truth.

    Most often considered a neo-pragmatist, Rorty turned away from his Chicago-school analytic training—quite the betrayal at the time—and toward a reexamination (and recovery) of thinkers like James and John Dewey. He found resonances between these American pragmatists and continental philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. “It is as if Rorty decided to mix apples, oranges, and nuts,” writes Kolenda in Philosophy’s Journey, “But…Rorty knew what he was doing.” Explaining further in his 1990 book Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism Kolenda writes that

The claim that it is the philosopher’s job to uncover the Truth about the Secret is the main target of Rorty’s criticism. Leaning on other thinkers preceding him, he points to the confusions underlying attempts to discover the foundations of all knowledge….He claims that…the entire Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant was motivated by this incoherently incoherent project…

The work of an ambitious man, surely. Rorty could be sardonic as when describing his escape from under the “collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about” and also unironically hopeful (“My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” The casual “pretty much” is typical of a philosopher whose prose, like his philosophy, bristles with the everyday. A rich correspondence, I imagined, awaited me: a trove of letters stuffed in some dusty old box stuffed in the corner of some old basement stuffed, as it were, in the Woodson archives of Rice University. I could already see the headline: BRILLIANT YOUNG SCHOLAR DISCOVERS UNKNOWN RORTY LETTERS NEW INSIGHTS PENDING DOZENS OF RORTY SCHOLARS EAGERLY AWAIT PUBLICATION. No ink would be spared.  I joked as much to myself, and yet I think a part of me took the idea seriously, the idea of finding something of vital interest in the letters between these philosophers—both prolific, one famous: was the other terribly overlooked?

    I’m not sure what I expected, but archives are both extraordinary and mundane. I found myself in the Woodson Center in a room of glass, carpet, and fluorescent lighting where two boxes were waiting for me on a cart near a large table. The Center’s archivists are wonderfully trusting, letting you handle most materials by yourself which is not always the case. The first boxes I had requested were chosen simply because I had seen names I liked: Richard Rorty, William James, Middlemarch. The latter two were folders with stacked loose pages of written notes, most scrawled in a barely legible hand. I skimmed through but decided to go to the Rorty letters instead. The folder, a slice of papers neatly slid (not stuffed) in a clean cardboard box, was disappointingly slim. And yet it wasn’t nothing, and my disappointment melted away as soon as I saw the penned signature at the bottom of the first typed letter: “All the best, Dick.” I always suspected Rorty to have been cuddlier than his philosopher persona—the casual “Dick” only encouraged me.

    The letters were typed, which was a relief. Unlike other folders of correspondence I later looked through, the Rorty folder had copies letters Kolenda had written and sent himself. Was this correspondence more important to keep intact? Did it mean more to him? The letters were in no particular order so I first had to spend time rearranging them from earliest to most recent. In doing so I was made more aware that I had no idea if I actually had the entirety of the correspondence, most of the correspondence, or only a sliver—I’d have to work with what I had. The first letter was dated 9 May 1983, and it was brief. But my eyes were drawn to the second paragraph under the greeting which had begun “Dear Konnie”:

It is nice of you to see me as a rejuvenator of philosophy, but I am not sure enough about whether there is such a thing to be sure of whether it ought to be rejuvenated. You are right in suggesting that I would prefer to regard myself as an intellectual, but not “just” an intellectual. As far as I can see, being an intellectual is about as far as one can go.

In 1983 Rorty would have been on the rise, but still quite controversial (not that he ever wasn’t controversial). My archival subject was an early admirer of the post-analytic Rorty it seemed. Kolenda replied that he was “exhilarated” by Rorty’s work and would be “reading as much of your stuff as I can lay my hands on.” Rorty writes that he was “very flattered” that Kolenda thought “[his] stuff worth working on.”

    The letters weren’t quite as deeply philosophical as I had expected. They talked about attending conferences, and about what the other was working on, like Kolenda’s Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism or Contingency, irony, and solidarity which was in the works in 1987-88. Kolenda had, in fact, offered editorial advice and is eventually acknowledged by Rorty in the book’s preface for “suggest[ing] a crucial rearrangement of topics.” Reading the letters though, my focus was on Rorty, since I assumed he would be the more interesting subject for my project—Kolenda was just a way in. But a letter caught my attention; it was in the Rorty file, but the sender instead was an Oxford publishing company called Basil Blackwell. Dated 18 January 1988 it began “Dear Professor Kolenda”:

I now have heard from our advisor about your proposal for the book on Richard Rorty. While the report is prefaced by a note to me saying that he thinks that the work is in fact very impressive both his and my feeling is that we oughtn’t to be publishing two books on Rorty in such a short time. As I think I mentioned in my last letter we’ve already contracted a book called Reading Rorty (a collection of essays about Rorty’s work and influence). Regretfully, therefore, we shall not be able to make you an offer for your book.

The sender assured they were “very sorry” for the “cautious response since I would have enjoyed working with you on the book.” This afterthought of an apology felt a bit cheap and insincere even if it wasn’t. Maybe this kind of vaguely saccharine rejection was a common occurrence for publishing academics, but I felt disappointed for Kolenda. Why couldn’t two books on Rorty be published?

    It was my first palpable response to Kolenda that had little to do with Rorty, and I think I felt a weird guilt at accessing Kolenda’s papers for a reason that had little to do with the work he had done over a lifetime, a life and work that could somehow be reduced to a dozen or so boxes of letters, and papers, and pictures, and manuscripts, and old date books. His papers had been given with the assumption that they would be of interest, that he was of interest, and that his intellectual work had been for something even if I had never before heard his name. Like finding a bleeding man on the sidewalk, I couldn’t in good conscience keep walking by. I was here, had chosen to be here; here to look, and respond, and (maybe) do something even if that just meant taking some time to read what he’d written, and taking too a good look at a life I had previously had nothing to do with. I would leave Rorty for another time. I turned to other boxes to begin answering a question I hadn’t yet asked: who was Konstantin Kolenda?

---

[1] In “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” James clarifies what he means by “positive connexion[s]”: “…Suppose there are two different philosophical definitions, or propositions, or maxims, or what not, which seem to contradict each other, and about which men dispute. If, by supposing the truth of the one, you can forsee no conceivable practical consequence to anybody at any time or place, which is different from what you would foresee if you supposed the truth of the other, why then the difference between the two propositions is no difference,--it is only a specious and verbal difference, unworthy of further contention.” We might think here of the dilemma of free will. Do we have free will, or are we blown about by the whims and drives of our own biology? The question itself is problematic, presupposing an intact “I” that either owns or is owned by the I’s body. Whether or not I really choose to eat a slice of pie, for example, or am instead driven by various physiological and environmental factors to eat pie, I’ll still either eat the pie or not eat the pie. Nothing else of practical significance is at stake for the moment.