Tenui musam metitamur avena

Or, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." Ref. in Richardson's biography of William James, p.59. Coined by Sydney Smith, a founding editor of The Edinburgh Review. 

From Richardson:

"Smith was an ardent believer in the association of ideas, in the notion, first given its full form by David Hartley, that "complex mental phenomena are formed from simple elements derived ultimately from sensation." The belief that everything mental has a physical explanation and origin--one of the rocks on which positivism is built--is put forward by Smith by way of an attack on metaphysics, " word of dire sound and horrible import," says Smith. "A great philosopher," he says, "may sit in his study and deny the existence of matter: but if he takes a walk in the street he must take care to leave his theory behind him."

Isn’t it Obvious?: Review, Sopia Rosenfeld’s Common Sense

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot…

Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

I walked into this class the other week, and so into a conversation. A few of my classmates, undergraduates, were enjoying their own bewilderment over the recent Donald Trump phenomenon. One of these bright young people had run into an unapologetic and—weirder still—an equally unironic Trump supporter. “I can’t believe he was serious,” my memory recalls this classmate saying. “How could anyone be so stupid?” was the unvoiced question. It’s common sense to my classmate that Trump is a fraud, a bully, disingenuous, privileged, a sexist, a racist. You’ve only to turn on the television and watch—no spin room necessary. It doesn’t take a Rice University education to figure this out.

   “Why dwell on the obvious?” This is the apparently unobvious question Sophia Rosenfeld takes up in her 2011 study, pragmatically and playfully titled Common Sense. Common sense isn’t really, wouldn’t you know it, just a matter of common sense after all. In proving her point Rosenfeld reaches all the way back to Aristotle, tracing the concept through the Renaissance, into its seventeenth and eighteenth century British, French, and Dutch variations, through revolutionary America (particularly with Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet), revolutionary France, and into modern political discourse. Common sense, Rosenfeld suggests, flourishes in, as they say, interesting times. As Rosenfeld puts it,

…common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself. (15)

A rhetoric of normalcy to ballast an otherwise listing ship of state—Rosenfeld sees that rather than righting us, that rhetorical bulk will right us right to the ocean floor.

   Rosenfeld’s study comes as in a tradition of complicating common sense (a touchstone study might be Clifford Geertz’s “Common Sense as a Cultural System”). Really the whole of academic endeavor is dedicated to complicating the obvious. No one dreads like the scholar dreads the mild words which could ultimately sound the death knell of one’s work: “Not bad. A bit obvious though, isn’t it?” And so we might see Rosenfeld eyeing rather an easy target. In fact her book turns on itself in a wonderful way: it’s really quite obvious that “the obvious” really isn’t that obvious after all. This is almost common sense, except unfortunately (according to Rosenfeld) it must not be, and so she had to write a book about it published by Harvard University Press.

   Common sense began in the body. It made us human, this super sense, this “koine aesthesis.” For Aristotle, common sense was a yoke for our other sensory faculties “comparing and coordinating the impressions received by [the rest of the senses]…and thus…allowing minimal judgments about sense objects to occur independent of reason” (18). An organizer and adjudicator. Historically its location has moved around: sometimes in the head and sometimes in the heart. But then something changed. Descartes, in fact, happened. Because he needed to get away from the body, Descartes took this super sense out of the body and altogether out of physicality. Rosenfeld writes that Descartes’s “mechanistic account of the body and brain, and his desire to root knowledge firmly in cognition rather than in sensation, rendered unnecessary the common sense as a specific, locatable mental faculty” (21).

   We’re coming closer to common sense as the wisdom of the ordinary. After Descartes, “[t]he watered-down Aristotelian notion of a common sense faculty merged…with the old Roman conception of sensus communis: the shared, though generally tacit, values and beliefs of a community” (22). Politicized common sense becomes a regulatory tool of the state. It could be rhetorically deployed to discourage ideological eccentricity; a tool, then, “in the creation of a noncombative common culture” (30). Common sense as common taste—not merely obvious, but shared, it could help maintain political stability (or political homeostasis). But Descartes would be, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, more a symptom than a problem. The ideological backdrop to her argument seems to be the threatening (and near constant) rise of skepticism. But Descartes’s answer to “How do we know anything?” and, really, “What makes things real?” simply didn’t take; not long after his 1637 settlement with epistemological skepticism, his cogito, his answer to the question of uncertainty, began to wear a bit thin. The problem of the era seemed to be “How do we live without certainty?”

   The drive towards common sense is, then, the flight from uncertainty. Rosenfeld’s history next takes us to Britain and the Scottish Common Sense school. David Hume was a particularly dangerous gadfly for eighteenth century anti-skeptics like James Beattie and Thomas Reid; Reid the founder of a rather self-congratulatory group called “The Wise Club.” These Scots of common sense were creating a new philosophy somewhere between Descartes and Locke. Rosenfeld calls Reid’s common sense “an amorphous set of basic judgments or propositions, evident in the common language in which it is entrenched, to which all sane adult people, anywhere, anytime, must subscribe” (72). Reid might have found a hero in Othello who also needed to know that he could trust his eyes: “Men should be what they seem.” Give me proof! Unfortunately, it is Iago rather than Othello still breathing at the end of that tragedy.

   So there came a taste for doubting in the wake of the Renaissance, and a counter rhetoric rose to combat the resultant epistemological anxiety. This seems obvious. But Rosenfeld is at her best when investigating the “radical” uses of common sense in Holland and France in the late eighteenth century. Eventually important to Holland, the early to mid-seventeenth century French le bon sens was “the very obverse of the kind of reasoning that formed the backdrop to the common sense philosophy of the Scots” (103). Le bon sens, or “good sense,” was the subversive French counterpart to British regulatory common sense. If British common sense loved its doxa, French le bon sens reveled in paradox. As with everything in France, this discourse eventually got classed. Rosenfeld points to the rise of “the philosophe” in this new “war over representation” (134). The other combatant? Common Sense de jour:

The philosophe, in other words, routinely chose unsettling language games over restoring the direct and long-established correspondence between words and things. His love of contradictions, like his refusal to follow either established authorities or the consensus gentium, pushed society in two directions: toward a generalized doubt about all that should be certain and toward the espousal of dangerous new absurdities under the banner of truth. (134)

We still find this formulation in variant forms of what we call “the culture wars,” often categorized by level of education, religion, geography etc. The Overeducated Coastal Snob (who knows quite a lot about very little) and the Ignorant Quasi-Bigoted Midwesterner, to make one generalized colorful example.

   Of course if Tocqueville’s observation in 1835 that “in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” has any merit, French le bon sens likely never took much hold in America. Rosenfeld goes into great detail about American and French Revolutionary forms of common sense, but her most interesting thesis is that “in the radical Whig rhetoric of revolutionary Pennsylvania, we can locate the apotheosis of a brand-new and decidedly modern form of political legitimation known as populism” (167). Ours is a particularly provocative climate in which to be reading of the inchoate roots of populism. Rosenfeld continues, asserting that in Philadelphia was initiated a “style and form of politics that depended upon wrapping itself in the moral and epistemological notion of the collective common sense of common men more than any economic argument” (167). Her dismissal of the centrality of an “economic argument” is quite provocative and, the reviewer admits, not entirely convincing. She takes this interpretation as evidenced by a one-page pamphlet written by James Cannon in 1776; what he did “in a few short strokes,” Rosenfeld argues, “was turn a concept long associated with a plainspoken, pragmatic, anti-aristocratic, and anti-expert way of seeing the world—that is, common sense—into an ideal foundation for a new, and distinctly American, political order” (167).

   It’s a well formulated argument—smart and neat. If we distill the book down to one sentence it might just be: Ideas matter, and few would argue with that. But there’s something telling about the concluding chapter wherein Rosenfeld claims the common sense playbook, this anti-expert, anti-thinking rhetorical toolbox, as “increasingly the province of the right” (255). Palin, Huckabee, Beck, and The Great Communicator himself Ronald Reagan began “a second American afterlife” to common sense politics. This isn’t to undercut the value of Rosenfeld’s book which I found interesting, intelligent, and clarifying. But the problem connects for me to the conversation I sketched at the beginning of this review essay.

   Rosenfeld betrays, at times, the frustrations of the bewildered, beleaguered intellectual. So anxious about the cult of an American unthinking public, Rosenfeld has had to write a book ripping down the façade of the greatest rhetorical weapon of the “common sense conservative” —a book that will likely only be read by people already interested in why common sense isn’t a matter of common sense at all. Common sense is everywhere. Everyone uses it for divers purposes. Donald Trump has in fact said “I’m a common sense conservative,” but the political Left uses it with “common sense gun solutions” all the time. And most people realize that common sense is a rhetorical weapon of political whimsy; and most people don’t need to read Tristan Tzara and Pierre Bourdieu to figure this out. Thus when Rosenfeld closes with the injunction that “[i]t is vital that some individuals in the modern world consciously position themselves outside of the reigning common sense and keep a close eye on the complex and powerful work that it does” we see Rosenfeld waving at us from her self-regulated commonsense-free zone and we can thank her politely and keep on walking because it doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to realize that wherever it’s located, and in spite of ourselves, we’re always bound to fall back on it. This doesn’t make us stupid, but it might make us vote for Donald Trump.

James reading Whitman's "To You" (or Picking Your Way)

last few lines from Whitman's "To You"

The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency;

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulgates itself;

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted;

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

William James, in the last lecture of Pragmatism, pegs "To You" to be "[v]erily a fine and moving poem" and that "there are two ways of taking it, both useful." The first way is to comfort yourself that you are always fine, no matter what life throws at you. The soothing of the self in all its "glories and grandeurs." He calls this reading the "monistic way":

...the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, LIE back, on your true principle of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication.

The second approach to the poem, though, is less easy but also...well, its got more calories. Instead of telling the reader to take comfort and lie down, this reading urges--urges to keep going, keep moving, to take action and make the effort; to be humble too, and to "accept your poor life," and yet to keep on picking your way through the brambles along the path you continue to make of your life:

But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glory's partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.

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.

Kolenda Peek

Prelude: A Telegram

He would later say that “[w]e experience death too much” (). And so to this young philosopher the Western Union telegram looked like any other; looked, indeed, not unlike one very dear to him received just over two years earlier.  But now as he pulled the thin paper from its envelope his [] eyes flicked over his own name, comically misspelled, to the message itself, to the first four staccato beats of the brief violet words that meant so much. He was being told, he realized, that on this Wednesday afternoon of November 2, 1949, Mr. Hill had died:

            MR KONSTANTINE KOLENDER

                                                827 BYRNE ST HOU

            MR HILL DIED THIS AFTERNOON AT GREENVILLE SOUTH CAROLINA

            PLEASE CONTACT PIETER CRAMERUS TELEPHONE JACKSON 8695

                              PIETER

George A. Hill Jr. was fifty-seven years old when a blood clot to the brain stopped his heart almost a thousand miles from home.  It was reported that the stroke was “caused by overwork—a word which friends said was never in George Hill’s vocabulary.”^[1] Konstantin Kolenda would live for another forty-two years until his own heart gave out; but now, twenty-six years old and six months away from taking a bachelor’s degree in a country not yet his own, Konstantin thought he owed this man everything.

---

^[1] Houston Post, “G.A. Hill Jr Dies of Stroke.” 3 November 1949, No. 213. 

Upcoming Project on Konstantin Kolenda

A rather abstract abstract proposal for ACLA Conference in March

(It's at Harvard! i.e. the only reason I'm applying is to gain access to Houghton library's William James papers...)

Thinker, Soldier, Justice, Die: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Pragmatisms of Ending

In 1911, a seventy year old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write that “the best way [to cope with mortality] is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead.” He would live to 93.

In his Introduction to The Essential Holmes Richard Posner writes that “a diverse cast of moderns….have been concerned with the…implications of taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks…” Pragmatism and Existentialism, in Posner’s figuring, stem from identical impulses, pragmatism being “typically American,” and existentialism “typically European.”

As has been observed by such critics as Posner and Louis Menand, pragmatism is both a post Darwinian and a post Civil War philosophy. Holmes, serving in the Union Army for three years, was wounded three times. Thus, as Menand argues, “the war was the central experience of his life.” Consequently, Holmes’s jurisprudential career was largely spent combatting those moral abstractions we might call universal principles or natural laws; such abstractions were, after all,  what called a young Holmes to enlist. But however “horrible and dull,” Holmes also found war necessary “everywhere and at all times.”

What I hope to contribute to this conversation on the interconnectedness between writing and death is an exploration of a particularly American voice of this soldier-philosopher judge. What are, for Holmes, the ends of pragmatic philosophy at the ends of life?

Re-reading the Declaration of Independence

Reflections on the Revolution in Philadelphia

[The Declaration] was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Henry Lee, 1825

…of all the books that no one can write, those about nations and national character are the most impossible.

-Jaques Barzun

    The Declaration of Independence: it’s a strange thing to really look at, for the first time, a thing you’ve seen your whole life. Strange too that my least favorite subject in school was early American History, and Revolutionary History in particular. Powdered wigs, documents and committees, General Washington floating rather chubbily down the Delaware: so bloodless, so boring. Hypocrites to the man, I had thought, slavery into the nineteenth century! Freedom, indeed. Once, though, I remember quite a revolutionary little pleasure of my own: an exercise in argumentation. Sometime around third or fourth grade, my classmates and I were to write Revolutionary pamphlets. As all were at liberty to represent either the British or American interest, all hands shot up for America, the eager little sycophantic would-be patriots. I—a wised-up, bespectacled nine-year-old yet to have heard of, let alone read, Edmund Burke—I puffed out my chest and raised my hand for Britannia. I alone would defend her, squash these upstart insurrectionists, and risk all for noble King George. I would rein in, and reign over, these ungrateful, incipient would-be pamphleteers!

    Though always a quiet student, I enjoyed the assignment immensely, and I think my teacher took a kind of qualified pride in my distressingly unironic enthusiasm for His Majesty’s purely paternal concern for his colonial children. Certainly such enthusiasm stemmed partly from a play of devil’s advocate, and yet I do think I began really to love the regal British red coats, and took sincere pleasure in the arch argumentation of speaking down to these my comrades: entitled, rhetorically inflated, and so woefully misinformed. They were so dreadfully dismissive of those very real institutions which had allowed that infantile entitlement to flourish in the first place. Duty, King, and Country: to dissolve those bands would be folly indeed. And who would be foolhardy enough to take on the British Navy? I got an A—or its elementary school equivalent—and no small degree of ridicule from my more patriotic classmates.

    I give you this anecdote by way of introduction, but also to try to explain to myself how I came to study American letters, and why. Taking leave of my hasty youthful Anglophilia, I find my higher education has largely revolved around a question I keep asking because it seems important, vital even: what, in any real sense, does “America” mean. I think here of Jaques Barzun's observation that the business of writing about a nation is "the most impossible." Academia too often renders questions of nationhood and national style as naïve, uncritical, even empty. The emotion of national pride, as Richard Rorty wrote, has been largely repudiated by the academic left (Rorty 252). Rorty sees the possibility of a richer national pride: Rorty’s patriot may feel humble, even ashamed, but also sincerely proud of her country. We might here recall Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox. Kammen writes of the tricky business of writing about national “style”:

There is both grandeur and pettiness in the so-called American experience. Hence its interpreter must somehow be unambiguous about ambiguities, must see several sides of many questions without being ultimately indecisive in his conclusions. (Kammen xiii)

Like Kammen, I seem to be writing around the problem of writing about America, and thus I also write around the problem of writing about the Declaration.  How does one approach such a document?

    In his brief, punchy biography (or, better, sketch) of Jefferson, Christopher Hitchens argues that “[t]here is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee” (Hitchens 23). But credit ultimately still goes to Jefferson as the Declaration’s author, Hitchens writing that rather than “inventing” or “imagining” America, “[i]t would be truer to say…that he designed America, or that he authored it” (Hitchens 5). Thomas Jefferson thought his government “the world’s best hope,” an institution through which the strength of its people could be channeled. “I believe,” he wrote in his first inaugural address, “[our government] the only one where every man, at the call of the law…would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern” (Jefferson 493). There is blood in these words yet, I think. To understand America, or the American Experiment, we turn to Jefferson; to understand Jefferson we could do worse than to turn to the Declaration.   

    Writing to Henry Lee, a distant relative and a brother Governor of Virginia, an octogenarian Jefferson explains “the object of the Declaration of Independence”:

Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take….[I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  (Jefferson 1501)

Radical but not original. An “expression of the American mind” was still expressed on paper by one American mind in particular. And the contradictions for which Jefferson is often vilified, are the contradictions pointed to in the Declaration as rendering its authors hypocritical and probably insincere. And yet I still shiver at the words: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”; self-evident truths; “all men created are equal”; “inalienable rights”; life and liberty; lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. Liberty, above all, liberty. So where stem the troubles? Staughton Lynd, in his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, identifies one particular tension within the document: “…the latent tension within the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence between an outlook on society based on property and a contrasting perspective built on conscience, or on self-determining human activity, could not long be avoided” (qtd. Kammen 237). We’re talking about, as Kammen points out, the nature of property and we’re also talking about the essence of mankind. Put together, we’re talking about the American ownership, in July of 1776, of a few hundred thousand men, women, and children. People as property.

     Natural rights and universal principles; theoretical beliefs and practical realities. Justice and reality can seldom be held in a single vision. In an 1852 commemorative speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglas would be rather frank to his audience as to just what exactly Independence Day means to the slave in America:

…a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery….There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

    Go where you may, search where you will…for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival. (Douglass 127)

We might picture the scattered applause, and gaping jaws. Still, Douglass addresses his contemporaries more than Jefferson. The Founding Fathers, Douglass writes, were “unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles” (Douglass 121). As much may be said of Jefferson, we do know. Congress cut about a quarter of Jefferson's original draft, the majority of the cut portions decrying slavery, that "execrable commerce" (Jefferson 22). The cuts crucially meant keeping the colonies together--these edits were very practical, probably necessary. He would have had to have been pragmatic, bending idealism down into the confines of  the dire situation at hand. And yet we still, with John Adams, admit pretty bitterly the probable necessity of cutting such language: "[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery" (22). 

    Perhaps slavery was on Jefferson's mind when property became happiness. Though heavily influenced by the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, Jefferson makes a crucial change to this oft-quoted passage in Locke's Second Treatise of Government: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (Locke 9, emphasis original). Our inalienable rights no longer extend to ownership, but to being happy. Douglass wrote that the founding fathers “loved their country better than their own private interests” and perhaps this might help explain, if only a little, why Jefferson continued to own slaves. He held the country’s future to a higher standard; much higher than that to which he could hope to hold himself and his comrades in 1776.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. New York: Norton Critical          Edition, 1997.

Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Harper Perennial,           2009.

Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett Publishing, 1980.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Louis Menand on Pragmatism's Three Moments

This lecture is great. Menand, editor of Pragmatism: A Reader and author of The Metaphysical Club (an incredible book, and excellent as an introduction to American philosophy) is as intelligent and concise as his philosophical subjects. He also importantly points out in this lecture the blind-spots of pragmatism, such that while pragmatism (an idea about ideas) is a great philosophy to take down traditions and dogmatism, it's not great at pushing social movements. Which makes sense, really, when you think about pragmatism's Emersonian inheritance--the emphasis on the individual so strongly endorsed by pragmatism--William James in particular. Civil rights movements, for example, strongly rely upon the notion of universal human rights ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" etc.). 

Idealism relies upon certainty. William James said that "certainty is the root of despair," and his friend the Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. similarly said that certainty led to death. Conflicting certainty about ideals led to, oh I don't know, the Civil War for instance. In this context, Emerson's observations in "Fate" about slaves "crowing about liberty" seem slightly more understandable:

So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act...

Freedom is earned for Emerson by how you think, how you approach the world. It's not so much an ideal state one can attain via some document or legal status, but a process, a way of thinking. Of course, this is rather easy to say when you're not a second-class citizen.

One might go about this in a pragmatist way, but you sometimes need Idealists and dreamers (Martin Luther King Jr. would be one example of a dream, a visionary, a prophet of sorts). I'm still thinking about the problems of pragmatism as a political tool.