What did I read (and finish and record) in 2016?

Jan 5.  The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood.
Jan 9.  Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Jan 14. A Thousand Naked Strangers, Kevin Hazzard
Jan 25. The Taming of a Shrew, Shakespeare
Feb. 2 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Feb. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Mar. 6  The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
June 3 The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
June 20 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
June 26 Euphoria, Lily King
June 26 The Flick, Annie Baker
July 8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
July 10 The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
Sept 3 The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (781 dense pages)
Oct 11 The Man of Property, vol 1 Forsyte Sage, John Galsworthy
Oct 28 Silas Marner, George Eliot
Nov 2 The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

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."

Notes on Nietzsche

Just re-reading my old notes on Nietzsche.

Tuesday October 7th, 2014

My Presentation on "On Truth hand Lying in a Non Moral Sense"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--Revaluation of all values

--Philosophy with a hammer. A tuning fork. Sounding out what doesn't ring true.

---Use Epigrams from Twilight of the Idols

15: "Posthumous human beings--like me, for example--are understood worse than timely ones, but they are listened to better. More accurately: we are never understood--and that's the source of our authority…

26: I distrust all systematizers and stay out of their way. The will to  a system is a lack of integrity.

Did he read Whitman? Or viceversa: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

----"Judgements, value judgments about life, for or against, can in the final analysis never be true they have value only as symptoms….the value of life cannot be assessed.

Idol #1: SOCRATES: Poor Socrates. Nietzsche thinks he's absolute shit! Nietzsche has a taste for the preSocratics as we noticed last reading. Greek philosophy before Socrates didn't infect it with his dialectics ie an investigation of truths in philosophy etc. by systematic reasoning.

"Socrates was the clown who got people to take him seriously: what really happened there?--" aka WTF Socrates?! (Twilight, 14)

Read about Socrates Section 11 and 12

"Reason" in language: oh, what a tricky old woman she is! I'm afraid we're not rid of God because we still believe in grammar…  (Twilight 21)

On Truth and Lying in a Non Moral Sense

--a touchstone for 20th century Deconstruction/Poststructuralism. Really for anyone ever who wondered if language and reality don't quite line up. Always a bit of ambiguity.

--Perhaps this is philosophical skepticism (Kant or Descartes. But even earlier pre Socratics like Pyrrho and Eastern philosophy.

--Truth as a comfortable lie.

--We the "clever animals [who] invented cognition"

--Human on earth "the most arrogant and most mendacious minute in the 'history of the world;"

-There have been ETERNITIES where the human intellect did not exist! Actually quite a humble philosophy. PULL DOWN THY VANITY via Pound

--The ideological target of this essay: the western commitment to seek fixed and solid truths. We are always under the influence of our own subjectivity, "truth" as such can never be found.

--"…[T]he intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the entire world revolved." (874)

--illusion  as dream influences Freud (875)

--We only like pretty truth, pleasant truth

You want the truth?! You can't HANDle the truth!! We're not ready to let go of illusions. Truth could be painful. "If they will not content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty husks, they will for ever exhange illusions for truth."

--"Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?"

--Pure truth/"the thing in itself" is both impossible for language to grasp, but also undesirable. You don't even know you don't want it.

--Concepts are made by dropping what is individual and real. Plato's forms one of the earliest concepts in western philosophy.

"Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an 'x' which is inaccesible to us and indefinable by us." (878)

Emerson's influence on Nietzsche: "All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not."

Philosophy as a calling forth to find out who this thing you call yourself really is.

I think I have always found Nietzsche fun to read, as do many intelligent people (I think Kaufmann said this). You get that picture of the 15 year old with bad skin and no friends who reads Nietzsche for the first time and is like: Yes! Everything is stupid, and I have realized it and am now going to be cool and ironic about everything. I see the void now, no one else is authentically living. He’s been labeled a nihilist by people who haven’t read him. The great thing about his author’s not in Birth of Tragedy is that he realizes his own folly, as a kind of juvenile philosopher. It’s early work. He was too broody! That he learned to laugh in his later work is what is fun to read. I was thinking about your question Tim, would you rather be a nihilist or a hypocrite. Now my reading--you can correct all of this in just a sec if I’ve bungled it all--but my sense isn’t nihilism at all, or anyway it must be a qualified nihilism. Why did he hate Christianity. Because Christians are nihilists. Christians have seen this world and given up on it. They see it fallen and evil, and dismiss it for the real world to come. They don’t trust the senses anymore. The senses are all fallen, all subject to the devil in a way. They’ve lost human will. This is what he calls nihilism. He’s a hypocrite, but he revels in being a hypocrite because he can’t not be, and so to admit being a hypocrite is in some convoluted way to get out of it if only for a second or two. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Nietzsche contradicts himself. I think a great way to understand his affinity for Emerson. Emerson understood that the Self is under constant, neverending revision. That the books you love today will not be the books you love tomorrow. That what you say today will be different tomorrow and this is what it means to philosophize. To try to find out what is the thing you call yourself. Philosophy with a tuning fork--sound out the discord.

Interview #1

I wrote this little piece after graduating college in 2013. Obviously I was frustrated with the idea that I would need "practical skills." I now find myself standing a bit more in line with the interviewer voice, rather than the interviewee. Funny how we change. I still like that idealism though.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




-- Hello. I would like to apply for a position.

-- You have a degree.

-- I have a degree.

-- Give me applicable skills: _________________

-- Certainly. In spades: Exploring the human condition as expressed through language: the written word.

Better: Identifying and articulating underlying philosophical assumptions in a piece of writing. Deconstruction ala Derrida. Ala Nietzsche.

-- No no no. I mean concrete/practical/applicable/useable skills. I mean give me something identifiable.

Useful. Tell me the life skills you have acquired though your education. You have a degree. Where are the internships. Where is the networking. Give me networking. Give me names give me places.

-- I have a thesis.

-- You have a thesis.

-- I read and researched and wrote. And so I have a clever title and a passionately argued central vision.

-- Thesis schmeesis.

-- An original piece of research on the power of imaginative sympathy in modern environmentalism. I pushed these ideas until 3 am even. I worked very hard. There is a brilliant turn on page 14.

-- Who read the thesis? Who will ever read the thesis. Did anyone read the thesis.

-- . . .

-- No one read the thesis. The thesis does not matter. Give me applicable skills:________________

-- . . .

-- Can you work a copy machine?

-- I graduated with Honors. I have an even better than solid GPA.

-- Are you comfortable on a Mac or PC? Are you at home in Microsoft Office more specifically can you format spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel?

-- . . .

-- Wake up. Head out of the clouds. Come on down. What was your education for?

-- To ask questions.

-- Question: Can you give me applicable skills?:_______________

-- What does it mean to be human?

-- Can you come in on weekends? Are you willing to work the occasional Sunday?

-- Is there an objective reality outside of subjective perception, or is reality subjective perception itself?

-- Are you familiar with Prezi or are you more comfortable with Power Point.

-- And so can we live happy, purposeful lives even after dismissing free will? Do we have to dismiss free will?

-- Let us be honest.

-- I can do that.

-- No no no. Who are you kidding. Honestly. What is your plan. Where are you purposefully headed in the next five years. Where do you see yourself. Imaginatively speaking.

-- I will work hard.

-- You have debt. You have little experience and not very little debt. Write a thesis on how you will pay your debt.

-- I will pay my debt.

-- How.

-- I will get a job. I will use my skills.

-- Give me applicable skills:____________

-- . . .

MLA 2017, Hopefully My First Panel in January

Panel Title: Pragmatism and Beyond: William James and the Aesthetics of Realist and Modernist Fiction

Panel Description

In concert with an initiative by the William James Society to broaden scholarly interest in the work of William James, this panel will examine James relationship to fiction. It brings together scholars whose approaches to James extend from, and also redirect, recent threads in literary scholarship concentrating on James' pragmatism within American poetics. 

James has long had an outsized influence beyond the fields of philosophy and psychology. A touchstone for our work is the recently co-edited publication by Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Ramussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (2014). Since only one chapter in the collection discusses James’ relation to literature, we see our panel addressing a similar transatlantic audience but opening new intersections between James and literary studies. 

Within literary studies, our panel will be distinguished by extending and transforming two of the central conversations most often associated with James, modernism and pragmatism. The former site resonates as a traditional location to find James in conversation with questions of aesthetics, as in Ross Posnack’s The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991) and Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007). More recently, scholarly threads tracing pragmatism as an influential discourse of American writing and literature include Joan Richardson’s Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (2014) and her A Natural History of Pragmatism (2006). 

Our panel will push these conversations in new directions, in part by extending them beyond the James-pragmatism-modernism-poetics nexus. We take up a range of James' texts, and consider his relationship to both realism and modernism, including lines of influence between James' philosophy and authors such as William Dean Howells, George Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Furthermore, we examine the novel, not poetry, as our primary textual object. Dr. Blyn’s paper makes important interventions into contemporary conversations on literature, affect, and neurology. Furthermore, by treating literary objects themselves as works of speculative psychology and philosophy coeval with James, the panel inverts assumptions about what’s “literature” and what’s “philosophy.” Given our concerns, we believe the panel will appeal to diverse audiences for the 2017 Convention.

We’ll begin with Laura Bilhimer’s paper, which draws in part upon James’ essay “Blindness in Human Beings” in addition to Pragmatism. In a twist, she takes seriously the idea that, as Rebecca West put it, James wrote philosophy “as though it were fiction.” With James’ admission that Eliot’s Middlemarch was “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written,” she contends that Eliot’s major fictive works were important influences in James’ pragmatist ethics. Drawing on examples from Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, she reads Eliot’s major social novels beside James’ post-representational philosophy of pragmatism. In doing so, Bilhimer inverts the norm of reading James in order to explicate or contextualize a literary object. In claiming the protagonists of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are “pragmatic,” she asserts that they, like James, struggle to live meaningfully after the abandonment of grounded knowledge: they struggle in concrete ways to be moral, useful, and empathetic to others.

Following Bilhimer, Dr. Todd Barosky will examine James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience from the perspective of an earlier moment in the nineteenth century. Premised upon how James locates the origins of religion in the ways human consciousness achieves “a sense of reality” that transcends ordinary sensory experience, Dr. Barosky argues that, for James, religion manifests as an aesthetic problem before it becomes an object of study for the psychologist. Working out the notion that aesthetic forms might bear traces of religious experiences, Dr. Barosky tests the idea against a literary form often defined by its repudiation of religion as a source of aesthetic inspiration: the nineteenth-century realist novel. Building on recent work by Gregory Jackson, who in The Word and Its Witness (2009) seeks to recover the spiritual dimensions of American realism, Dr. Barosky turns to William Dean Howells' novels Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, which Howells composed after suffering an acute spiritual crisis. Dr. Barosky contends they’re shaped by, in James’ words, “a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” He argues that this “unseen order” manifests itself in the temporality of Howells’ narratives, which situate the dense materiality of the present within a providential historicity that figures moments of individual purgation as a prophecy of social regeneration. 

Dr. Robin Blyn’s paper inquires into the ways Gertrude Stein’s novella Melanctha critically adapts James’ neurological redefinition of feeling in Principles of Psychology. James suggests here that feeling does not have a content, but is rather a technology that potentiates new patterns of thought through its apprehension of relations. It’s a process James finds difficult to explain, and Dr. Byln argues that Stein’s Melanctha finds a grammar and language that approximates those Jamesian feelings of relation that allow thought to take place. Reading Stein’s neural aesthetic alongside James’ Principles, she argues that education itself hinges on the process by which feeling opens pathways to the apprehension of the new. Her paper necessarily intervenes in contemporary debates in affect studies, shifting attention away from the James-Lange theory to sites in The Principles of Psychology. There, building on the emergent science of neurology, James offers a description of the work of feeling as a precognitive operation that predisposes the mind to thought. Dr. Blyn argues, however, that when Stein appropriates this view she reveals a more complex feedback loop between feeling and thought. While feeling continues to facilitate a predisposition to new thoughts and ideas, it does so by re-contextualizing what the subject already knows. As Stein appropriates James's view of language, Stein invents a neural aesthetics that, as Ezra Pound enjoined, "takes the language and makes it new."

Our respondent, Dr. Kristen Case, is an established scholar of James with expertise in pragmatism and American poetics. She will act as an interlocutor between poetics and fiction, and spark conversation about James’ overall relation to literary study.

Panel Bios

LAURA BILHIMER is currently a doctoral student in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She earned her Bachelor’s degree with Honors at the University of Kansas. She is particularly interested in the nineteenth century social novel and its reception within the American literary and intellectual scene, with a specific interest in addressing the implications of Eliot and James’ work both within and beyond academic contexts.

TODD BAROSKY is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, where he teaches writing and American literature. His work has appeared in the journal Early American Literature, and he is currently working on a project that reassesses the influence of Christian mysticism on nineteenth-century American realism.

ROBIN BLYN is Professor of English at the University of West Florida. She has published widely on twentieth century and contemporary literature and culture in a variety of journals, including Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Narrative. Her first book, Freak-garde: Extraordinary Bodies and Revolutionary Art in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the connections between avant-garde art practices in the U.S., the history of American capitalism, and liberal subjectivity. She is working on two book projects, one which investigates the relationship between neoliberalism and network aesthetics and another that explores the theory and art of anarchism in the U.S.

KRISTEN CASE teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington. She is the author of the critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House 2011) and Little Arias (New Issues, 2015), a book of poems. She is co-editor of Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has also published work (or has work forthcoming) on Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James, including a chapter in the forthcoming book Understanding James, Understanding Modernism. 

JUSTIN ROGERS-COOPER is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, where also he teaches in the Urban Studies program. His work has appeared in Mediations and International Labor and Working-Class Studies. He has forthcoming pieces in The Canadian Review of American Studies, as well as a forthcoming chapter on the intersections between the late nineteenth century novel and representations of contagion and affect. He is also the liaison for the William James Society in its efforts to expand scholarly conversation around James into new literary fields.

The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) is a multidisciplinary professional society that supports the study of the life and work of William James (1842-1910) and his ongoing influence in the many fields to which he contributed. We are currently interested in expanding the society’s engagement with disciplinary fields beyond philosophy and psychology. It’s hoped that the MLA panel may anchor a special issue of the peer-reviewed, online journal William James Studies. 

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.