Footnotes is a series of essays that build on each other. This is the eighth installment in a chapter on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.
⩩ 31
Anger is decisive. Critical in decision-making, in overcoming inhibitions. In getting courage. Anger is a door, a pathway to the heroic. What is “the heroic”? Do we need it – an idea of the heroic? I believe we do.
From the beginning my obsession with James has sprung from his interest in and answer to the question: what makes people willing to live?
Using concepts I learned from him, to live is to take interest, and to take interest is to experience joy, at least a preview of it, the promise of it. But interests are jealous, selective, exclusive. To pursue one thing means to neglect the other, to leave behind the rest, to become indifferent to them. Dead to them. But this we do not accept. We cannot, we will not accept it. Why should we? This is madness.
I believe choice between interests in general is mad — hence our love of conversation, where ideas are investigated, imagined, considered, and not realized, where all questions are open and nothing is decided. But we are real, and act and choose, and there is a specific kind of the dilemma we need to consider: when what you have to do is dangerous.
Doing what you are called to do always conflicts with your other interests. It requires giving up your comfort, safety, sometimes physical but more often social. In these cases, it requires social risk, meaning humiliation, isolation, social death. You wouldn’t perceive it as an obligation if it didn’t.
Here finally we see the meaning of "the heroic.” The heroic accepts pain and wrong and death. Not looking away from them, it runs toward them and embraces them. It feeds on them, thereby accepting the tragedy of life, not madly, in a fit of insensibility, but with higher good sense. Seeing danger, it would rather avoid it, but accepts it nonetheless, — and the whole mystery of courage and the heroic is wrapped up in this “nonetheless.”
The hero has figured herself out; she has become decided; she knows her ultimate purpose. While sacrificing her own lower interests and seeing them sacrificed, she says “this is truly to live, and I exult in the opportunity and adventure.”
In Varieties there’s one example of the heroic that I like best, and that’s one given by James himself. It comes in the first two paragraphs of the book, at the start of the first lecture — the book is made up of a series of lectures James delivered at the University of Edinburgh, the well-known Gifford Lectures.
He begins his first lecture by commenting on his hesitation to deliver the series at all. He says, “It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk, and face this learned audience.” James describes a youthful admiration for the stage he now inhabits. Professors who occupied the chair of philosophy at Edinburgh had written the first philosophy books he read as a boy, and actively studied as a young man. They impressed and awed him. He makes clear that, on contemplating entering the scene now himself, his impulse to flee, to cower, to hide. “Such juvenile emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a colleague of these illustrious names, carries with it a sense of dreamland quite as much as of reality.”
“But since I have received the honor of this appointment,” he goes on, “I have felt it would never do to decline. The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words.” It doesn’t matter how big or small the stage; the soul always rejoices when it stumbles across such sentiments, when it rediscovers its heroic resources. It receives a thrill wherever it finds this pivot: fear, death, ‘no,’ swallowed up and overcome by an encompassing ‘yes.’
And then there’s his justification. There’s his idea, his assertion that “the academic career also has its heroic obligations.” “Also”! The academic career “also”! What is the meaning of this “also”? And who knew that the academic career might have heroic obligations? Even the academic career. Who believes this today? Who acts this way? I don’t think this is said or done often enough.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 31, the eighth installment in a chapter on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Fruits for life
⩩ 26 Interest
⩩ 24 Fruits for life
Retreat
⩩ 21 Review
⩩ 19 Storytelling
⩩ 17 Retreat
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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