Hello! Thank you to all readers! I’m moving forward again, picking up where I left off, which is at the end of a section on William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. I’ll start a new chapter next week.
⩩ 32
What does it mean to know something? Relatedly, how do we learn something? How do we teach it? These questions have been fuel to these experiments from the start, and I have tried on the view that knowledge is done. My teacher does not give his lesson in words, but in transparent deeds.
Connected with this is the importance of examples, where William James again offers an excellent case study. What a taste this guy has for examples! He says he has “loaded the lectures with concrete examples,” and that’s true, even if it’s an understatement. My binding is breaking, this book is so bulgingly stuffed of them. When I pick it up by the wrong side they slip out and feather the floor.
Though it might appear accidental, James’ unusual appetite for examples is not accidental. It leads straight into the heart of the book, to its most basic and most original contention. This is that reality is personal, and that we are more real the more personally we take it.
The belief that something must be visible and shared to be real is pretty well built into us. In recent centuries science has impressed us with the utility of approaching nature with the categories position, weight, velocity: the categories of bodies. It has taught us that reality is objective, that it should be understood mechanistically. In itself, the world is colorless, impersonal, indifferent.
But deeper than that is the fact that we are social animals and need verification. We need confirmation from others. When I was recently reading a book with a couple preschoolers and a few more ran over to join us, I noticed the arrivals and welcomed one or two of the oncoming group by name, and another called out energetically, “I’m here too!” I shivered, because he spoke to me as the human social drive incarnate.
Or consider a child who demands of a grownup, “look, look!” with his arm outstretched. Read his body language. His hand points, but the child himself doesn’t look where he is pointing. He looks at the face of the adult whose attention he requests, and requires. Only when his gaze is matched, only when his vision is doubled will he return to his discovery or invention. We must be doubled. We need confirmation.
In adulthood the requests don’t become less prevalent or urgent, only more subtle and variously expressed. “Look, look! Look at me!” or more truly look with me, look at what I’ve seen, or found, or experienced. We can’t rest until they see it too, because it is not real until it is confirmed.
In the opposite way, what is unconfirmed is unreal. Everyone has noticed that it is difficult to assign reality to what resists confirmation by others. It is a challenge simply to maintain a grip on, to remember, let alone to account for or act on. It is lost and forgotten, and our sense of reality contracts to what is most easily shared and confirmed: arrangements of physical objects, facts about weights and sizes, commonalities.
The premise is that only what is shared and public and objective is real, and James goes the other way. He argues that any objective fact is a fraction, an abstraction. The whole it is a part of consists in the fact, plus the person perceiving it, plus the person’s ongoing sense of self: their changing feelings, their underlying history and developing plans, their sense of the own destiny — all of which is necessarily to some degree private and personal, but not, James argues, for that reason less real.
As long as we deal with the “cosmic and general,” James says, “we deal only with symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.” Facts are abstractions, but the private and personal issues that are alive to you are part of the very fabric of reality. Rather than a rejection of empirical science, this is better thought of as expansion of it, one that hints what James would eventual call “radical empiricism.” Nonetheless, the difference between this attitude and our everyday social attitude, let alone scientific practice or Platonism, can’t be overstated.
We easily fixate on general descriptions as the truth, but reality is deeper than that. It is not described but enacted, and therefore personal. Emerson circles the same point in his essay, “Character.” He writes, “Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? if none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.” You see how this sits opposite the need for social confirmation.
The whole idea of the personality of reality in thinkers like Emerson and James flows, I believe, from the primacy of action. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another. Our situation is the latter. We act and action is situated. It deals with particulars, instances, examples. This is why I admire James’ example, including his heroism.
This returns us to the idea of fruit, because what is the first thing anyone knows about fruit? That we eat it, that it tastes good, if it’s good fruit, and that it nourishes us too. Fruit is not to be described only but to be tasted, appraised, judged: ripe or unripe, fresh or rotten, trick or treat. A fruit meets our needs and wishes, and is judged helpful or useless or harmful. We judge its worth, both in the total economy of human life and for ourselves individually.
Description, in other words, is good so far as it goes. But it only goes so far. We are really, ultimately, actors — not describers, not observers, as the present scientific stance casts us. It is as actors, situated, concrete, personal actors, that we catch truth in the making. A fact is to a person as a description is to an example.
Set free from the task of description, in any given case, we have to answer what is to be done. It remains for us to add it all up, to judge and act on our judgment. To provide an example.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 32, the ninth 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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