|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
Adventures in Philosophy |
 |
|
||
|
|
||||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Select: John Burroughs - George Santayana - Felix Adler - Paul Carus |
|
|
John Burroughs (picture), who was born near Roxbury, New York on April 3, 1837, was an American naturalist and author and a friend to many important men of his day. Characterized as a nature lover, friends of birds and squirrels, scientist and poet in his descriptions of animal and plant life, Burroughs stated that his two greatest sources of inspiration were Emerson, in his youth, and Bergson, in later life. In 1882 he wrote, "With Emerson dead it seems folly to be alive." When Bergson lectured at Columbia University, Burroughs assiduously attended lecture (although he did not understand French), and hailed the French philosopher as "the prophet of the soul" who had opened new vistas to him. Throughout his lifetime, Burroughs longed for the solitude which would allow him to enjoy the "company of one's self." He liked to live in his cabin in the woods and devote himself to "prophets of the soul" and sensory perception. He strove to attain large perspectives, but he also thought that "little things explain great things." This principle directed his observations of nature, which to him epitomized the spirit. He regarded natural objects as spiritual symbols and relished their variety, but maintained that chance does not exist in nature, but that laws dominate even the oddest singularity. He rejected materialism, but declared that "the greatest materialists I know are the spiritualists." He believed in the unity of matter and spirit. A man of action as well as of contemplation, Burroughs was an efficient bank examiner and receiver. Among his steadfast friends, he numbered Walt Whitman and Theodore Roosevelt. Working as a government clerk in Washington, he became a close friend of Walt Whitman and wrote the first biography of the poet, Notes on Walt Whitman As Poet and Person (1867). Whether he was leading an isolated life or a socialized existence, his spirit and actions were always forcefully compelling. He was a frequent contributor of essays on nature to the Atlantic Monthly magazine. His books, Wake-Robin (1871), Birds and Poets (1877), Fresh Fields (1884), Ways of Nature (1805), and Accepting the Universe (1920), have become favorite reading. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
George Santayana (picture) was born in Madrid, Spain, on December 16, 1863 and died September 26, 1952 and was an influential philosopher, poet, and literary critic. His parents separated when he was very young, and he spent part of his childhood in Spain and part in Massachusetts, where he attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College. He was graduated from Harvard in 1886, studied in Germany for two years, then returned to Harvard for his doctorate. After completing his studies he joined the department of philosophy at Harvard, where he remained until 1912, when a legacy from his mother's estate allowed him to retire. He spent the period of World War I in England and later Paris, and finally settled in Rome. During World War II he lived in Rome in the convent of an order of English nuns. Introduction Santayana was the son of a Spanish father and an American mother. He hints at his own Spanish strain when he describes the southern mind as long-indoctrinated, disillusioned, distinct, skpetical, malicious, yet in its reflective phase detached and contemplative, able to despise all entanglements, to dominate will and to look truth in the eye without blinking. He thinks of the American mind as being more ingenuous than wise. American is the texture, Spanish is the structure of Santayana's mind. America impressed his spiritual outlook. But, successful as he was as an influential professor at Harvard, he never felt himself at ease there. The Spanish tradition corresponded more by far to his inclinations, and, although he did not care about authorities, he highly esteemed the soil of history, tradition or human institutions without which thought and imagination became trivial. Santayana's early work can best be understood as that of a primarily poetic moral philosopher. His early works, The Sense of Beauty (1896) and The Life of Reason (5 vols., 1905-06), focus on the imaginative life of humanity, not on the underlying structures of reality or on humankind's mode of grasping reality. His later works, particularly Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and The Realms of Being (4 vols., 1927-40), are more concerned with a systematic development of the ontological distinctions within nature and the different kinds of mental activities to which they relate. This difference represents a shift of emphasis, not in position. Santayana throughout his life remained a naturalist, concerned with the ideal factors in human existence and holding that everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural has an ideal development. For Santayana, human good consists of the harmonious development of humanity's impulses in conformity with the reflective ideational aspects of existence. He viewed religion as an imaginative creation of real value but devoid of absolute significance. Santayana's philosophical naturalism is systematized in his later, more ontologically directed work in terms of four major realms (his term) of being: essence, matter, spirit, and truth. Throughout his life Santayana also wrote poetry and literary criticism. His novel The Last Puritan (1935) received critical acclaim. General Ideas When Santayana resolved to spend the rest of his life in an Italian convent as guest, he did not give up his philosophical conviction, one of whose striking features was unrelenting materialism. He was "attached to Catholicism" but "entirely divorced from faith," and protested that his skepticism had rather confirmed than dispelled this attachment. He continued to hold that "most conventioanl ideals, the religious ones included, are not adequate to the actual nature and capacities of men who accept them." He did not acknowledge any Christian dogma but liked the Christian religion for aesthetic and historical reasons. Nevertheless he was far from holding romanticist predilections, and even farther from having any adoration of the tragic sense of living. What was true for Santayana's attachment to Catholicism was also true for his relation to Platonism. Santayana thought in terms of two realms of being, that of existence and that of essences. Concerning existence, he professed materialism. His realm of essences was of Platonist origin. But Santayana declined to regard essences as truer realities than existent things, or to found the realm of essences upon divine activity or to oppose essence to accident and modification. Doctrine According to Santayana, essences neither necessitate nor explain thoughts, nor do they determine the ground of concrete existence. The seat and principle of genesis is matter, not essence, which, for its part, is explanatory of intuition, assures the form of apperception, elucidates existence, and helps the mind to grasp and to retain the character and identity of the changing existences. However, while the evolution of existing things changes their character at every moment, the essences, representing every moment of this change, remain in their logical identity. An essence is anything definite capable of appearing and being thought of: it is senseless to believe in it because belief involves the assumption of real existence. Intuition of essence is no knowledge at all because illusion and error are also intuitions. Knowledge is a compound of instinctive conviction and expectation, animal faith and intuition of essence. It is essence by means of which the pursuit, attention and feelings which contribute to knowledge are transcribed in aesthetic, moral or verbal terms into consciousness. Matter is in flux; mind, conceived by Santayana as "simply sensibility in bodies," is existentially carried along the movement of that flux but is capable of arresting some datum, different from what the stimulated sensibility can articulate. This datum is essence in whose language alone mind can express its experiences. Disillusioned, Santayana, although convinced of the truth of his work, did not except his philosophy from his general judgment of philosophical systems. To him they were all personal, temperamental, even premature. They were human heresies. The orthodoxy around which these heresies play, is no private or closed body of doctrine. It is "the current imagination and good sense of mankind," a body of beliefs and evaluations far too chaotic, subject to errors and too conventional to satisfy a reflective mind, but capable of correcting its errors. Hence the need for personal philosophical thought, hence the impossibility to attain the goal to shape a philosophy satisfying mankind. As for Santayana he acquiesced in this insight, and was fond of stating divergencies between his mind and that of his critics. Santayana as an anti-Idealist, maintained that not only does thought not constitute all of reality, but actually is not reality at all. Consciousness is like a fourth dimension, and its value consists in making something present to a subject. But what does consciousness make present? The essences of things. By the essences of things Santayana means the free constructions of the mind, symbols through which everybody expresses the universe as he interprets it. These essences are the kingdom of the spirit, and through them the spirit enriches itself. But essences, being merely a free construction of the spirit, do not tell us whether anything exists. How, then, may we be sure that there are in the extra-mental world things which correspond to these essences? Santayana maintains that we may never be certain of the existence of extra-mental things; reason cannot justify their existence, and hence Skepticism is inevitable. But as matter of fact, mankind has faith in the existence of an exterior world; mankind has always rebelled against any attempt to foist Skepticism upon it. This fact, however, is not the result of a logical process, but of a faith based upon the necessities of the vital functions. According to Santayana, we could not live unless we felt something "acting upon us." This sense of passivity is the argument used by mankind to prove the existence of extra-mental things. Such an exigency belongs to animal life, but cannot be justified rationally. Thus the antithesis between the world of essences and that of extra-mental things is irreducible. Santayana is a decided skeptic. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Felix Adler (picture) was born on August 13, 1851. He was a German-born American educator and founder of the Ethical Culture movement. Brought to the United States at the age of six by his father, a rabbi, Felix Adler was also educated for the rabbinical office. He received his doctorate from Heidelberg University and returned to preach at the Temple Emanu-El in New York City. It was here that he failed to refer to God in his sermons. Although he was not disloyal to Judaism, as a rationalist he could not accept the rituals in any literal sense. He left the rabbinate and his friends established a professorship of Hebrew and Oriental literature for him at Cornell University. After two years as professor of Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell, Adler founded (1876) the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The Ethical Culture society welcomed people from all backgrounds and taught that an ethical reality existed independently of the existence of a personal God. Under Adler, the society was active in child welfare, medical care for the poor, slum improvement, labor relations, and city politics. Adler also pioneered in education, advocating progressive education, free kindergartens, and vocational training schools. He was professor of political and social ethics at Columbia from 1902 to 1918. His books include Creed and Deed: A Series of Discourses (1877). It was his belief that the principle of the good life can be achieved independently of religious ritual and dogma that led him to found the American Ethical Union and the Society for Ethical Culture in New York. He maintained that the idea of a personal God is unnecessary; that the social and ethical behavior of man, if it makes for harmonious relationships among men, constitutes the Godhead; that man's personality because of its unique and inviolable nature is the central force of the religion. He advocated more than mere religious tolerance; men should reverently respect the religious differences among themselves. In his book Creed and Deed (1878) and Moral Instruction of Children (1892) he was able to fuse his heterogeneous influences: Judaism, Christianity, Kant, Emerson, and the cogent socialistic ideas of his lifetime. Felix Adler died on April 24, 1933. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
The memory of the eclectic Paul Carus (picture) is kept alive by the Carus Foundation, the Carus Lectures, and the American Philosophical Association. Carus preferred to consider himself a theologian rather than a philosopher. He referred to himself as "an atheist who loved God." The fact was that he was a pantheist who insisted that God, as a cosmic order, was a name comprising "all that which is the bread of our spiritual life." He held the concept of a personal God as untenable. Carus' monism was more frequently associated with a kind of pantheism, although it was occasionally identified with positivism. His pantheistic theology regarded every law of nature as a part of God's being. Although when he maintained that the laws of mechanics represented the action of spiritual existence, it was never quite clear whether he meant that mechanics were a part of God's being, or more simply, that the matter was identical with mind; thus he did not commit himself as to the character of divinity. He acknowledged Jesus Christ as a redeemer, but not as the only one, for he believed that Buddha and other religious founders were equally endowed with the same qualities. Carus tried to steer a middle course between idealistic metaphysics and materialism. He disagreed with metaphysicians because they "reified" words and dealt with them as though they were realities. He objected to materialism because it ignored or overlooked the importance of form. Carus constantly emphasized form by conceiving of the divinity as a cosmic order. He also objected to any monism which sought the unity of the world not in the unity of truth but in the oneness of a logical assumption of ideas. He referred to such concepts as henism, not monism. He stated that truth was independent of time, human desire, and human action. Therefore, science was not a human invention, but a human revelation which needed to be apprehended; discovery meant apprehension; it was the result or manifestation of the cosmic order in which all truth were ultimately harmonious. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On The Internet
To Page 2 of Recent American Thought Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Magazine...
|
|
|
Introduction & Directory |
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, & 2002-03 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.
This Page Was Updated On