Flying into the light

Enjoyed our first Enlightenment class last night, we mostly just introduced ourselves and shared our respective notions of what "enlightenment" might mean. I wanted to emphasize the point that enlightenment in the western philosophical sense is decidedly not about finding a singular sage or guru with privileged insight into reality, truth, and meaning. It is about the collaborative conversation that attempts to corral as many points of view and fields of experience as can be gathered, so to yield a wider comprehension of (in James's phrase) "our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means."

And, I wanted to highlight the distinction between The Enlightenment, as a particular historical era, and enlightenment per se as an attitude and approach to reason and feeling, head and heart, science and humanism and progress etc. that transcends any particular time and place. 

We're trying in our course, in other words, to identify core enlightenment values that we may now share with that earlier moment and build upon, to better meet the challenges of our own day.

And that aspiration prompted one of us to wonder about the limits of historical interpretation. Can we be sure that their Enlightenment values may translate constructively into enlightenment in the 21st century and beyond?

Good question. I mentioned Wittgenstein's notion of a family resemblance between concepts, and averred that that's all we need: not perfect translation, just a sense that we're playing in the same ballpark. I think we are. We'll see.

The student who raised the historiographic concern also shared a metaphor I like. "As I walk down the hallway into the darkness I know there is a door that might be halfway opened..." It reminded me of James's pragmatic corridor, the idea of negotiating various philosophies and ideas via a central passageway that is the pragmatic method. (He generously, characteristically credited an obscure other, Papini, but it's a fundamentally Jamesian vision.) 

As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, 'CATEGORIES,' SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS.

So much for the pragmatic method!

And then the darkened hallway also reminded me of the Wallace Stegner quote my wife and I shared in our wedding scroll, nearly 28 years ago...

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But... It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle." (--from The Spectator Bird)

And it reminded me of Dumbledore, who said happiness is always possible if we just remember to turn on the light. I think that's right.