LISTEN. Entering class today for the first time in the Covid era without a university-imposed mask mandate, in a red state and with shaky guidance from our school's president to "encourage our community members to consider the use of masks as circumstances warrant" and "encourage our students, faculty and staff who have not been vaccinated to consider taking this precaution."
Great. Do please consider it, all who've previously chosen to disregard minimal considerations of public health and responsible citizenship.
Wonder who was consulted about this.
But okay. Here we go.
That essay was based on James's lecture to the Harvard YMCA in 1895. Early provisional answer: maybe. Depends on the liver.
Before century's end he was offering a less equivocal answer, in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings":
"Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ali! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people. . . . when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."(11)
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception...
And this is James's great theme, on my reading: immediacy, supported by perception and constant attentiveness to novelty and possibility in our experience. It is immediacy that calls us out to ourselves for analyzing too much and appreciating too little, for brooding too much and forgetting how lucky we are, for fabricating too much instead of exploring and discovering. Immediacy applies the brakes to unchecked speculation and subjectivist rumination.
But philosophers in our tradition must also think about immediacy, as well as consult it. Which gets priority? Neither. It's a circular dance, without a lead partner.
My friend in Alabama who's spent a career worrying "the problem of the criterion" finds such irresolution annoying and intolerable. I find it merely emblematic of pragmatism and the human condition. It's the best we can do. It might be good enough. Maybe.
Maybe too, on the heels of Carl Sagan's birthday, we can ponder our lucky stars from a cosmic perspective. We're star stuff. What a wondrous world we've awakened to. There's no place like home.
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