The experience of Home

LISTEN. The theme of next year’s tag-team MALA liberal arts course at our school, I'm gratified to learn (having proposed it), will be Experience. So, I'll get to do a two-week trailer in the Fall for my semester-long Spring '23 course of the same name. 

We'll do William James's 1901-02 Gifford Lectures, Varieties of Religious Experience, the first week;  then Carl Sagan's from 1985, that thanks to Ann Druyan's perspicacity became the posthumous Varieties of Scientific Experience.

The juxtaposition will be apposite, and true to the pluralistic hearts and minds of James and Sagan. Both Gifford fellows, in their strikingly distinctive ways, made the point that assimilating our personal experience, valuing it, respecting it, defending it, is precisely how we make ourselves feel (and be) at home in the world and in our own skins. 

And James explicitly, Sagan implicitly, defend that state of being and feeling as the epitome of rationality. 

Hence the rationale for melding my impending summer MALA course, Rationality (commencing shortly in July), with Experience. They do belong together. As Jennifer Michael Hecht once wrote of the Hellenic "graceful-life philosophies" (Epicureanism, Stoicism et al), the great task of a reasonable life is to stop searching manically for a way out of the "forest" (the natural universe). "Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done..." *

I did that once, or got Younger Daughter to do it back when she was in her arts-and-crafts phase. The sign eventually faded but the message has stuck. 

 

* "Where the Hellenistic philosophies excelled was the production of what could be called secular religions. They were based on self-help–oriented doctrines often borrowed from the earlier philosophers but interpreted and presented in a way that made more direct sense to a lot of people. I’m calling them graceful-life philosophies to distinguish them from other philosophy. Their goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods. The Hellenistic graceful-life philosophies had a lot in common. The experience of doubt in a heterogeneous, cosmopolitan world is a bit like being lost in a forest, unendingly beckoned by a thousand possible routes. At every juncture, with every step, one is confronted with alternative paths, so that the second-guessing becomes more infuriating even than the fact of being lost. After a direction is chosen, one is constantly met with another tree in one’s path. What do you do if you come from a culture that had a powerful sense of home and local value, and now you are lost in something vast and sprawling, meaningless and strange? The stronger your belief in that half-remembered home, the more likely you are to panic, to grow claustrophobic among the trees and beneath their skyless canopy. Hellenistic men and women felt a desperate desire to get out of the seemingly endless, friendless woods. The graceful-life philosophies of this period were able to achieve an amazing rescue mission for the human being lost in the woods and bone-tired of searching for home. They did this by noticing that we could stop being lost if we were to just stop trying to get out of the forest. Instead, we could pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze. The initial horror of being lost utterly disappears when you come to believe fully that there is no town out there, beyond the forest, to which you are headed. If there is no release, no going home, then this must be home, this shimmering instant replete with blueberries. Hang a sign that says HOME on a tree and you’re done; just try to have a good time. Thus the cosmopolitan doubter looks back on earlier generations with bemused sympathy—they were mistaken—and looks upon believing contemporaries with real pity, as creatures scurrying through the forest, idiotically searching for a way out of the human condition. After all, it isn’t so bad if you just settle in and accept a few difficult ideas from the get-go."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson 

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Been thinking about this for a while... Hecht @home, 2.4.10