I appreciated his call to our new students to seize the spirit of '76 and Tom Paine's Common Sense, and each to pursue their own life, liberty, and happiness in the full freedom of independent thought and cultivated character. Hope they were listening.
Today is Juneteenth, also known as “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” [And it’s the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964… and opening day at the Obama Center.] It’s a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It was on this date in 1865 that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to spread the word that slavery had been abolished. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect some two and a half years earlier, in January 1863; most Confederate states ignored it until they were forced to free their slaves by advancing Union troops.
From the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, General Gordon read the contents of General Order Number Three: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Galveston’s former slaves celebrated that day, and formal Juneteenth festivities were held in other parts of Texas on the first anniversary. Celebrations of the holiday have waxed and waned over the years; today, Juneteenth is celebrated in communities all over the country, and as of April 2012, it’s officially recognized as a holiday by the governments of 42 of the United States. Observances often include a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and performances of traditional African-American music, dancing, and literature.
It's 12 degrees in middle Tennessee on the first day of the Spring semester. No matter. Spring means renewal and a fresh start, just like Opening Day in my favorite sporting pastime. Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in just a few weeks now.
I think these "first contact" days in academia, meeting bright-eyed eager young learners for the first time (they get younger every year, somehow), hearing who they think they are and why they're here and what they think philosophy is (et al) are what I'll miss most when I stop teaching. Is this really going to be the penultimate year? We'll see. Meanwhile, I fully intend to enjoy today.
I see that several more student introductions have surfaced on our course site since last night, before we've entered the classroom for the first time (starting at 9:40 this morning). Pleased to see that so many of the kids have responded to my challenge, when I said in my own intro that I worry about their generation not reading books. They're mentioning titles that are unfamiliar to me, mostly, and that's good. I do learn from them at least as much as they learn from me, when I remember to pay attention and make connection. George Saunders is right: "[W]riting and reading [and teaching and learning] is a way of simply underscoring that human connection is important, that you can know my mind and I can know yours, which is a vastly consoling idea, and we need it."
So here we go. Another fresh start. Tabula rasa time. My mentor John Lachs didnt quit 'til he was 87. I begin to understand why.
It's a real treat, relatively late in an academic career, to teach a new course for the first time. I'll be doing that next semester with Existentialism, and this semester (beginning in less than two weeks now) with Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. I always ask my new students some basic Opening Day questions. Here are my own responses, this time:
*Who are you? - I'm the Prof, probably the oldest guy in the room (though that isn't always the case, in MALA classes). I've been teaching at MTSU for a quarter century, but this is the first time I've offered THIS course. My special interest is in American philosophy, particularly that of pragmatist William James. [And btw: I am current president of the William James Society.]
*Why are you here? - I'm at MTSU because they hired me, not long after the Belmont provost un-hired me when I expressed sympathy for the Unitarian Universalist credo ("guided by reason and inspired by love, we celebrate diversity, confront oppression, and promote environmental and social justice"). And in retrospect, I'm glad he did! I've been happy at MTSU (and teach a course called Philosophy of Happiness). I'm in Middle Tennessee because I came to Vanderbilt (from Mizzou) for grad school and liked it enough to stay.
*What's your definition of philosophy? - "An unusually stubborn attempt to think [and write and speak] clearly" in the pursuit of wisdom. (The quoted/un-bracketed bit is, naturally, from William James.)
*What are the best and the most recent novels you've read? What did you like/dislike about them? Did you find in them anything "philosophical," by your definition? - Most recent, and among the best, are those by the two Richards (Ford and Powers) we'll be reading. We'll get into my thoughts (and yours) concerning their relation to wisdom. Suffice for now to say that Ford's Frank Bascombe is a character I find amusing and occasionally wise, living his life in Periods (The Existence Period, The Permanent Period, etc.); and Powers's Playground touches on themes I find vitally relevant and potentially either an advance or a big setback for humanity: the environment, and Artificial Intelligence. It's too soon to tell about that, but it's pretty clear that we've got to address those issues effectively as individuals AND as a species, if we're to survive and flourish for long.
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Postscript. Frank says things like:
I wasn't planning to mention Woody Allen or baseball on Opening Day in Happiness class, but I did. It is important to make our personal lists of things ("small stuff") that make life worth living for us ("for me..."), and then to realize that others' lives and lists are as vibrant and compelling to them as ours are to us.
And it's important to care about the small stuff, so we can transpose our care to life's bigger prizes. Like happiness.
"Small stuff""An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about... the universe. Let's... Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. Like what? OK... for me... Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues. Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by C?anne. The crabs at Sam Wo's. Tracy's face..."
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” ― Roger Angell, Game Time: A Baseball Companion
The Fall '25 academic season kicks off for me today. It always feels like a holiday, and like MLB Opening Day: nobody's in last place. Everybody's still a winner, and still will be in December whatever the gradebook says, if they've showed up and made a contribution to our co-philosophizing.
I'm going to mention Douglas Adams's eternally-recurrent whale, and this time I'll bring a centipede into it too.
On Opening Day I never say to myself what that bowl of petunias said about the whale-"Oh no, not again."
[Previous Opening Day posts.]
Still in the process, pre-Fall '25 Opening Day, of screwing my head on straight for the task at hand.
(Still, I say, because most of my old cohort have already hung it up. Retired. Begun to bask in the pleasures of uninterrupted-by-alarms morning sleep not followed by stressful vehicular commutes.)
The task at hand for me on Tuesday, then, is of first asking neophyte students who they are and why they've come to a philosophy course, and then conveying to them why I think they've come to the right place.
I do myself believe, with William James, in philosophy. Devoutly. ("Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers..." - Pragmatism Lec.I))
But I also share James's ambivalence about the whole professional/academic philosophic enterprise.
He liked to say his "religious act" was to defend experience (including the varieties of religious experience) against philosophy, whenever the latter became too imperious and dismissive of the former... and never mind the fact that so many religious creeds and theories are patently absurd. (Letters, April 12 1900)
In another letter he declared, at least a bit facetiously and referencing himself in the third person, his hatred of philosophy... "especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being." (Letters, July 17 1895)
But we're not at the beginning of a vacation, we're at the end of it. This is the time of year when we must all set aside our various ambivalences about the philosophy teaching vocation and get on with it, with as much overt enthusiasm as we can muster. WJ concluded that same letter with the concession that "at present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year."
Next year is here.
All good pragmatist philosophers always want to do it better next year, whether we say so in public or not, because we really do believe devoutly (albeit secretly, sometimes) in what we're doing.
And what is that? It's nothing less than attempting to inspire and empower the next generation to step up and care about "the really vital question for us all-What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
And in caring, to be impelled to doing.
Time to draft a presidential summer missive for the William James Society newsletter.
When I think of William James in summer, I think naturally of his annual escape at term's end to his Chocorua summer home in New Hampshire, with (he told his sister Alice) its "fourteen doors, all opening out"...
and where he had what he called a Walpurgis Nacht pseudo-mystical experience...
And then I think of the terrific split-venue Chocorua/Cambridge centenary celebration of his life and work the James Society sponsored in August 2010, "in the footsteps of William James," coinciding with Harvard's Houghton Library exhibition Life is in the Transitions.
I think of the time he got horribly lost on a hike and probably propelled the heart-strain that expedited his exit from this earth at age 68 in August 1910.
And of course I think of the nobility of that exit. It was in his dying summer a hundred and fifteen year ago, when he penned a marvelous riposte to Henry Adams's morose pessimism over the universe's own mortality. The entire letter (dated June 17, 1910) is a tour de force of indomitably life-affirming human spirit, even in the shadow of looming personal extinction. It concludes with a crescendo of defiantly insistent hopefulness: "Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be... a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness... In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.'"
Isn't that an exit!
It was in his terminal summer that James declared, a bit disingenuously, that there were "no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given," in the conclusion of his final publication, "A Pluralistic Mystic"-a paean to his eccentric friend Benjamin Blood, but from our vantage more a brave "Farewell!" at the conclusion of a remarkably inspiring, perceptive, and humane life devoted to the unyielding defense of experience in all its irreducible variety.
The disingenuity in question has less to do with fortune-telling (though he was more than sufficiently receptive to the experience of unscrupulous seers and non-creditable prognosticators) than with advice. He was full of that. "Be not afraid of life" was one of his better lines, in this regard.
And it's probably the line we need most to heed ourselves, in this summer of our own (and America's) unsettled fortune. He'd tell us, I'm sure: you can stand it.
As he told us just before that final farewell: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"
We're still here, to enjoy experience and to shape it; to enjoy the world and to change it.
So say we at the William James Society, in the spirit of our namesake: enjoy your summer, and help ameliorate our world.
Happy Opening Day! Expectations for my team are low, but today they begin the year in first place. Let's go!
On Monday this week a student committed suicide in our library. School was closed on Tuesday. I went for a hike in the woods, wishing the victim had walked away from despair and chosen to stay with us.
In class yesterday we talked about it...
"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (public library), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide — a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies — of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.
To be sure, Hecht’s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude — after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we’ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention..." (continues)
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My morning mantra: When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Elbert Hubbard, probably... and not Marcus Aurelius
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“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
"…d.r.: And you stand up onstage in front of all these people and play. It's such an honor to have all of your energy focussed on this one thing that you care about so much. And to know that all the work you've done in the past—all the thinking about what the next line's going to be, or what the next story you're going to tell is, or what the next note you're gonna play is, or what you played last night that really was fun and you need to remember how to do that again because people enjoyed it so much and you enjoyed it, that you have this North Star. It's unreal.
g.w.: It's so heartening that, with everything that's going on in everybody's lives and in the world, people still feel that impulse. They still want to go and sit in a dark room and listen to people sing."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings-took-from-the-tornadoRepublicans certainly don't—a mere 19 percent of them expressed "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education in a Gallup poll last year. But we already knew that. More striking is that Democrats' confidence is down to 59 percent. Men, women, young people, the middle-aged, and the elderly range from ambivalent about to decidedly wary of today's colleges and universities. Of college graduates themselves, only 47 percent were able to muster more than "some" confidence in the institutions that minted their credentials. No wonder fewer students are enrolling in college after high school and fewer students who matriculate stay on track to finish their degrees.But I say reports of the death of higher education and the humanities are greatly exaggerated. I can't do much about administrators, but I'm pretty sure I can persuade at least a few students that reading and learning are good for them, for their democracy, for their humanity. Some of those students will have their lives altered positively and permanently when they learn to love learning.
On campus, the atmosphere of disillusionment is just as thick—including at elite schools like Harvard, where I teach. College administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority...
"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" Thank Goodness!
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"…The South is littered with memorial battlefields, state parks and memorials and the federal acreage — 4,600 acres at Chancellorsville, 9,500 acres at Chickamauga, 5,000 at Manassas, 2,500 at Vicksburg, rows of rusting cannon, and then the monstrosity that is Gettysburg, a 6,000-acre junkyard of obsolescent obelisks and meaningless mind-numbing monuments and sentimental statuary, a National Park of Bad Art, so cluttered it's hard to walk through and imagine the ferocious battle that took place. Very few people under the age of 60 care about the war it commemorates, and the junk should all be trucked away to a landfill and the land developed into nice neighborhoods with hiking trails and flower gardens and finally put Pickett's Charge and the Lost Cause behind us and go on to more interesting things. You want a memorial, put up a podium on the spot where Abe Lincoln gave his speech and let visitors press PLAY and listen to it..." GKThis reminded me of our brief discussion in CoPhi yesterday of the problem of Forrest Hall. I have a fix, which I've shared with GK's readers:
The ROTC building on my campus in middle Tennessee, and any number of residential streets hereabouts, still bear the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Old misplaced sentiment dies hard, administrative wheels grind glacially. But this could be a relatively easy fix: just drop an r, and commemorate the trees instead of the racist.
