Presentations: 21 SSHM ch6 - #1 Haylie #2 Caleb #3 Presley Baker #2 Amelia Starry Messenger (or Wanderlust?)
Exam 2 audio review...
1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?
2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
4. What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?
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3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
4. What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?
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BONUS ?s (See below*)
5. What would we lose, if we were without feeling?
6. When does a life become "genuinely significant"?
7. "To miss ___ ___ is to miss all."
8. "Life is always worth living" if you have responsive sensibilities like ____'s.
9. What is distinctive about B.P. Blood's version of mysticism?**
10. What's WJ's last word in philosophy?
5. What would we lose, if we were without feeling?
6. When does a life become "genuinely significant"?
7. "To miss ___ ___ is to miss all."
8. "Life is always worth living" if you have responsive sensibilities like ____'s.
9. What is distinctive about B.P. Blood's version of mysticism?**
10. What's WJ's last word in philosophy?
LH
- The question of absurdity is about what? 148
- Why isn't "42" a good answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? 151-2
- What did Samuel Scheffler say about "the afterlife"? What's "the Alvy Singer problem"? 161-3
- What does Rebecca Solnit say about the relation between hope and action? 175
- What did Seamus Heaney say about the relation between hope and history? 182
*On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
William James
OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.
Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"—that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:—
(continues)
==
William James
OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.
Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"—that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:—
(continues)
==
**A PLURALISTIC MYSTIC
Not for the ignoble vulgar do I write this article, but only for those dialectic-mystic souls who have an irresistible taste, acquired or native, for higher flights of metaphysics. I have always held the opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality whom he may discover in his explorations. Now for years my own taste, literary as well as philosophic, has been exquisitely titillated by a writer the name of whom I think must be unknown to the readers of this article; so I no longer continue silent about the merits of Benjamin Paul Blood.
Mr. Blood inhabits a city otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central Railroad. What his regular or bread-winning occupation may be I know not, but it can’t have made him super-wealthy. He is an author only when the fit strikes him, and for short spurts at a time; shy, moreover, to the point of publishing his compositions only as private tracts, or in letters to such far-from-reverberant organs of publicity as the Gazette or the Recorder of his native Amsterdam, or the Utica Herald or the Albany Times. Odd places for such subtile efforts to appear in, but creditable to American editors in these degenerate days! Once, indeed, the lamented W. T. Harris of the old “Journal of Speculative Philosophy” got wind of these epistles, and the result was a revision of some of them for that review (Philosophic Reveries, 1889). Also a couple of poems were reprinted from their leaflets by the editor of Scribner’s Magazine (“The Lion of the Nile,” 1888, and| “Nemesis,” 1899). But apart from these three dashes before the footlights, Mr. Blood has kept behind the curtain all his days.[2]
The author’s maiden adventure was the Anesthetic Revelation, a pamphlet printed privately at Amsterdam in 1874. I forget how it fell into my hands, but it fascinated me so “weirdly” that I am conscious of its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since. It gives the essence of Blood’s philosophy, and shows most of the features of his talent–albeit one finds in it little humor and no verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision, sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by anaesthetics–of all things in the world–and unlike anything one ever heard before. The practically unanimous tradition of “regular” mysticism has been unquestionably monistic; and inasmuch as it is the characteristic of mystics to speak, not as the scribes, but as men who have “been there” and seen with their own eyes, I think that this sovereign manner must have made some other pluralistic-minded students hesitate, as I confess that it has often given pause to me. One cannot criticise the vision of a mystic–one can but pass it by, or else accept it as having some amount of evidential weight. I felt unable to do either with a good conscience until I met with Mr. Blood. His mysticism, which may, if one likes, be understood as monistic in this earlier utterance, develops in the later ones a sort of “left-wing” voice of defiance, and breaks into what to my ear has a radically pluralistic sound. I confess that the existence of this novel brand of mysticism has made my cowering mood depart. I feel now as if my own pluralism were not without the kind of support which mystical corroboration may confer. Morrison can no longer claim to be the only beneficiary of whatever right mysticism may possess to lend prestige.
This is my philosophic, as distinguished from my literary, interest, in introducing Mr. Blood to this more fashionable audience: his philosophy, however mystical, is in the last resort not dissimilar from my own... (continues)
...
“There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild–game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true–ever not quite.”
“Ever not quite!”–this seems to wring the very last panting word out of rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says “hands off,” and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat absolutely original and novel. “We are the first that ever burst into this silent sea.” Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The “inexplicable,” the “mystery,” as what the intellect, with its claim to reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the resolution of which Blood’s revelation would eliminate from the sphere of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic insight, according to our author. Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!”
Not for the ignoble vulgar do I write this article, but only for those dialectic-mystic souls who have an irresistible taste, acquired or native, for higher flights of metaphysics. I have always held the opinion that one of the first duties of a good reader is to summon other readers to the enjoyment of any unknown author of rare quality whom he may discover in his explorations. Now for years my own taste, literary as well as philosophic, has been exquisitely titillated by a writer the name of whom I think must be unknown to the readers of this article; so I no longer continue silent about the merits of Benjamin Paul Blood.
Mr. Blood inhabits a city otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central Railroad. What his regular or bread-winning occupation may be I know not, but it can’t have made him super-wealthy. He is an author only when the fit strikes him, and for short spurts at a time; shy, moreover, to the point of publishing his compositions only as private tracts, or in letters to such far-from-reverberant organs of publicity as the Gazette or the Recorder of his native Amsterdam, or the Utica Herald or the Albany Times. Odd places for such subtile efforts to appear in, but creditable to American editors in these degenerate days! Once, indeed, the lamented W. T. Harris of the old “Journal of Speculative Philosophy” got wind of these epistles, and the result was a revision of some of them for that review (Philosophic Reveries, 1889). Also a couple of poems were reprinted from their leaflets by the editor of Scribner’s Magazine (“The Lion of the Nile,” 1888, and| “Nemesis,” 1899). But apart from these three dashes before the footlights, Mr. Blood has kept behind the curtain all his days.[2]
The author’s maiden adventure was the Anesthetic Revelation, a pamphlet printed privately at Amsterdam in 1874. I forget how it fell into my hands, but it fascinated me so “weirdly” that I am conscious of its having been one of the stepping-stones of my thinking ever since. It gives the essence of Blood’s philosophy, and shows most of the features of his talent–albeit one finds in it little humor and no verse. It is full of verbal felicity, felicity sometimes of precision, sometimes of metaphoric reach; it begins with dialectic reasoning, of an extremely Fichtean and Hegelian type, but it ends in a trumpet-blast of oracular mysticism, straight from the insight wrought by anaesthetics–of all things in the world–and unlike anything one ever heard before. The practically unanimous tradition of “regular” mysticism has been unquestionably monistic; and inasmuch as it is the characteristic of mystics to speak, not as the scribes, but as men who have “been there” and seen with their own eyes, I think that this sovereign manner must have made some other pluralistic-minded students hesitate, as I confess that it has often given pause to me. One cannot criticise the vision of a mystic–one can but pass it by, or else accept it as having some amount of evidential weight. I felt unable to do either with a good conscience until I met with Mr. Blood. His mysticism, which may, if one likes, be understood as monistic in this earlier utterance, develops in the later ones a sort of “left-wing” voice of defiance, and breaks into what to my ear has a radically pluralistic sound. I confess that the existence of this novel brand of mysticism has made my cowering mood depart. I feel now as if my own pluralism were not without the kind of support which mystical corroboration may confer. Morrison can no longer claim to be the only beneficiary of whatever right mysticism may possess to lend prestige.
This is my philosophic, as distinguished from my literary, interest, in introducing Mr. Blood to this more fashionable audience: his philosophy, however mystical, is in the last resort not dissimilar from my own... (continues)
...
“There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild–game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true–ever not quite.”
“Ever not quite!”–this seems to wring the very last panting word out of rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says “hands off,” and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat absolutely original and novel. “We are the first that ever burst into this silent sea.” Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The “inexplicable,” the “mystery,” as what the intellect, with its claim to reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the resolution of which Blood’s revelation would eliminate from the sphere of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic insight, according to our author. Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word.–“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.–Farewell!”
The penultimate question:
Penultimate happiness: "I can't stand it!"
To Henry Adams: "...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 the millennium-a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalised that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. 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!" --William James, Letters June 1910 [he died in August]
1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?
ReplyDeleteThe greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it. I think this is true in some cases, but it is not true in every case. Some people have devoted their lives to things that leave a negative effect on generations to come—this is an example of something that outlasted them, but not something that seems to be “the greatest use of life” to me. I think it should be considered whether that thing has positive or negative effects on others and the world around us to determine whether it is “the greatest use of life” or not.
2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
William James wrote to Benjamin Blood that “no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.” This is an interesting statement, and I’m not sure whether I agree or not. I think it’s inevitable that if someone were thinking about whether or not life was worth living that they would think about the implications of suicide as a concept. I hope that James wasn’t suggesting that all “educated” people have been suicidal because that would be a very sad situation. James could also be suggesting that being able to contemplate one’s life from that vantage point could make one “educated,” but I’m not sure.
3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
In William James’ final entreaty in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” he reminded his readers that they often don’t have a clue about how other people experience the meaning of their lives. I think this is a good insight into being able to understand other people. Generally, meaning in my life has always been driven by passion, whether it be for the arts, for the people I care about, or anything else. I need to remind myself that not everyone is driven by passion; they have different things that motivate them or inform their choices.
Ainsley Stewart (section #1)
ReplyDelete2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
He wrote that there is no one who is educated who has not contemplated suicide at one point or another. I find this to be a very depressing idea.
3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
His final entreaty was an assertion that one cannot understand the way in which others experience the world. The ways that people find meaning in their lives are so diverse that it cannot be guaranteed that one person can understand another person’s reasoning for why they are alive.
4. What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?
He says the reason is “human nature’s willingness to live on a chance.” This “chance” is the opportunity for a reason to live to arise. Human nature’s curiosity means that it can be worth pursuing this chance if it means finding that reason to live.
1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?
ReplyDeleteTo spend it on something that will outlast life
2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
No educated man has ever not battled suicide
3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
We don’t have a clue on how other people live life.
What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
ReplyDeleteJames made the provocative claim to Benjamin Blood, that a person cannot be educated without having wrestled with the darkest questions existence has to offer, including the thought of suicide.
What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?
James reminded his readers that they rarely have any real understanding of how other people experience the meaning of their own lives. He suggested we leave the assessment of another person's life at a maybe. I agree with this for the most part. Our assumptions cloud how accurately we view other's lives. It takes a disciplined approach to intellectual empathy to even get close to the truth of someone else's life. As morbid as it is, someone might have a legitimate reason to want to end their life and end their suffering, that is not something we should judge.
What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?
James argued that the difference between a life of resignation and a life of hope comes down to the existence of chance. Where there is a chance, there is the possibility of hope.
Section #1
ReplyDelete1.) The greatest use of life, according to William James, is to spend it on something that feels meaningful and “lived for,” something that matters beyond just personal comfort or routine.
2.) To Benjamin Blood, James wrote that education should not just train intellect, but develop perception and widen a person’s capacity to notice and appreciate different ways of living.
3.) In On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, James’s final entreaty is to resist judging other people’s lives too quickly and to recognize that what seems meaningless or wrong to us may carry real value and richness for them.
1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ? According to William James, the greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
ReplyDelete7. "To miss ___ ___ is to miss all." “To miss the joy is to miss all.”
10. What's WJ's last word in philosophy? William James’s “last word” in philosophy was, “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
According to William James, life is best used spending it on something that will outlast it.
ReplyDeleteWilliam James said that the difference between resignation and hope is action, risk, and belief.
We would lose everything we liked and loved if we went without feeling. Life would be bland.
Section #1
ReplyDeleteWhat would we lose if we were without feeling?
If we lose feeling, we lose our perception of other things. I like this viewpoint. I believe if we were feeling-less, we would not be able to distinguish happy from sad, so nothing would really matter to us.
“To miss ___ is to miss all”
I wasn’t really sure how to take this, but I believe it is asking about where W.J. is explaining that a spectator misses the root of the problem. Since the spectator misses the root of the incident, they have no truth at all. I agree mostly. The only spectators that would have the full truth would be ones that were viewing an incident the moment that it started.
What’s WJ’s last words in Philosophy?
“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.-Farewell!” This is a great way to conclude. It shows that his philosophies are open to be questioned!
Section #1
ReplyDelete1. What would we lose, if we were without feeling?
A: We'd lose the ability to perceive other things. Beyond trivial interaction, personal communication would lose all meaning. I'd personally find it difficult to derive enjoyment from a life like this. I find that my emotional connections to people are part of what drives my desire to experience life.
2. "To miss the joy is to miss all." This sentiment is one that I share. It's imperative for a human being to receive a consistent stream of euphoria. Without it, it becomes a lot easier to slip into a depression.
6. When does a life become "genuinely significant"?
A: To me, a life becomes "genuinely significant" when a person begins to form foundational memories and initial happiness. Of course, every life is important, but it only seems that way to the individual if they're living a life that they feel satisfied with.
Section #3
ReplyDeleteThe greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?
According to William James, the greatest use of life is to do something that will outlast your own individual life.
What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?
He told Benjamin that learning ought to be more than just reading and doing things such as homework. Rather, educated people should be able to appreciate and perceive the things they have within their lives.
What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?
William James explained that the difference between resignation and hope was the existence of chance.