The American Thinker

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-64
Author(s):  
Amanda Brown
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
American Institution ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
James Jones ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Pragmatist ◽  
The Universe ◽  
American Thought

Chapter 1 establishes Thurman’s place within modern American thought, arguing that he is part of the American pragmatist tradition. Thurman inherited pragmatism from William James by way of W. E. B. Du Bois and Rufus Jones. Du Bois applied James’s ideas about people’s “blindness” to the experiences of others and the theory that social norms could evolve over time, through human agency, to better represent the needs of the democratic whole to his ideas about Black agitation and activism—a school of thinking within which Thurman was educated and nurtured. Thurman’s liberal theological component, especially his mysticism, is best understood through the James-Jones lineage. Rufus Jones drew off of James’s secular theories on mystical experience to popularize a culture of religious seeking and the pursuit of spiritual truth. Informed by his Quaker background, Jones theorized that the individual could reach points of heightened consciousness and could achieve a sense of oneness with a divine truth (James did not specify what this universal truth was, but Jones insisted that it was God). Both James and Jones favored affirmation mysticism—the idea that once a person experienced wholeness with the rest of the universe that he would be motivated and even responsible for attempting to create the same synchronicity within the society that he lived. Thurman, who had mystical leanings since childhood but could never fully articulate his insights on spirituality, felt as though he found a kindred spirit after he encountered one of Jones’s books on mysticism in 1929. The discovery led Thurman to study under Jones at Haverford that spring (with special permission from the college since Haverford did not admit Black students at that point). Thurman emerged from Haverford armed with a sophisticated grasp of affirmation mysticism that he connected seamlessly to his activist education. Through close readings of James, Du Bois, Jones, and Thurman, the chapter argues that Thurman’s pragmatist heritage both establishes him as a distinctly modern American thinker and sets the Fellowship Church—the physical expression of his ideas—as a distinctly modern American institution.

Perceiving Facts and Values

Philosophy ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUTH ANNA PUTNAM
Keyword(s):  
Medical Care ◽  
William James ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Evolutionary Selection ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Access To Medical Care ◽  
The Individual ◽  
History Books ◽  
The Universe

In a memorable passage near the beginning of ‘The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life,’ William James asks us to imagine a world in which all our dearest social utopias are realized, and then to imagine that this world is offered to us at the price of one lost soul at the farthest edge of the universe suffering eternal, intense, lonely pain. Then he asks, ‘what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’I find this passage enormously interesting for a variety of reasons. We would have an impulse to grasp the utopian world, and that impulse is not inexplicable: we would be happier in such a world than we are now. The impulse is even morally defensible: James tells us later in the essay that, ‘[t]here is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest universe of good that we can see.’ (ibid., p. 158) Moreover, he acknowledges that our best ideals cannot be realized in this poor world without trampling some other ideals under foot. The realization of the values of good and sensitive people entails the frustration of the desires and goals of cruel and brutal people. Worse, institutions that are on the whole beneficial will have innocent victims; James mentions monogamous marriage as an example of such an institution. In a functioning democracy, these are frustrations that everyone must take in stride sometimes. So, should we then not grasp that utopia, that world without unemployment, without homelessness, where everyone has access to medical care, where racism and other forms of prejudice and oppression are known only from the history books, etc., etc.? Those commentators who read James as a kind of Utilitarian, must surely believe that James would advocate our grasping that ideal, that he would speak not merely of an impulse to clutch that happiness but of an obligation. But James is not a Utilitarian, and the passage under discussion occurs when James wants to distance himself from the Utilitarians. We have, he says, a capacity for quite specific emotions, capacities that cannot be explained in any simple way as the result of evolutionary selection for the survival of either the individual or the species. He does not mean the capacity for sympathy, though that too would come into play here. Sympathy enables us to vividly imagine the suffering of the lost tortured soul, to feel for it and, indeed, with it. But James means something else; he means a revulsion, an apprehension that to do a certain thing would be ‘hideous.’ To do what? To opt for the utopia? That is not what he says. To enjoy the utopia? Again, that is not what he says. There is nothing wrong with opting for or enjoying utopia if it can be had at no cost, or at a cost clearly bearable by those who are obliged to bear it, or if one is non-culpably ignorant of the price. What is hideous is ‘enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

Making Behavioralism Work

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Kuenzler
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Consumer Preferences ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Revealed Preferences ◽  
Consumer Sovereignty ◽  
Bright Line ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
External Incentives ◽  
The Universe

This chapter turns to the restoration of consumer sovereignty. It revisits the three recurrent principles set out in Chapter 1 and argues that antitrust and intellectual property laws must understand consumers in their full socially embedded complexity to promote progress. Only in this way can analysts respect, rather than suppress, consumer preferences that evince concern for less proprietary forms of production and distribution in a marketplace which is heavily fixated on consumerism and passive consumption. It points to a number of ingenious recent studies from the cognitive psychological research that demonstrate that revealed preferences and external incentives have been offered as bright line rules for directing the consumer’s attention primarily (and exclusively) to conventional manufacturing and distribution techniques, but that such physical and economic processes scarcely exhaust the universe of choices about which consumers express strong interest.

scholarly journals Dialogue on Alternating Consciousness: From Perception to Infinities and Back to Free Will

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Janew
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe

Can we trace back consciousness, reality, awareness, and free will to a single basic structure without giving up any of them? Can the universe exist in both real and individual ways without being composed of both? This dialogue founds consciousness and freedom of choice on the basis of a new reality concept that also includes the infinite as far as we understand it. Just the simplest distinction contains consciousness. It is not static, but a constant alternation of perspectives. From its entirety and movement, however, there arises a freedom of choice being more than reinterpreted necessity and unpredictability. Although decisions ultimately involve the whole universe, they are free in varying degrees also here and now. The unity and openness of the infinite enables the individual to be creative while this creativity directly and indirectly enters into all other individuals without impeding them. A contrary impression originates only in a narrowed awareness. But even the most conscious and free awareness can neither anticipate all decisions nor extinguish individuality. Their creativity is secured.

Tennant's Struggle with a “Desperate Task”

1942 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
Graham Frisbee
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Do So

In his essay, “On God and the Absolute,” F. H. Bradley declares that the “assertor of an imperfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming defeat.” The appeal of the second course, even when it is set forth in the spirited and heroic manner of William James, cannot survive a full realization of what is involved in such a prospect. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that most of the more sober-minded theologians who hold the idea of a limited God attempt to do so in the first form suggested by Bradley. F. R. Tennant belongs to this group. And it is his attempt to accomplish the “desperate task” that we propose to examine.

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

Preface to Toward the Concrete

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Wahl
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Alfred North Whitehead ◽  
Great Success ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The Universe

First published in 1932, Vers le concret(“Toward the Concrete”) served as something of a manifesto for a new approach to philosophy in France, one that turned away from idealism and toward the questions that would engage phenomenology and existentialism. The Preface draws out the themes that Wahl sees uniting the three figures discussed in the book’s three chapters: William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel, all the while showing the proximity of these three thinkers to the work of Heidegger. About this work, Jean-Paul Sartre would later write: “What interested us, however, was real men with their labors and their troubles. We cried out for a philosophy which would account for everything, and we did not perceive that it existed already and that it was precisely this philosophy which provoked in us this demand. At that time one book enjoyed a great success among us—Jean Wahl’s Toward the Concrete. … the work pleased us, for it embarrassed idealism by discovering in the universe paradoxes, ambiguities, conflicts, still unresolved.”

Discrimination, Old and New

Outsiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Zachary Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Religious Discrimination ◽  
Common Bond ◽  
The Individual

Chapter 1 examines the stories and cases of three women, each of whom was unsuccessful in her attempt to use civil rights laws to redress an individual wrong. The transition from old to new discrimination is a story about identity. Despite their different jobs and distinct life experiences, the women in Chapter 1 share a common bond. They are outsiders. Discrimination evolves. While it used to be aimed at discrete outsider groups, discrimination is increasingly about the individual. And existing civil rights law is not equipped to deal with this shift. We need a new language to explain modern discrimination. Religious discrimination law holds the key.

Self, Indian theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.S. Rukmani
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Spiritual Energy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Ultimate Principle ◽  
Ultimate Nature

Hindu thought traces its different conceptions of the self to the earliest extant Vedic sources composed in the Sanskrit language. The words commonly used in Hindu thought and religion for the self are jīva (life), ātman (breath), jīvātman (life-breath), puruṣa (the essence that lies in the body), and kṣetrajña (one who knows the body). Each of these words was the culmination of a process of inquiry with the purpose of discovering the ultimate nature of the self. By the end of the ancient period, the personal self was regarded as something eternal which becomes connected to a body in order to exhaust the good and bad karma it has accumulated in its many lives. This self was supposed to be able to regain its purity by following different spiritual paths by means of which it can escape from the circle of births and deaths forever. There is one more important development in the ancient and classical period. The conception of Brahman as both immanent and transcendent led to Brahman being identified with the personal self. The habit of thought that tried to relate every aspect of the individual with its counterpart in the universe (Ṛg Veda X. 16) had already prepared the background for this identification process. When the ultimate principle in the subjective and objective spheres had arrived at their respective ends in the discovery of the ātman and Brahman, it was easy to equate the two as being the same spiritual ‘energy’ that informs both the outer world and the inner self. This equation had important implications for later philosophical growth. The above conceptions of the self-identity question find expression in the six systems of Hindu thought. These are known as āstikadarśanas or ways of seeing the self without rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Often, one system or the other may not explicitly state their allegiance to the Vedas, but unlike Buddhism or Jainism, they did not openly repudiate Vedic authority. Thus they were āstikadarśanas as opposed to the others who were nāstikadarśanas. The word darśana for philosophy is also significant if one realizes that philosophy does not end with only an intellectual knowing of one’s self-identity but also culminates in realizing it and truly becoming it.

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