Whitman about Carlyle

On a list serve that I run I was asked not long ago by a fellow who described himself as an archivist for Alcoholics Anonymous whether I knew of any passage in which William James referred to certain religious experiences as being of the "educational variety."

The AA fellow also mentioned that as he had heard the phrase (he had gotten it second hand) James meant specifically by these experiences of an "educational variety," those that aren't immediate stroke-of-lightning conversions, that represent a gradual turning about.

I couldn't give him a precise use of that phrase. I was reminded of this passage, though, which is a quote from Walt Whitman to which James devotes a footnote in VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. I like the passage and will reproduce it here. You folks can make of it what you will.

"There is apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it is the goal and apex of all education deserving the name) an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hands of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface."

This is part of a critique of Carlyle for the simple reason that Whitman believes Carlyle has never acquired the vision he describes, and thus failed to become a "superior human identity." Carlyle is the "mere optimist" of the final thrust.

I think it may have been what the archivist wanted, because the word "education" is in there twice, and in precisely the sense that would have impressed the founders of AA. Whitman is contrasting "what is called education" with what is truly "worthy of the name."

Also, the archivist had in mind the "educational variety" of experience as a drawn-out process, that Whitman had in mind -- as James was passing along to his reaers -- the notion of a certain intuition as a "goal and apex" of such a process -- which doesn't sound like a one-off stroke of lightning!

Happy Birthday, Thomas Carlyle

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle was born on this day, more than two hundred years ago: 213, to be exact.

His reputation as a philosopher and a man of letters has suffered something of an eclipse in recent decades. He's probably best remembered today as a name to attach to the "great man theory of history," because of this book: http://www.questia.com/read/1444983#|

Carlyle's examples of history-defining heroes in that book?

Mohammed (the hero as prophet), Dante and Shakespeare (the hero as poet), Martin Luther, John Knox (the hero as priest); Johnson, Rousseau, Burns (the hero as man of letters); Cromwell, Napoleon (the hero as King).

Notice the back-and-forth structure there. Carlyle's book starts with religion, proceeds to literature, returns to religion, returns to literature, and only at the end arrives what his first readers may have been impatiently awaiting throughout -- European political history.

But of that another day.

At the peak of his influence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carlyle was chiefly thought of as the author of an odd book called Sartor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored), in which Carlyle poses as an editor trying to reconstruct the life and work of a German "philosopher of clothes" named Diogenes Teufelsdrockh.

It was Carlyle as the author of Sartor that James often approvingly cited. In "The Dilemma of Determinism," for example, Carlyle figures as the great enemy of subjectivism, the voice ("so chaste and sane and strong" James calls it) for the view that it doesn't matter how you feel, what matters is what you do.

So toast Carlyle on his birthday. And tip a tailor.