Today we're switching gears yet again, and we're gonna be talking this week about two thinkers who were very different from one another and working in different time periods. It's something we haven't done before, and in some ways it violates the historical framework of this course a little bit. But I wanna introduce all of us to a key theme that emerged in our conversations about Virginia Woolf last week. And that is the theme of the ordinary, or the theme of the everyday. Remember when we talked about To the Lighthouse I emphasized that one of the things Lily realizes in the course of the novel, Lily the character who's a painter, is that this quest for certainty, this quest for the absolute, is not her quest as an artist. Her quest is to grasp these little illuminations as matches struck in the dark. Not the grand epiphany, but the intimacy with the ordinary. And we're going to continue with that theme of the ordinary and the everyday, and how to get close to it this week with two thinkers who have been so important for contemporary philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ludvig Wittgenstein. Now Emerson is a key figure in American intellectual history, cultural history, but until pretty recently wasn't seen as a key figure in philosophy. Emerson is a often flowery writer. He's a writer of [LAUGH] wonderful sentences. One of the most quotable authors in American history. You see his nostrums on the gates of universities, on greeting cards, in sermons by ministers all over the country, but not a thinker who was used as philosophy became more professionalized in the 20th century. Harold Bloom, the great literary critic wrote about Emersons' defining almost American religion of self-reliance. And Stanley Cavell, philosopher for many years at Harvard University, has emphasized Emerson's philosophical contribution to American culture. His philosophical contribution as a author whose importance rivals that of Nietzsche and of Heidegger, both of whom Stanley Cavell has argued in a series of works were influenced by Emerson. But for our purposes, I want to just show you a couple of things and two of Emerson's great essays that bear upon this theme of the ordinary and the everyday, a shift away from the modernist quest for foundations for the really real towards another motive of thinking and engagement. Emerson was born during the presidency of [LAUGH] Thomas Jefferson so very early in the 19th century. Lived a long life, he was at some point a minister and left the pulpit because of a crisis of faith, not so much in the divine being but in institutionalized religion, and became an essayist and a lecturer, really long before the days of Coursera. Everson had audiences of thousands of people around the country who were following his intellectual excursions via lectures in towns across the United States. His departure from the enlightenment tradition as it had been imported into the United States is really key for us, and I just wanna say a word or two about that. The enlightenment tradition in the United States was very much indebted to the Lockean Tradition that we spoke about earlier in the semester, that is the view that all of our ideas come from sensations that are, that we are the receptacle of stimuli from the world and that our ideas and our beliefs and our work comes as we process the stimulation, the sensation that comes into us. In some ways, thinking of us as a blank slate and having these impressions made upon us by the world. That's the tradition that the American progressive thinkers, enlightenment thinkers let me call them the beginning of the 19th century, adopted. Emerson has a different view. Emerson's view is a kinda activist mind, if you will. For him, experiences in just receiving the world, you know, you get, oh, my, someone hit me. I know now this thing hurts, no. Emerson's view is that the mind goes out into the world. We make our experience in an active way. Now you remember there's some cont in there, right? That we can only know what we make. For Emerson it's key that experience comes not by just bumans being receptacles, but humans creating experience by actively living in the world. And I've asked you to read one of two essays this week of either experience or self reliance, and I want to say a few words about both of these essays. We're starting off with the essay Experience. You'll see in the beginning of the essay that Emerson deals with the subject of grief. And for Emerson this is important because shortly before penning this essay, he had lost his beloved son, and the death of his son was certainly a trauma for Emerson, and he reflected upon what the meaning of this traumatic event was, and here's a quotation that we use in the course. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But Emerson goes on to say, "The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is." Skipping a little bit. "An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with." "Grief too will make us idealists." And finally, "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature." Now, I wanna pause here. This is lots of ideas that are important for us in the modern and the postmodern, in this quotation. There are moods in which we court suffering in the hopes that at least here we shall find reality. You know what Emerson's saying here is that there are times in our lives when we think that we're living a kind of banal existence, everything's routine, that you know, we go to work every day, or we go to school every day, we have our meals at the same time, we see the same members of our family, our friends, our spouses, our lovers, whatever depending on our situation, and after a while we realize we're not feeling things, it's just going through life, going through the motions we might say, right? And sometimes in such moods we want a crisis. You want something big to happen, even if it's a bad thing because it make you feel more alive, more vital. If you had some crisis, if you had a grief you would at least wake up to the world because you're living in the world without waking up to it. This is what Emerson's talking about. But Emerson cautions, he says the only thing that grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. So when you look into grief to give you the really real, if we can use that phrase here, wake you up to the world. He says that seems to be a mistake. Emerson goes on and says, an innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at. Grief will make us idealists. What he's saying here is that there are times when we think that we are away from the world. And we hope that some huge event happens, even a horrible event, that will make us at least feel the world. That we are not apart from the truth of the world. But in fact, it's a mistake to think you need some huge experience, some trauma to wake you up to the world. Emerson says, I grieve that grief can teach me nothing nor carry me one step into real nature. We don't or we shouldn't need some wound [LAUGH] to make us feel alive. We shouldn't need, this is what Emerson's saying, we shouldn't need to be wounded to feel alive, we are alive, how do we wake up to our every day existence. What do we see, Emerson says how do we experience. He writes, in 289 in my edition, we animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. What does this mean? We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Again, it should remind you of Cont. It should remind you of Cont. Who said we only know what we make we make with our minds. Remember I told you for Kant? Here they are my handy space time [LAUGH] glasses, remember? Oh now I can make sense of the world. My mind constructs the world in a reasonable form so that I can know it. Remember Kant? Emerson is saying we animate what we can and we see only what we animate. Even our sensation. Even our sensation, it comes from an activist mind in the world. We make the world alive to us. We enliven, or we enliven the world. And so what he's looking for is what he calls a joyful presentness.
