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American Romanticism and Andrew Cohen
Now that I have outlined some thoughts about Romanticism I want to go back and explore what I do think that Andrew Cohen might have gotten from William James. I do believe that Andrew Cohen picked up something from his reading of William James, but I don’t believe that you can reasonably place his work in the tradition of the Pragmatists. I do believe that there is an American spiritual lineage and an argument can be made for Cohen’s inclusion in it. That is the lineage of American Romanticism.
Romanticism as I have previously discussed has German and English roots. Although it is a loosely defined literary, philosophical and spiritual tradition, I do believe that there are three primary elements of American Romanticism that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, to William James’ philosophy and then to Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment. These elements are:
- A critique of scientific materialism and determinism
- The belief in natural creative forces beyond our ordinary awareness that can be embodied by a realized self
- The conviction that the development of the self is the highest human purpose
These fundamental principles can be seen strongly in the original American Romantics – the New England Transcendentalists. And although William James was a scientifically trained modernist, the ideas of Emerson, his godfather seemed in the end to have lodged themselves deep in the heart of James’ thinking as well. Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment are also characterized by these fundamental ideas.
My research into American philosophy began six years ago when I read some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings and found that his spiritual teachings bore an uncanny resemblance to the teachings of Andrew Cohen. As I read more of Emerson and then William James I saw that there was a thread that ran through their thinking that connected them to Andrew Cohen. I now recognize it as the line of American Romanticism. All three critiqued scientific materialism and determinism. All three believed in a creative reality beyond our ordinary awareness. And perhaps most importantly all three believed that we actually choose who we become and that self-development is the ultimate purpose of human life.
The following quotation from William James’ first and arguably his greatest work “The Principles of Psychology” convey his belief in the human ability to self create.
“The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man’s entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? — his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become.”
This sentiment would have been well received by Emerson and it is also reflected in these words from Andrew Cohen.
“…in the end, you are always choosing to be the person that you are. You are making conscious and unconscious choices in every moment that determine what actions you will take and what impact you will have on the world around you.”
And so I feel confident that at least in a broad and loose sense I can place Andrew Cohen in an American tradition of Romantic thinkers.
What I found lately is that some connections to romantics as you mention them are found in Whitehead. It is interesting that both De Quincey and Wilber, who are very different in their conclusions, point at him as an important source.
Whitehead starts with describing speculative philosophy as a logical system to interpret every element of our experience; everything we are conscious of.
Whitehead describes that the philosophy of organism is closely allied to Spinoza’s schema of thought except that e.g. morphological description is replaced by description of dynamic process.
Spinoza: every separate part in nature harmonizes with the whole; there is coherence between all parts. A molecule consists of atoms and keeps a certain order: a molecule connects with other molecules and creates a more complex body i.e. the blood and so on.
Every ultimate actuality embodies in its own essence a principle of unrest, namely its becoming. ‘Becoming’ is a creative advance into novelty. Potentiality passes into realization; it is internally determined and externally free. Spinoza’s ‘modes’ become ‘actualities’. The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process of any actual entity involves other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity receives its explanation. In this system of organism the ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; with Spinoza the ultimate is termed God or the Absolute, which has a final reality.
Spinoza: the natural order of the bigger whole determines the nature and activity of its parts. This bigger Whole is God. The parts in nature (incl. humans) change all the time (i.e. they die), but it doesn’t influence the perfection of the whole/ God or Nature. The One Substance (God or Nature) expresses itself in endless ways and things which are all united. God is Everything that is, both matter and spirit. These are the only attributes we know of God, because we are part of it ourselves: it is God in Creating (matter) and God in Thinking (spirit).
Whitehead: the ‘consequent nature of God’, evolves in relationship with the evolving world. Whitehead connects ‘creativity’ with the Aristotelian ‘matter’. Creativity has no character of its own, just like Aristotelian matter is without character of its own.
Aristotle: The theory of form and matter is about the division of potentiality and actuality. Matter is potential form: what we would call ‘evolution’ is when matter takes more and more form. The more form is has, the more actual it is.
Whitehead (p.348-349) : God and the world are two contrasted opposites, in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each diversity there are two concrescent poles of realization: the ‘physical’ and the ‘conceptual’. For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the world the physical is prior to the conceptual. God and the world stand opposite to each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each temporal occasion embodies God and is embodied in God.
In Gods nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the world: in the worlds nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness –the Apotheoses of the world.
God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the union of vision seeking physical multiplicity; the world is the multiplicity of finites, actualities seeking a perfected unity. God is primordially one, namely, he is the primordial unity of relevance to the many potential forms; in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity which the primordial unity absorbs into its own unity. The world is primordial many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occasion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the primordial character
I left out an alinea because the post was so long, but it connects to the first and last point about the romantics. The connection of this post might not be so clear; I looked what Whitehead said about creativity because I think it is all very connected. I think the difference is that the romantics did not talk about connectedness and mutual influence etc. or the process in the way Whitehead does.
this is the missing line about speculative philosophy:
It has a rational side and an empirical side; the true method of discovery is like a flight of an airplane; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation by rational interpretation. Imaginative rationalization might supply the differences which direct observation lacks. E.g. it is a remarkable characteristic of the history of thought that branches of mathematics developed under the pure imaginative impulse, finally received their important application.