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Emerson & James in Defense of Individual Greatness
In 1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a book that he called Representative Men. In this book he explains that great individuals represent possibilities of higher ways of being. These extraordinary individuals have the power to inspire others to reach for equal greatness in themselves through their heroic encouragements. As to humanities indebtedness to these great individuals he says, “Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them… The race goes with us on their credit.” This emphasis on individual greatness as the driver of human progress gives Emerson’s ideas a particularly, although not exclusively, American flavor. It is interesting here to note that Emerson was influenced by the philosophy of George Hegel. Hegel, like Emerson, also believed in a transcendent Absolute intelligence and saw the advancement of humanity in terms of increasing manifestation of this absolute mind in society through time. Karl Marx was a contemporary of Emerson and was also influenced by Hegel, but where Emerson saw individual greatness as the driving engine of cultural progress, Marx saw social and economic forces as the main shaper of human destiny. Emerson’s thinking became foundational to the American free-market economy, while Marx’s ideas became the roots of socialism.
William James similarly saw individual greatness as the source of cultural change. In his essay Great Men and Their Environment James directly examines how extraordinary individuals affect the progress of cultural evolutionary. He opens the essay with the question what are the causes that make communities change from generation to generation? And he concludes that, the difference is due to the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their initiatives, and their decisions. James believed that the genius of Darwin was his recognition that individual difference is the source of change in the process of evolution. The environment plays a role in evolution by determining which individual changes will survive and thrive, but the environment is not the cause of those changes. Here again we can note that James had a quarrel with Hegel (He had a similar argument with Emerson) this time over Hegel’s belief that a transcendent Absolute mind was gradually manifesting into reality. For James this led to an unacceptably deterministic view of evolution. His belief that individual choice was the driver of evolution and his almost militant allegiance to freewill allowed him to navigate passed any determinism.
Both Emerson and James honored and encouraged greatness in all human endeavors, but they held spiritual greatness as the most transformative form. Spiritual greatness is the domain of the mystic and according to Emerson leads us into the world of morals or of will. “I count him a great man,” Emerson says, “who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.” The mystic is a saint whose life becomes a living example of goodness and moral clarity for the world. Along distinctly similar lines James writes in The Varieties that “The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers… the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave-crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerunners.”
Reading your blog Krishnamurti came to my mind. On the one side he renounced like so many others the path that had been laid open for him: he renounced being the world leader of the Theosophical society, what he was raised to be, just like Buddha renounced being a worldly king; Spinoza renounced being a Jewish Intellectual; Kierkegaard renounced, to his very regret, to be married; Gandhi renounced Western culture. I think all these cases and many more are clear examples of ‘ intuition’: they all focused on one path en than they HAD to choose something different even though it mostly took their whole life to put it into words or theory.
What is so interesting about Krishnamurti is that he also renounced being a special individual. He referred to himself as ‘ the speaker’ stating clearly that it was not about him, or ‘the individual’ it was about the intuition itself.
A novelty in consciousness that is trying to express itself through an individual.
I always wondered why so many intellectuals came in pairs: Plato/Aristotle, Husserl/Heidegger, Freud/Jung or for example: at the same time Darwin wanted to publish his findings, someone else had come to the same conclusion; it also seems that Bergson and James, independedly or not, came to the same conclusions -there are many more examples of that, in the time of Socrates/Plate/Aristotle in other parts of the world others great individuals laid foundations for great philosophies like : Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tse, or to say it different: philosophy was founded 2500 years ago, evolution was discovered 150 years ago and so forth. Another example is the one Jeff gave: Hegel both influencing Marx and Emerson who totally came to different conclusions
It seems like waves of novelties that came through individuals. I had to think about our age of consumption, where an astronomer told that his most brilliant students never took up the carrier of astronomer just because no money could be made there. He described how these guys choose to be marketers or something owning houses, cars, families, and turning dumb within a few years.
In Greece slaves did all the work, in the past ages rich people did not have to work. It is not only that people need to be open to intuition; they also need time and freedom to evolve. It seems collective intelligence is a way to disclose those novelties in consciousness much easier because it is much easier to leave the conditionings of the brain behind and be open to intuition.
I would like to say a little more about Krishnamurti, and also about another trio of celebrities Locke, Berkely and Hume. I am still ‘ thinking about thinking’ and Krishnamurti especially is against personal and cultural conditioned thinking. But what he says, and that is why I connect it to Hume, that intelligence is the ability to perceive reality, to understand and distinguish, but also the ability to watch and to combine these things and act. This is exactly what Hume is talking about: it is impossible to know reality as it is, but, and here I go back to Krishnamurti, real intelligence is observing without any bias, any conditioned idea, just observing, or like he says somewhere: ‘ looking at your wife as if it is the first time you see her’ .I think this is where most of us would agree. The idea that we see reality as it is, is an illusion, but, what I read somewhere else: language & thinking is the way we communicate, if we want to have anything to do with this world, this the way we connect. And the ability to see clearly, that is real intelligence and the strange thing in our complicated society is that we have to see all the layers of conditioning that make up our thinking. Of course Enlightenment means freedom of this all, to see the illusion of all these structures, some lucky people just wake up and are free. But to go back to Krishnamurti, he says, ‘ real intelligence asks for impersonal observation, and not only understand but also be able to talk about it. It also means collecting as much information as possible, even though it will be never complete. Intelligence is accompanied by hesitation, perception and the clarity of rational, impersonal thinking. To be able to see all the complexity at once, that is the highest intelligence. This has nothing to do with being someone in the world or success. It is interesting that he says: To be able to be (as said above) also means to become..it has nothing to do with filling a void, Normally we try to get away from ‘what is’ . Analytical thinking is always a process towards solving a problem, it is connected with the conditioned brain. ‘ Time’ is the essence of this. Is there observation free from time and thinking. Thinking is time, experience, knowledge and memory. It means total observation, without thinking. All of ones attention is with the observation. this is the clue, which I always felt during group communication; total observation/listening frees one from memory, from ‘ I’ , from conditioning. Than a different energy appears, free from time and thinking.
At this point ‘ deep spirit, cracking the noetic code’ of De Quincey came to mind: the discussion starts with the difference between ‘ materialist thinking’ (brains produce thoughts) and ‘ mind is everywhere in the cosmos’; the ‘ intelligence of the world seeks expression’ , we are estranged from the core of our own consciousness; integrating intuition and intellect.
We observe (also as scientific method) with our five senses. We focus on parts of reality that can be known. But how do we know what we know is real? (Hume!). We do not know how the brain ‘transforms’ nerve signals into experience. Science is based on the senses, it happens in consciousness, but consciousness is extrasensory. So science can tell us nothing about consciousness.’Science is superstition because because it believes that the senses are the only guides to knowledge. And there is absolutely no scientific evidence for such a belief’ . ‘ Reality is an illusion’ , the world we live in is not the real world, it is a system of images and ideas generated and manipulated by people society turns to for leadership. It is a systematic brainwashing of the masses by a combination of biased history, academics, religion, media, industry etc. ‘ Modern western culture mistakes the shadows of the cave for what is real’ . The ‘cave’ is our collective trance. It is a conflict in consciousness itself. Western culture is infected by reason. We have to correct it with intuition and noetic knowing. We need to learn to ‘feel our thinking’. ‘ Noetics’ goes beyond our scientific brainwashing; it refers to knowledge beyond normal senses and reason. It is immediate, direct, powerful; it is about being or becoming, it is directed inward at the unfolding of consciousness or experience itself. It dives in the heart of reality by tapping into the universal web of connections. Here De Quincey points to Plato, Plotinus, Jung and Teilhard de Chardin and William James. The noetic code translates the wisdom of the world soul into messages we can understand in our own souls by feeling.
It means being completely ‘open’ for whatever happens, to ‘free yourself up to experience deeper intelligence and creativity; this is where we know that choice is consciousness and consciousness is choice. Every moment of every life is a moment of creation. We’re an expression of the ‘ nowhere’ of pure potential, a creative expression of intelligence and creativity.
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