Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘American Philosophy’

Cosmos, Consciousness and Culture

January 27, 2010 · 3 Comments

It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical American Philosophy and the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment which I have been involved with for 18 years. What I found was that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism had many resemblances to Evolutionary Enlightenment and that the American Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey had developed between them a profound evolutionary philosophy.

I have been both stunned and humbled to learn that so many ideas that I have devoted myself to and had thought were new actually had a long and rich history in American Philosophy. I also have had the benefit of outstanding comments from so many of my readers and have refined developed and even (gasp) altered my thinking all along the way. The path over the year was not exactly what I expected. We took a few long detours into very critical and important philosophical questions. One of these was the question of freewill vs. determinism. With the help of our friend Carl we were able to take a long look at this perennial philosophical question and to get help by drawing on Carl’s college professor B. F. Skinner a truly original and brilliant American thinker. I also took us on a related excursion into the possible limits of science and certain rigidities that can arise in scientific thinking. We also had many changes to explore the sweeping movements of history that have so much impact on how thought develops through time.

For me the big revelation over this past year was seeing how Peirce, James and Dewey had constructed the beginnings of a comprehensive philosophy that attempted to explain the evolution of cosmos, consciousness and culture. Although the ideas of each of these thinkers includes some of each of these three elements, it is also true that they can fairly neatly be categorized based on the emphasis in their work as follows. Peirce emphasized an exploration of the cosmos. James emphasized the evolution of human consciousness. And Dewey emphasized the evolution of culture.

Peirce was convinced that a fully encompassing theory of evolution would have to explain not only the evolution of life, but the evolution of the universe as a whole including the development of time and space, life and consciousness, and all of the natural and physical laws that currently exist. Peirce explained how the right combination of spontaneity, continuity and the tendency to form habits was enough to explain the evolution of everything else. 

James taught that the human experience of consciousness flows forward in ever emerging “drops” of awareness. He described “The Will to Believe” as the mechanism that controls the unfolding of our destiny. We each are free to chose what we believe in and what we believe in will determine the choices that we make and the future that we create.  

Dewey  recognized that objects that are named always have as part of their meaning a sign that points toward some possible future. Objects such as these, that can be either physical or mental objects, make up culture, and the energy and activity of people that live in any particular culture will tend to flow in whatever direction the objects of that culture are pointing. Changing the objects in a culture becomes the mechanism through which culture can be changed.  

Together these three thinkers outlined the broad contours of an American Evolutionary Philosophy. Over the course of this year it seemed more and more obvious that the contemporary ideas contained in Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have deep roots in the intellectual development of American Philosophy. So where do we go from here? With a year’s worth of foundation set I want to turn now to a more detailed look at just what Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have inherited, directly and indirectly, from the great tradition of American Philosophy.

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Our Evolutionary Crisis

October 3, 2009 · 20 Comments

I certainly want to continue with our discussion and I want to explore the profound ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce further, but first I wanted to say a few words in general that I have been thinking about. As some of you may know I have been a student of a spiritual teacher named Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment for the past 16 years. During that time I have become very close to Andrew and have become in a sense a teacher myself. I am not writing this blog to attract people to Evolutionary Enlightenment (although I am happy if they find it.) I am writing this blog because I feel that life on this planet is in the midst of an evolutionary crisis. This blog is my attempt to explain what I think I have learned about our evolutionary crisis and the way to get beyond it.

The evolutionary crisis that we face stems from the fact that the circumstance of the world we live in are changing faster than we are. The pace of evolution is increasing beyond the current ability of human beings to change in response. As a result, we find ourselves unable to effectively meet global and even personal challenges. I know I often feel like I am still working on yesterday’s problems only to realize that today’s are already upon me. We simply find ourselves unable to adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances.

I believe that the solution to this is a shift in consciousness and by that I mean a fundamental change in how we understand ourselves and the universe we are a part of. That shift, as I understand it, has two stages – that don’t necessarily come in a particular order. The first is a shift that is characterized by unity. This is a shift from seeing a universe made of separate objects of which we are one, to seeing a universe that is one whole which includes separate parts; more like an organic system. The embrace of a higher unity that includes the separate parts has long been explored in different ways by most of the great spiritual traditions and the worlds philosophies and the sciences.

The second stage of the shift involves the evolutionary awakening to the fact that we and the universe we live in are not static. We are changing and evolving constantly. The evolving nature of who we are has not been explored by humanity as deeply or for as long as the exploration of our fundamental unity. In fact it has only been over the past few hundred years that this investigation has really taken shape in the west. And it is only since the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection that we can really say that the modern investigation of evolution has begun. I personally feel that this investigation of what it means to shift from a mainly separate and static relationship to life, to an essentially whole and evolving one is the key to the future. That is why I am writing this blog and why I appreciate so much those of you that join me either by reading or, even better, by contributing your own thoughts and insights. I appreciate having the opportunity to be challenged and to learn from you as I hope you do from me.

When I discovered a few years ago how much American Philosophy revolved around the question of, “How do we adapt to the new truth of evolution?” I nearly fell over. I couldn’t believe that well over a century of deep thinking had already gone into this investigation, just within the relatively limited circle of American Philosophy. As I have tried to study this philosophy it has become clear to me that there is a great deal more to learn. But in the end I think that learning is only as valuable as it helps us think clearly for ourselves. I am not a scholar, as most of you have undoubtedly already realized, but I am a firm believer in the power of philosophy and the human spirit. I don’t believe that we can change our world without changing the way we think, but I do believe that we can change our world if, in the midst of our Evolutionary Crisis, we find it within ourselves to change the way we think.

Thank you for participating in this journey with me.

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A New American History

April 7, 2009 · 1 Comment

I was a primary and secondary school teacher for many years and one of the things that I taught was history. It always occurred to me that the way we taught history, the events and people we chose to pull out of the continuum of time, was arbitrary. At the same time, we are so consistent about those choices from book to book and school to school, that a reinforced solidity emerges. The way we teach history becomes history, it creates our national mythos – the story we know and tell about ourselves and who we are.

Most Americans know that Columbus discovered America, that Virginia was the first American Colony and that the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts. They know about the Revolutionary War, The Civil War and America’s part in World Wars I and II, and later the Korean War and Vietnam.  We also tend to know about the Industrial Revolution and its effect on American life and the dismantling of the slave economy. In short our national mythos is one of colonization, militarization and industrialization.

We throw a few presidents and statesmen in along the way and that is the story we know about ourselves. What is largely missing is our Intellectual History. We don’t know the story of how our way of thinking and our worldview has developed. We don’t know the story of the evolution of the American mind.  And to my thinking this is a huge omission.

American history as I have seen it taught (and taught it myself) at the primary and secondary levels is almost completely devoid of a story of our nation’s great thinkers and philosophers – unless they had political significance. If a child grows up and you don’t tell them about some part of their history they will never know it existed.

I often find that when I talk with people about the rich history of American philosophy. Initially there is often delight at the discovery, but it soon becomes clear that person doesn’t know if the fact that American philosophy exists has anything to do with them. After all they didn’t know anything about it.

It does have to do with us. It is part of our cultural heritage because our way of thinking and our shared values have been partially shaped by that philosophical history – whether we knew about it or not. At the same time it is not much value to us until we do know about it. If we are unaware of our culturally held values they simply become an unconscious lens through which we see the world.

When we learn about the intellectual heritage that has shaped our view of the world it takes many of our most fundamental “American” attitudes out of the realm of the unconscious and makes us aware of them. In this way we become more aware of the ideas and attitudes that are always guiding our decision making and we become more free in our thinking. We can also begin to consciously understand and appreciate the philosophical perspective that has grown up here in our own nation and take responsibility in our own way for developing it – maybe not by becoming a philosopher, but by putting the best elements of that philosophy into action and creating a better future as a result.

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What every American needs to know about American Philosophy

March 26, 2009 · 3 Comments

For those of us who were educated in the American school system, we all had to study American history. In our history classes we learned about the founding fathers, their ideas and how they led the American Revolution. We also learned about the Civil War and how the institution of Slavery was finally dismantled. We learned about the Industrial Revolution, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. And we probably made a few stops at other wars and events along the way that most of us forgot.

In short we learn about the military, economic and industrial history of America, but how many of us ever learned much about our nation’s philosophical history?

And yes, we do have one.

The American nation is a fascinating experiment in philosophy. America was part of “The New World” and the people who first arrived here (and for the purpose of this short discussion I will leave the issue of the Native Americans aside) found themselves in a struggle for survival. The consciousness that emerges in those on the frontier is part of the bedrock of the American mindset.

On the frontier what is most important is what you can do; knowledge is useful because of what it can help you accomplish. In this atmosphere philosophy tends to be a luxury. And so deep in the American psyche there is an anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual bias. As Americans we pride ourselves on being can-do, no-nonsense, straight-shooters, but not necessarily as complex and profound thinkers.

Then came “The American Founders” – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, James Madison, etc. These men were fueled by the exciting new ideas that had exploded through French thinkers especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the European Enlightenment in general. They had new thoughts about the powers and rights of the individual and how society should be built by and in service of individuals, not a ruling class that lorded over it.

So into the frontier consciousness you add the philosophy of the enlightenment and you get the impossible event of a successful American revolution. Still, as proud as Americans may be of the events that brought this country into existence we remain surprisingly unaware of the development of our philosophical ideas since that time.

After the American Revolution it is probably true that for the majority of people philosophy revolved around the frontier philosophy of utility and common sense. This philosophy is captured perhaps most notably in the pithy sayings penned by Benjamin Franklin such as: a penny saved is a penny earned; early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise; etc. Others, who had the luxury and the interest to explore philosophical ideas may have studied the great works of European thinkers and translated and interpreted those ideas for America.

But something else started to happen as well – a genuine American philosophy began to form in the hearts and minds of a few ingenious and inspired individuals who had the courage to break from the ideas of Europe and carve out a way of looking at the world that had a uniquely American flavor.

The story of how those ideas developed and the people who developed them is fascinating and profound. The ideas themselves sit deep in the consciousness of all Americans – they are part of our inherited collective perspective on life. Sometimes they lead to our most noble acts and other times to actions either by individuals or by our nation that most of us would agree represent far less than our most noble aspirations. The filter of our culturally inherited values and ideas can be an asset or a liability depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in, but we must be aware of that filtering mechanism before we can tell the difference.

What every American needs to know about American Philosophy is that we have one. That it is rich. It is complex. It can be either an asset or an obstacle. And most importantly that it is already a part of who we are and how we think. If we strive to understand it we will be in the best possible position not only to use it, but also to develop it toward more and more splendid forms.

This blog is devoted to an ongoing exploration of that genuinely American Philosophy; how it developed, how it can be seen in action (good and bad) today, and how we can make much better use of it by understanding it deeply and putting it into conscious service of our highest ideals.

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Audio: Two Generations of American Philosophy, Part 1

February 28, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Recently I gave a talk about certain aspects of the history of American Philosophy and the contemporary work of Andrew Cohen and his philosophy of Evolutionary Enlightenment. I intend to publish that talk in a series of which this audio is the first installment.

In this first part of the talk I speak about what I see as some of the fundemental elements of the American charactor and wherre those elements might have come from. I go on to describe some of the major figures in two different generations of American philosophers. The first generation includes Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists and the second generaton includes William James and the pragmatists. Around both of these philosophical movements there were a number of significant individuals and groups at work and in a few minutes I try to outline both.

To play click on the link below.

 

 

 

  (This audio is 10 minutes long.)

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual but not Religious

February 11, 2009 · 5 Comments

It is not uncommon today to find certain segments of society in America and even more so in Europe who would describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. After The Enlightenment in Europe, science and reason began to increasingly dominant the modern mind leaving religion and spirituality on the defensive throughout the Western World. Some defenders of faith argued that this trend would lead to a decent into evil, others developed powerful metaphysical arguments to prove the existence of that which could not be seen, still others tried to find “alternative” ways of thinking that could create a marriage of science and spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James are two of the leading figures who attempted to carve out a place for spirituality in America in between scientific materialism and religious orthodoxy. The ideas of these two thinkers led to the creation of what can be see as an alternative spiritual tradition in America. They inspired New Thought Churches throughout America and the spiritual movements of the 1950’s and 60’s, not to mention the “East meets West” spiritual paths that have become so popular in America. More recently the Integral Spiritual approach and Evolutionary Spirituality have immerged continuing some of the core ideas and attitudes put in place by Emerson and James.

Perhaps this particular stream of alternative spiritual thought can most directly be traced back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous “Divinity School Address.” In the summer of 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson was invited to speak to the senior class at the Harvard Divinity School where he himself had been trained as a minister years before. On that day he gave a blistering speech creating an uproar among the spiritual and religious elite of New England that didn’t completely die down even a after a year.  In fact it, was a blowup that had been building because of tensions between the established orthodoxy of the Calvinist church, the more liberal Unitarians, and brazen young Transcendentalists like Emerson. Emerson’s unabashed attack of the church, in one of their own strongholds, to a group of newly trained ministers, was more than enough to catalyze a spiritual explosion.

Emerson addressed a small audience of students, friends and Harvard officials, delivering a searing indictment of a Christianity that he accused of robbing human beings of their natural divinity. Emerson saw Jesus not as especially blessed but as the greatest example (so far) of what all human’s could and should aspire to.  In his own worlds:

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world.”

Emerson accused the church of two errors, the first was that the church had elevated the figure of Jesus Christ to a station above the rest of humanity creating a cult of personality around him.

“Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.”

In doing this the church had relegated the holy to something that had happened in the past and did not recognize that true spiritual emancipation was available for all of us here and now.

“Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticulate voice.”

The second error of the church leads directly from the first – its preachers are largely uninspired by authentic spiritual experience and teach the gospel largely from an intellectual understanding and not living revelation. Because of this they are unable to provoke a genuine experience of the divine in others.

“The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.”

Emerson felt it was his duty to encourage this new generation to strike out on their own, to find their own path to the immediacy of Truth and look towards nature to find spirit as it exists today and not into scripture to see how it was understood by others in the past.

“Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.”

It seems in reading Emerson’s Divinity School Address that he probably should have anticipated how enormously inflammatory it would be. Yet Emerson never quite seemed to understand how he could have caused such a tremendous public backlash. The Divinity School Address was given two years after the publication of “Nature” and the stir surrounding it propelled him on a trajectory that would make him an international superstar of the spirit. He had effectively carved out a niche, and a pretty good sized one at that, for a true and serious path to spirituality outside of any religious tradition.

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The Pluralistic Universe of William James

February 1, 2009 · 2 Comments

William James, the great American philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th century, was pushing into some fascinating intellectual territory with his ideas about reality. What he was pushing into was a truly post-metaphysical view of reality – a view that popular contemporary thinkers like Integral theorist Ken Wilber and spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen also ascribe to.

A metaphysical world view is one in which it is assumed that some objective reality exists already independent of us. This reality is what we assume to live in and philosophy has been occupied throughout history largely in an endeavor to find and verify the nature of this reality.  James held a mistrust of any metaphysical absolutisms about what is real. He did acknowledge that as long as we are considering only lower forms of reality – inanimate objects and life that has not achieved self-conscious awareness – then metaphysical assumptions about reality are adequate. But at the level of human life the problem with metaphysical worldviews in James’ opinion is that they separate human experience and human action from reality.

Let’s use an example, silly though it may be, to illustrate my understanding of James’ idea. Imagine that you have lost a book and then you walk into a room and see it lying on a table. You immediately feel relief because you have found your book. If you then walk up to the book and look inside it and see that your name is not printed inside the front cover you realize that it is not your book.

To James the universe is created moment by moment in an additive process. So when you first saw your book on the table you existed in a universe in which you had found your book. Then when you realized your name was not in it you found yourself in a different universe in which the book was still lost.

Most of us would say James was daft. There is obviously only one universe and in that universe the book was never found. You had only mistakenly thought it was. James would say no, because your experience of reality will be the basis for your decisions and actions and so it is real. The fact that later you realize you have made a mistake is not going to change the very real consequences of your previous actions. If we are only talking about a book on a table it is hard to imagine why this would matter, but if we are talking about a metaphysical believe in the fact that only my God is the true God then James knew that the consequences of actions based on beliefs like this could be devastating.

Our example of a book on a table might be silly, but it is illustrative enough to give us a sense of the experience of reality that was driving James’ philosophical ideas. To him reality was not a static thing that we exist in, it is an ever created process that emerges before us in the experience of each moment. In James’ view human life is the edge of a new universe where all of our ideas, beliefs, perceptions, motivations and attitudes merge with the objective fact of our environment and create the experience of the next moment. In this way realty squeezes into existence through our moment to moment experience. And our response in action to every moment creates the effects on the next moment that then mix again with our ideas, beliefs, perceptions, motivations and attitudes to create the next experiential moment of the universe.

To James we are at the very  edge of an ever creative universe. Our experience is an inseparable part of the emerging reality of that universe. Our actions are a driving conscious influence on the creation of the universe. There is no metaphysical reality that already exists that our life is unfolding in, we are creating reality as we go along. This was the relentlessly creative universe – or as he preferred multiverse – that James believed we all lived in.

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My Re-introduction to American New Thought

January 31, 2009 · 1 Comment

My interest in the American philosophical tradition re-emerged a few years ago when Andrew Cohen – my spiritual teacher and the person for who I serve as personal assistant – was asked to speak at the Concord School of Philosophy. That school is a rustic wooden structure of one room with a small stage. It was built behind the house of Bronson Alcott a great American educational reformer of the 19th century who was also a close friend and associate of the American mystic Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

In that building Allcott, Emerson (until he was too ill), and a host of other prominent thinkers met each summer between 1879 and 1888 to give lectures and discuss matters of philosophy and spirituality. Andrew and I arrived early and spent some time on our own inside the small room of the school. We both felt the physically tangible presence of the seriousness and profundity of the inquiry that had happened there so many years ago.

 

After this I began re-reading Emerson who had been one of my first spiritual heroes and I discovered the rich vein of alternative thought that has run a parallel course along side the more mainstream history of America. Even in Emerson’s time (1803 -1882) they were using the term “New Thought” to describe their ideas and ideals.

 

For the past few years my reading of American philosophy has moved from Emerson and the “Transcendentalists” of the 19th century, to William James and the “Pragmatists” of the early 20th century. And everything that I have read has helped me gain a deeper understanding of the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment that I practice today and to see that teaching in the context out of which it has emerged.

 

I hope that this blog will serve as a “virtual” Concord School of Philosophy for all who share my passion for Truth, Meaning and Purpose.

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