Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’

American Romanticism and Andrew Cohen

March 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

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:

  1. A critique of scientific materialism and determinism
  2. The belief in natural creative forces beyond our ordinary awareness that can be embodied by a realized self
  3. 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.

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Evolutionary Enlightenment and American Philosophy

October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment

Before continuing with our fascinating discussion I wanted, in the interest of transparency, to tell a little more about my interest in American Philosophy.

The last decades of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in progressive and evolution thinking in both academic as well as popular philosophy. The author Louis Menand in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club attributes this resurgence of progressive, forward-looking thought to the ending of the cold war and links it back to the classic American philosophy of . Today this line of thinking can be found in the increasingly popular literature of Evolutionary Spirituality. Some of the most prominent contemporary proponents of this philosophy are the recently deceased Pragmatismbut enormously influential Fr. Thomas Berry, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, the futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, the author Ken Wilber and my own spiritual mentor Andrew Cohen.

I first encountered Andrew Cohen in November of 1992 when I saw him speak in Cambridge,Massachusetts. At the time he was teaching a somewhat westernized version of an Eastern Enlightenment tradition called Advaita Vedanta. I left his talk intrigued, but honestly feeling that I had not understood anything of what he was saying. I was inspired enough, however, to pick up a copy of his book Enlightenment is Secret and my imagination was soon captivated by the message that I was reading in it. As I understood it, Cohen’s message was devastatingly simple and profound; if you truly want to be free there is nothing in this world that can stop you! What Cohen was pointing to was the deep sense that most of us have of being victimized by the experience of life. We feel burdened by our emotional and psychological experience and often see our ability to make choices as being severely limited by circumstances, social roles and responsibilities, and our personal inadequacies. This sense of limitation, according to Cohen, was an illusion. It was, in fact, a stance, a position that we were freely choosing to adopt in relationship to the complexity of human life. And because it was a position that we were choosing to take, we could just as easily stop choosing it. That was the mysterious key to liberating the human spirit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this notion revolved around one of the central themes that had developed through the history of American Philosophy; the question of freewill and creative potential.

After reading and rereading Cohen’s book I finally had the chance to see him speak again. This time I was determined to walk away with at least some understanding of what he was saying so I resolved to ask him a question about what I was thinking. “I believe what you are writing and speaking about is true.” I stated, “But, where do I find the faith to follow that path and know that everything is going to turn out OK?” I asked. His answer was as devastating simple and direct as his teaching. “Who says everything is going to turn out OK?” he questioned in response and then continued. “If you knew that everything was going to turn out OK you wouldn’t need any faith.” He went on to speak about the nature of risk and human life, but I had already gotten the answer to my question and although it wasn’t necessarily the answer that I had wanted it was the answer that I was looking for. Again, I had no way of knowing it, but my question about faith and Cohen’s implied instance that human life was a risk was also a central theme in American Philosophy. It was, in fact, the central question that propelled the entire career of America’s great psychologist philosopher William James.

In the year’s since my early encounter with Andrew Cohen his teaching has grown and developed enormously. What began as a plea for personal liberation became increasingly couched in an evolutionary philosophy that always considered the liberation of the individual in the context of their power to affect the development of our world. Again this line of thought is in many ways the central organizing notion that unifies the great tradition of American Philosophy. Over the past few years I have read and studied some of the historical development of American thought and have been continually strengthened to learn that the teaching that Andrew Cohen calls Evolutionary Enlightenment is very directly connected to the development of philosophy in America.

Two of the main roots of American Philosophy rushed into this nation during the period of colonization from two streams of thinking that had burst into being during the age of reason. One of these came directly from the scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment that was painting a picture of a world governed not by god, but by natural law. At the same time the Protestant Reformation was removing power from a church that it saw as an unnecessary obstacle to and direct access to the divine. These two lines of thought found their way into the American mind where they were shaped by the utopian ideals and challenges of colonization. The American mind began to take shape in the decades during and after the war for independence and finally came into its own during the cultural and spiritual movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of Concord. The next generation of thinkers were the first American professional philosophers and they created the greatest original American contribution to world philosophy; Pragmatism.

Pragmatism was an evolutionary philosophy that flourished during the early decades of the 20th century as modernism peaked in American culture. After the great depression and two world wars the progressive spirit of modernisms was called into question by many and Pragmatism and the progressive spirit from which it came was temporarily submerged beneath the post-modernist philosophies  and social movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The resurgence of interest in Evolutionary Spirituality today is perhaps a second look at the evolutionary thinking at the heart of American philosophy and a chance to recreate Pragmatism in light of the many lessons learned through the 20th Century.

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Test Drive a Worldview

September 16, 2009 · 7 Comments

To respond to Andy, I knew that I was getting myself into some trouble by oversimplifying and over-generalizing philosophy and breaking it down into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I was lumping things, like logic into epistemology and aesthetics into ethics (which I probably would have been better off calling values theory.) I also regret using the phrase “complete” to describe a philosophical system when in fact “closed” would have better conveyed what I meant.

The point that I was making still intrigues me and it has to do with the nature of what a worldview is. In my last post I argued that if a philosophy dictates “what is real,” “how you determine what is real,” and “how you value what is real,” then it is a closed system. Internally it will be completely consistent, and as long as you “believe” in these three pillars everything (to lift a phrase from Carl) on the inside will look like non-fiction (ie. true) and everything on the outside will look like fiction (ie. not true.)

A worldview is not only a set of ideas or beliefs about the world; it is a complete psycho-emotional mental filter of the world. It is a 360 panoramic view of the real. Your worldview dictates how you think about the world, how you feel about the world and how you respond to the world. It envelops us so that the world from inside what worldview looks and feels completely different than the world seen from inside another.

As I study philosophy I like to try to get inside – to the extent possible – different worldviews and drink them up, appreciating each on its own merit before comparing them one to another. If I read enough and think enough there seems to be a point where I get a glimpse of the world from inside that worldview.

Recently, I have been reading the romantic poets, philosophers and scientists and sometimes I really seem to get a sense of the world they were looking at. It was a world of open and unlimited possibility in which strangely marvelous and unseen natural forces were guiding the movement of life. These natural invisible movements were continuously revealing themselves and there was a sense of awe and wonder at the marvel of life and reality. The Romantic mind has an aversion to too much control over the forces of nature. They prefer a kind of philosophical/spiritual/emotional aikido. They attempt to feel the underlying currents of life and match them in speed and intensity and allow the power of those deeper forces to move them so that they become an instrument of life.

It was this romantic spirit that was so alive in the work of the American Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the other brilliant lights of Concord and New England were blazing Romantic spirits. And look at the wondrous result! Almost all of American culture can be traced to some aspect of their genius. There are four houses on two streets in Concord in which a huge amount of greater American literature was created. We might look at them through a modern lens and find much of their thinking lacking. The question remains if we will be as influential on our future as they have proved to be on theirs.

Rare Personal Aside: I was married this past weekend in the Hillside Chapel that in the late 1800’s housed The Concord School of Philosophy. That school, which ran for 10 consecutive summers, was a gathering place of great minds from across America. My wife (Amy) and I gave a brief talk to all who gathered expressing some of the ways in which we have both been inspired by their romantic pioneering spirit. And so I am thinking a great deal about these romantic thinkers and the world they lived in.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Conception of Nature

August 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The Pragmatic definition of truth may have deep roots in American thought, but to uncover the metaphysical conception that is the ground under Pragmatism’s feet we should look one generation earlier into the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s Transcendentalism, which recognizes intuition and not logic as the ultimate source of wisdom, stands in opposition to many core Pragmatic notions. At the same time, central to Emerson’s thinking are two ideas that would become foundational to the later metaphysics of Pragmatism. The first is the conviction that the inner reality of consciousness has to be continuous with, and non-separate from, the external reality of the world of the senses. The second is the conviction that individuals have the freedom to make choices that will control their destiny and unleash their true creative potential.

The connection between the early Pragmatists and Emerson was deep and intimate. Of the three most significant originators of American Pragmatism, two had fathers who were close associates of Emerson. Charles Peirce’s father, Benjamin Peirce, a professor at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, and William James’s father, Henry James Sr. a converted Swedenborgian, and a self-styled devotee of Emerson, both orbited in Emerson’s circles. In fact the “Sage of Concord” as Emerson has been called, was said to have visited the James home so often that a room in the house was affectionately referred to as Mr. Emerson’s room.

To consider Emerson’s metaphysical contribution to Pragmatism we should go to 1836, when he published his first book, Nature. In it he described, in his uniquely poetic fashion, an integrated view of man and nature. The word “nature,” as Emerson used it, did not refer to the outside world of animals, plants and landscapes, in the way it is commonly used today. He used it with a connotation more common during his time, to refer to the fundamental essence of things. And in his book he describes his firm belief that the nature of man and the nature of the outside world are one and the same. In the first chapter of Nature, Emerson writes:

Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. 5

Emerson in moments of deepest revelation saw the boundary between inner and outer dissolve and become transparent, revealing a deeper unity between the inner life of human beings and the outer manifestation of the physical world. This is Emerson’s expression of the continuity of reality that was to become central to the evolutionary metaphysics of the Pragmatists. Emerson expressed the same sentiment, again, in his famous American Scholar Address, when he wrote:

He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.

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