post 3

Dan Flood

1) As it turns out my family knew very little of its previous history and had we been asked to go back another generation I might have been out of luck in terms of finding out my history. However, I learned last night that my grandmother’s grandfather was a regular in the British Armed Forces at the time. He had a very small family, a wife and daughter, and lived about two hours from London. He spent most of his time serving away from my family, as he was regularly stationed or off on platoon. Having very few skills and remaining nearly illiterate, the army life offered the best support for his family that he could hope to have achieved. He was also promised a pension for his family should something bad have happened to him. The family as I learned was always in survival mode. Never were they fortunate enough to have an excess or surplus of goods. Unlike today, meals were often extremely small and plain. Although he never was forced into armed combat, I found out that he did serve on the European continent at two different stages of his enlistment. Though the life promised to a man in the army was not grand by any means, it provided a significant consistent stipend, which kept my family going despite his wife working many long hours as a laundry woman. Although there is not much overlap with the Americas, I know the life of an army family at that time must have been much the same. Those enlisted on this side of the Atlantic were fighting a civil war as well as other armed conflicts with Mexico and the like. Many of those military families lived off of the promise of the government wage and spent many a night apart from one another. They too struggled to read and to be able to provide food for their families. Whether it was in Great Britain, or back over here in America, the struggle to care for one’s family led many a man into the dangerous and lonely life of the armed forces.

2) In Self-Reliance Emerson introduced me to a thought process that despises societal progression in so far as it is considered a means to a ‘truth-less’ end. Perhaps the things, which we take for granted and seek to improve upon and leave behind, are in fact the things from which the most knowledge of what is truly important can be gained. He makes this claim that “all men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves” (38, Stuhr). In support of this, he references the great thinkers of every time and posits that the self reliance of these men, their will of individuality I want to call it, is what has separated them from the lost consciousness of society. He claims that no one will become Shakespeare by reading and studying Shakespeare. I contend that his reasoning is poor. I assert that if it were not for the society that surrounded, and in turn, motivated those great thinkers, much that they realized and brought to light would have remained hidden in the darkness. I concede that much can be gained and learned from a life spent living each day, as opposed to one spent learning how others lived. And yet, many if not all of those indubitable truths discovered and brought to life and awareness by the men he mentioned where brought about through reflection or contemplation, or in atonement for the societies of their present day, or those that came before them.

Emerson goes on to claim that, “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration” (38, Stuhr). He sets up polarized examples for how with the passing of time and the progress and innovation of the human spirit just as much knowledge is lost is as gained. I think he trying to say that we lose the greater meanings and greater truths that were available to us when we lived a simpler more survival based life akin to the ‘naked New Zealander.’ He seems to be insisting that we lose the qualities, which help to define us as survivors. It seems to be more likely the case that the knowledge and truths of those things, which became eradicated, were instead imbedded in the very heart of the advancements Emerson rails against. In defense of that position he claims “society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts” (Stuhr, 38). And yet, it seems counterintuitive to say that the farmer loses anything from the advent of the plow and the hitching of it to an ox. Emerson maintains that, “the civilized man has built a coach, but lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun” (Stuhr, 38). He argues for the failure of the faculties of man in response to the advancements (or setbacks for Emerson) in technology, society, thought, education, and the arts. He claims “great genius returns to essential men” and I am left to consider whether his biological implication here is the presence of a ‘genius’ gene encoded in, for Emerson, these great solitary, self-reliant, self-motivated, exclusionary individuals (Stuhr, 39). Is it not possible that the advent of the watch provided for more time available to be spent in defiant isolation and contemplation of the greater truths? If the world finds itself slipping into another Dark Age, I do fear for the future of man who is lost without logic, reason, practicality, and the knowledge of how to read a sundial. I fear that there is more to be lost than gained by separating one’s self from society in favor of a more embolden sense of self, and commitment to thine own mind.

3) Peirce’s philosophy is the outcome of injecting a logically based, mathematically, driven scientist, into the poorly defined and hypothetical realm of greater understanding in everyday life. Philosophy had a long way to go in its evolution as a science for Peirce because of the murky waters in which it remained as long as people were seeking and refuting each other’s absolute truths. Peirce brought a new perspective to philosophical objectivity. From a Post-Kantian perspective objectivity would have to be defined in terms of our experience, as opposed to the previous Cartesian assumption centered on mere personal, individual experience. For Peirce, objectivity could “only mean what we, equipped with certain organic capacities and trained within certain intellectual disciplines, [could] experience” (Stuhr, 49). In contrast with previous thought, Peirce considered it imperative to make explicit the fact that any and all objective inquiry was going to be impacted by the everyday implicit norms that structured our societies. Without these groundbreaking reinterpretations, additions, and increased scrutiny to the study of philosophy, its unlikely that pragmatism, as it is currently understood would be recognizable. When we talk about phenomenology with regard to Peirce, we are talking specifically about the way he understood and construed the world using the same external phenomena available, but instead subjecting said phenomena to ‘ongoing self interrogation and critical dialogue.’ It seems as if Peirce was trying to structure philosophy from a scientific perspective. Peirce saw “the only form of responsible inquiry” as undertaking the “painstaking, ongoing work of formulating, testing, revising, and rejecting hypotheses” (Stuhr, 53). He was constantly quantifying and categorizing everything he encountered in both the physical and the metaphysical world around him. It felt a little bit more like doing philosophy for Peirce than perhaps with some other philosophers just based upon the nature with which he attacked the philosophical questions everyone was trying to answer. As Peirce intimates, “the phenomenological recovery of human experience” is a way of reinterpreting the world around us using the external phenomena making up everyday life and choices, but simply applying a different more categorical, more scientific lens. Such a lens would provide endless, “inexhaustible resources for philosophical reflection” and contemplation (Stuhr, 53).