From Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead:
“One of the happiest times that I know of in the history of mankind,” said he, “was the thirty years, roughly, from 1880 to 1910. I am not suggesting that there were not a great many things which needed changing; but we intended to change them and had set about doing so. For people like us, moderately comfortable, the conditions were ideal — not too much money, engrossing work to be done, and a sense of purpose and progress in the world.”
New at IWP Books: Science, Liberty and Peace (1947) by Aldous Huxley.
From Concerning Women (1926) by Suzanne La Follette:
The dominant spirit among us is not only not hospitable to the idea of freedom; it is openly inimical to the idea. The United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world. It is in the midst of the most interesting experiment ever seen in the simplification of human life. It is undertaking to prove that human beings can live a generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the reflective intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and in a proper use of the word without emotions, so long as they may see the prospect of a moderate well-being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under the spell of a great number of mechanical devices for the enhancement of comfort, convenience and pleasure. This experiment is so universal and so preoccupying that while it is going on there would seem to be no chance to get any consideration for so unrelated a matter as freedom. Hence the only current notion of freedom is freedom to live and behave as the majority live and behave and to desire what the majority desire; and notions which diverge from this have not been under stronger suspicion and disapproval since the eighteenth century than they are in this country today. Not that any one, probably, fears any degree of liberty for himself, but every one has a nervous horror of too much liberty for others. Most people no doubt feel that they themselves would know exactly what to do with freedom and therefore might be safely trusted with any measure of it; it is the possible social effect of other people’s liberty that they dread. No idea, probably, is more distrusted and feared among us at the present time than that of freedom for someone else.
From Concerning Women (1926) by Suzanne La Follette:
It is not the fear of want alone which demoralizes and corrupts. In a society where the greatest respect is paid to those who live in idleness through legalized theft; where men of genius may be treated like lackeys by those whose only claim to superiority is their command of wealth; where industry and ability yield smaller returns than flattery and servility; in such a society there is little to encourage honesty and independence of spirit. So long as honour is paid to those who live by other people’s labour, in proportion to their power of commanding it, so long will praise of honesty, industry, and thrift savour of hypocrisy, and so long will the mass of people be under small temptation to cultivate these virtues; and so long, also, will the moralists who seek to inculcate them be open to the same suspicion of insincerity as are those bankers who stand to profit substantially by the thrift they preach among depositors. There is something grimly amusing in the complaints so frequently heard from those who live in ease, about the shiftlessness of the working classes and their dishonest workmanship; complaints which are well founded, perhaps, but do not take into account the slight incentive that is furnished by the knowledge that the profits of industry and honest workmanship will be diverted into other pockets than those of the workers. If labour takes every opportunity of giving as little as it can for as much as it can get, one must remember that it but follows the example set by the owning classes, an example that has yielded them rich returns both in wealth and in the esteem of their fellow-men. Under a free economic system no such demoralizing example would exist. The material rewards of honesty, industry, and thrift would accrue to those who practised these virtues; and since there would be no opportunity to gain esteem through the appropriation of other people’s labour, those who wished to enjoy it would be forced to depend on more worthy means, such as ability, integrity, and uprightness in their dealings with other people.
New at IWP Books: Concerning Women (1926) by Suzanne La Follette.
Soon at IWP Books: Concerning Women (1926) by Suzanne La Follette.
“7 September — The worst thing I see about life at the present time is that whereas the ability to think has to be cultivated by practice, like the ability to dance or to play the violin, everything is against that practice. Speed is against it, commercial amusements, noise, the pressure of mechanical diversions, reading-habits, even studies, are all against it. Hence a whole race is being bred without the power to think, or even the disposition to think, and one can not wonder that public opinion, qua opinion, does not exist.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)
From “A Study of Romeo” (Emerson and Other Essays) by John Jay Chapman:
The plays of Shakespeare marshal themselves in the beyond. They stand in a place outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is greater than our philosophy. They are like the forces of nature and the operations of life in the vivid world about us. We may measure our intellectual growth by the new horizons we see opening within them. So long as they continue to live and change, to expand and deepen, to be filled with new harmony and new suggestion, we may rest content; we are still growing. At the moment we think we have comprehended them, at the moment we see them as stationary things, we may be sure something is wrong; we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh interest in life has been arrested.
From the Translator’s Preface to Invertebrate Spain:
The first three essays herein presented were taken from the volume whose Spanish title, España Invertebrada, provided the subject as well as the title for this book. The others were chosen from other volumes of Señor Ortega’s work because they shed added light on problems which he indicated in that famous analysis, or because they were pertinent to aspects of the present struggle.
The only translation available, then, is not a full translation of España Invertebrada.
From Invertebrate Spain by José Ortega y Gasset:
Strict Catholic dogma limits itself to demanding that the faithful admit the canonical definition of God, and leaves each one’s fancy free to imagine Him and to feel Him in its own peculiar way. Taine speaks of a child who was told that God was in the sky. “In the sky, like the birds?” she exclaimed. “Then he must have a beak.” That child could be a Catholic; there is nothing in the catechism’s definition which prevents God from having a beak.
From Invertebrate Spain by José Ortega y Gasset:
It is well known that a region’s humidity is determined not by the absolute quantity of water it receives, but by the proportion between what it receives and what it gives back by way of humidity. In Castile there is four times as much evaporation as there is rain. If we translate this figure into terms of the imagination, we get the grotesque picture of a country where more water goes from the earth to the clouds than comes from the clouds to the earth. In Castile it must rain upwards.
Next at IWP Books:
Artemus Ward on Woman’s Rights:
“My female frends,” sed I, “be4 you leeve, I’ve a few remarks to remark; wa them well. The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste. It’s onpossible to get along without her. Had there bin no female wimin in the world, I should scacely be here with my unparalleld show on this very occashun. She is good in sickness – good in wellness – good all the time. O, woman! woman!” I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitch, “you air a angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speaken) get into pantyloons – when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin’s rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seekin whom you may devour someboddy – in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance. My female friends,” I continnered, as they were indignantly departin, “wa well what A. Ward has sed!”
Artemus Ward on Jeff. Davis:
Jeff. Davis is not poplar here. She is regarded as a Southern sympathiser. & yit I’m told he was kind to his Parents. She ran away from ’em many years ago, and has never bin back. This was showin ’em a good deal of consideration when we reflect what his conduck has been. Her captur in female apparel confooses me in regard in his sex, & you see I speak of him as a her as frekent as otherwise, & I guess he feels so hisself.
Two by Ambrose Bierce:
One can not be trusted to feel until one has learned to think.
Must one be judged by his average, or may he be judged, on occasion, by his highest? He is strongest who can lift the greatest weight, not he who habitually lifts lesser ones.
All the books by Albert Jay Nock now available at IWP Books:
The Freeman, 1920–1924
“Fountains of Joy” by Albert Jay Nock (The Freeman, March 21, 1923)
Current discussions of the philosophy of art remind us that, according to Goethe, a little common sense will sometimes do duty for a great deal of philosophy, but no amount of philosophy will make up for a failure in common sense. It is usually the case that as analysis becomes closer and philosophizing becomes more profound, there is a tendency to obscure certain broad general fundamentals which to the eye of common sense are always apparent; and thus very often the complete truth of the matter is imperfectly apprehended. A great deal of what we read about the arts seems in some such fashion as this to get clear away from the notion that the final purpose of the arts is to give joy; yet common sense, proceeding in its simple, unmethodical manner, would say at once that this is their final purpose, and that one who did not keep it in mind as such, could hardly hope to arrive at the truth about any of the arts. Matthew Arnold once said most admirably that no one could get at the actual truth about the Bible, who did not enjoy the Bible; and that one who had all sorts of fantastic notions about the origin and composition of the Bible, but who knew how to enjoy the Bible deeply, was nearer the truth about the Bible than one who could pick it all to pieces, but could not enjoy it. Common sense, we believe, would hold this to be true of any work of art.
When Hesiod defined the function of poetry as that of giving “a release from sorrows and a truce from cares,” he intimated the final purpose of all great art as that of elevating and sustaining the human spirit through the communication of joy, of felicity; that is to say, of the most simple, powerful and highly refined emotion that the human spirit is capable of experiencing. This, no doubt, does not exhaust its beneficence; no doubt it works for good in other ways as well; but this is its great and final purpose. It is not to give entertainment or diversion or pleasure, not even to give happiness, but to give joy; and through this distinction, common sense comes immediately upon a test of good and valid art, not infallible, perhaps, but nevertheless quite competent. It is, in fact, the test that the common sense of mankind always does apply, consciously or unconsciously, to determine the quality of good art. Great critics, too, from Aristotle down, have placed large dependence on it. One wonders, therefore, whether more might not advantageously be made of it in the critical writing of the present time.
A work of art – a poem or novel, a picture, a piece of music – may affect the average cultivated spirit with interest, with curiosity, with pleasure; it may yield diversion, entertainment or even solace, not in the sense of edification or tending to build up a permanent resource against sorrows and cares, but in the sense that its pleasurable occupation of the mind excludes sorrow and care for the time being, somewhat as physical exercise or a game of chess or billiards may do. But all this is not a mark of good art. Good art affects one with an emotion of a different quality; and this quality may be rather easily identified, provided one does not make a great point of proceeding with the stringency of a philosopher in trying to define it. Joubert said that it is not hard to know God, if one will only not trouble oneself about defining him; and this is true as well of the profound and obscure affections of the human spirit – they are much better made known in the experience of the devout than in the analysis of the philosopher. A critic, indeed, might content himself at the outset by laying down some examples of classic art, and saying that the emotion he wishes to identify, the emotion of joy, is simply what is produced upon the average cultivated spirit by those; and that the difference in quality between this emotion and the emotion produced by another work of art, is a fair index or registration of the difference in quality of art between the two objects or examples. We have space but for one illustration, so for convenience we shall take it from the realm of poetry. Let us take two examples, both dealing with the valid and excellent poetic theme of the shortness of human life and the transitory character of its interests. First, this one:
How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!
How nothing unto the earth – and we so small!
O, wake, wake! do you not feel my hands cling?
One day it will be raining as it rains to-night; the same wind blow,
Raining and blowing on this house wherein we lie, but you and I,
We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.
Is the emotion wherewith this verse affects the average cultivated spirit, of the same order, the same quality, as the emotion produced by this –
The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
– or is the difference merely one of degree? Well, then this difference may be used at the outset by criticism, as the common sense of mankind does continually use it, as an index of the poetic quality of the two examples; and criticism can go safely on in assuming that to whatever degree a work of art succeeds in arousing just that emotion, so far can it justify its candidacy for a place as valid art.
We do not put forward this test as one to be used mechanically, nor have we any exaggerated notion of its importance. There are some very welcome signs that criticism, after long running derelict in fantastic extravagance, is beginning to come to its sober senses. Well, then, here, in this test that we speak of, is an implement of criticism that great critics have found extremely useful, but which has of late fallen into disuse – why not bring it out and use it again, not fanatically, but with judgment and discretion? It is primarily an implement for the critic to use upon himself in shaping the course of his criticism; the layman, as we said, has had the more or less conscious use of it all the time. When confronted with the claims of this or that work of art, the critic will be greatly helped to get his bearings if for the moment he puts all other considerations aside, and asks himself with what order or quality of emotion, precisely, does this work of art affect him. Is it with a pleasurable emotion due to interest, curiosity, entertainment, diversion, or is it the emotion of felicity, of joy? No matter about the degree, but is it or is it not, in any measure, small or great, the kind of thing that he gets out of “The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces”? We do not say that this test will ensure his judgment; all we say is that it will greatly assist it.
“Toadstools” by Albert Jay Nock (The Freeman, May 5, 1923)
In one of his earlier books Mark Twain tells of seeing a toadstool which in its growth had dislodged and pushed up into the air a mass of tangled roots and leaves, amounting to twice its own bulk. Commenting on this display of strength, he says: “Ten thousand toadstools with the right purchase could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would it do?”
There should be more of this strong common sense employed to make our estimate of our civilization less formal and more fundamental. One of the most striking differences between the Oriental mind and ours is seen here. The Oriental is struck with our way of regarding things and actions as good in themselves, without reference to individual and personal realization; and it seems strange and unnatural to him. Railways, banks, telephones, finance-companies, industrial development, newspapers – all such things are most commonly and generally accepted among us as absolute goods in themselves, quite irrespective of their effect upon the spirit of the individual life, and the quality of the collective life, which are lived under their influence. Let a new railway be laid out, or the postal service be increased, or some new device be invented for quickening communication or transportation, and our general tendency is to accept it at once without question as a good thing, not considering that its whole value is to be measured by its effect upon the spirit and quality of life, and that until this effect be ascertained our estimate of it is worthless and misleading. Our newspapers teach us to take this formal and mechanical view of trade-balances and the expansion of industry, never raising the question whether these actually tend towards a better spirit and finer quality of human life or whether they tend towards a spiritual impoverishment and vulgarization; nor is it regularly pointed out that unless they are so employed as progressively to improve life, unless they are practically interpreted in terms of personal realization, they are hardly worth having.
Surely common sense and the free play of consciousness upon the facts of the material world about us are enough to show that this formal view, almost universal as it is, is superficial and retarding. We read the other day a complaint from a railway-official about new trackage. It seems that only a few miles of new trackage have been laid during the past year. He spoke of this as a calamity, as indeed it may be, but the mere fact does not prove itself as such. One must go further and ask whether it can be shown that individual realization has at all profited, and if so how much, by what trackage we already have. How does the spirit of American life compare, indeed, with the spirit of life at a period when there was no trackage at all? Again, we read not long ago a statement by the president of a great chemical concern, in which he predicted that science would possibly before long enable us to produce synthetic food, cheap fuel, artificial wool; to store solar heat, to do without sleep and to prolong mental and physical vigour. The tone of the statement left no doubt that this chemist regarded all these matters as absolute goods in themselves, whereas clearly they are nothing of the kind. If they are made to tend towards the enrichment and deepening of the spiritual life of man, they will be good; if they are made to tend against it, they will be bad; if they are made to tend neither way, they are of no consequence except in point of curiosity, like Mark Twain’s toadstool.
Again, we lately saw the advertisement of a life-extension institute, headed, “Do You Want to Add Ten Years to Your Life?” Here once more the obvious assumption was that longevity is in itself a good and desirable thing. But is it? There is of course in all of us the primary instinct of self-preservation which speaks out strongly in favour of living as long as we can; and it is to this instinct, this irrational and almost bloodthirsty clinging to life, that the advertisement was intended to appeal. As such it seemed to us, we admit, a little ignoble; we were reminded, as all such enterprises which are now so much in vogue remind us, of Julius Caesar’s remark that life is not worth having at the expense of an ignoble solicitude about it. But instinct apart, the worth of such enterprises is measured, surely, by the quality of the life which we are invited to prolong. The content of the average life being what it is, and its prospects of spiritual enlargement and enrichment being what they are, may longevity be so indubitably regarded as an absolute good that one is justified in an almost ferocious effort to attain it?
We are not now concerned that these questions be answered; we are concerned only that they be raised. We are concerned with the habit, which seems to us unintelligent and vicious, of regarding potential accessories to civilization as essential elements in civilization. We insist that civilization is not to be measured in terms of longevity, trackage, the abundance of banks and newspapers, the speed and frequency of mails, and the like. Civilization is the progressive humanization of men in society, and all these things may or may not sustain a helpful relation to the process. At certain periods and places, indeed, the process has been carried notably further without any of them than it is now carried with all of them. When we learn to regard them intelligently, when we persuade ourselves that their benefit is potential and relative, not actual and absolute, then we are in the way of intelligently and quickly applying them to the furtherance of true civilization; but as long as we unintelligently regard them as absolute goods in themselves, we shall merely fumble with them.
“An Undelivered Address” by B. W. Huebsch (The Freeman, Aug 8, 1923):
The train stopped at a small station on the plains in a Western State, and the President appeared on the platform of the observation-car at the rear. There was some lively hand-clapping, but it stopped suddenly when the President signalled that he was about to speak.
“My fellow-citizens,” he said, “it is indeed pleasant to be welcomed by groups of citizens everywhere. It is plain that political friends and adversaries sink their differences in order to express their respect for the high office which I happen to occupy. I might easily delude myself concerning the significance of your enthusiasm, but from my knowledge of the past I am aware that you would greet any President in exactly the same way.
“You have been kind to me, and I will be frank with you. It has long been the custom of our citizens to demand that, when a plain man – one of you – becomes, oftener by a series of accidents than because of superior merit, the chief officer of the Government, he gives utterance to profound wisdom on every subject under the sun, early and often. The people like to ignore the fact that when a farmer or an editor becomes President he remains the same farmer or editor that he was before election. The office confers honour, responsibility and dignity, but not learning or wisdom. Too frequently the President permits himself to be blinded to this truth by the eager acceptance, by large numbers, of all that he says; and, once he has fallen into error, he begins to believe that his words are prophetic or otherwise important. Thus he is led to consider himself endowed, by virtue of his position, with gifts that are bestowed by an inscrutable power upon leaders of men but not necessarily upon politicians; and in his anxiety to respond to the clamour of his fellows for an opinion on all subjects, he is bound to say many things that are ill-considered, puerile and unworthy. Eventually he is found out, for, in the long run, the people do find out. Then the people laugh him into oblivion and contemn him.
“My friends, the fault lies with you. Every man who attains to this high place, even a petty man, enters it with a resolve to do his duty, as he conceives it. If you would but permit him to mind his own business he might step down, at the conclusion of his term, with a reasonable amount of self-respect, and with the respect of his countrymen. But you insist on his being a philosopher, a poet, a financier, a statesman, an historian, a bon viveur and – most reprehensible of all – you almost force him to become a dictator.
“Your good-natured importunity has ruined men who might have proved to be good Presidents, cobblers who intended to stick to their last, but whom you forced to be vicars of God. I speak thus to you because I seem to have seen the light for a moment, and I wish to unburden myself while the inspiration lasts. By the time we arrive at the capital of your State, in a few hours, I presume that the Presidential habit will have got the better of me, and I shall deliver the address prepared for me by one of my secretaries, on co-operative farming, Greek drama, the gold standard, a universal tribunal, vegetarianism and infant damnation. Give me your earnest prayers. Farewell.”
Like most of our contemporaries we have become so lost among the trees of new knowledge that we can not see the forest. When we take as a measure, the ratio between the knowledge of the individual man, and the sum total of human knowledge, it appears to us that men are becoming increasingly ignorant as the years go by; the world as it is actually known to the individual has been expanding, of course, but at a far less rapid rate than the “known world” of science. That this process of expansion has been also a process of disintegration, some of us have felt only too keenly as we have watched the specialists move outward and disappear from sight along a thousand new paths of knowledge which stand to the generality of human individuals as just so many new indications of things that they can never know.
Whether the totality of existence, known and unknown, constitutes universe or multiverse, is a matter of small consequence here. The point we are trying to make is simply this: that in a lawful and orderly universe, the method of the specialists tends to reduce the known world of the individual man to chaos; while on the other hand, even in actual chaos, a broader science might help to raise the known world of the individual man into something like a universe. Such, at any rate, is our belief; and if we had the opportunity to act upon it, we should shut the ablest men of science out of their laboratories for a decade or so, and force them to sit down together, with their masses of data in front of them, and think things over. If they did not eventually produce something like “a larger synthesis,” we should turn them loose again, and begin in our blindness to pray for the coming of a wiser generation. (Geroid Tanquary Robinson)
“Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and denunciations, by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there can not be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their ignorance, their short-sighted selfishness.” Henry George, 1883, Social Problems
“For there is no doubt that the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.” Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses
Works by Albert Jay Nock at IWP Books:
Soon:
New at IWP Books: Jefferson (1926) by Albert Jay Nock.
Also at JAYS (John Jay Chapman and Albert Jay Nock).