tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post6921010071923241817..comments2023-10-11T06:50:10.494-04:00Comments on The Glass-Bottom Blog: Rationality and other lost causesZedhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10623092831367861959noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-74218138412547966032011-03-19T07:09:29.251-04:002011-03-19T07:09:29.251-04:00Crase has an explanation for the vocabulary too: &...Crase has an explanation for the vocabulary too: "I always tried to ignore his <i>thees</i> and <i>thous</i>, for instance, especially the ones in 'The Poet' and 'Experience.' But when Emerson was a minister he rarely used those terms, and readers who were alert to the Quaker example could have appreciated the allusion when he chose to use them now. <i>Thee</i> and <i>thou</i> were once appropriate to use with intimates, but never with superiors; thus they had been adopted by the early Quakers precisely to demonstrate that there are no superiors, everyone is equal. In England, Quakers were sent to prison because they refused to say <i>you</i> to the magistrates."<br /><br />There is also a very deadpan humor in Emerson, an extension of his Yankee temperament, that people tend to miss, because it is more reflective and subtle. His humor and irony often go misinterpreted, and I think is another reason why he's usually shelved with "essayists" rather than "philosophers," in people's minds and on their bookshelves.MASchiavohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15639031912135091927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-9005536084754453132011-03-18T20:21:21.865-04:002011-03-18T20:21:21.865-04:00Thanks, I should read the rest of that; "supe...Thanks, I should read the rest of that; "superficial tenants" is great, one is reminded of the cloud-forms in Antony/Cleopatra that "the rack dislimns, and makes indistinct / as water is in water." I might have been put off by Emerson's prose style (all the yea-ing and betwixting) without giving him a fair chance. "Solidity" is an old obsession of mine; my first long college paper was about Locke on solidity, and it's (probably) the only point at which all my intellectual interests meet.Zedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10623092831367861959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-16125239238477772582011-03-18T19:07:47.899-04:002011-03-18T19:07:47.899-04:00Being a physicist, I think you'd appreciate Do...Being a physicist, I think you'd appreciate Doug Crase's introduction to the Library of America's paperback edition of the <i>Essays</i>. He quotes a passage from "Experience":<br /><br />We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man, and the wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe, and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all outside: it has no inside.<br /><br />And then Crase continues: "Someone who knew the world had no inside would be only mildly shocked, possibly not as shocked as Einstein was, at quantum duplicity."MASchiavohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15639031912135091927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-70262832499681484752011-03-18T11:04:38.044-04:002011-03-18T11:04:38.044-04:00Thanks for the passage! I agree that skeptical arg...Thanks for the passage! I agree that skeptical arguments clear the air for a lot of different approaches. "Seeking" and "experimenting" are certainly among them... personally, however, I'm much closer to Hume than to Emerson in temperament.Zedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10623092831367861959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-19392261491956189472011-03-18T04:55:05.853-04:002011-03-18T04:55:05.853-04:00I mention Emerson only because he is always, as yo...I mention Emerson only because he is always, as you've confirmed, dismissed because of seeming "faults" in his worldview, and/or because he's a 19th-century white male American, that last descriptor being the most egregious.<br /><br />What are his particular catalog of virtues? He holds up change as the supreme virtue. As he writes in "Circles":<br /><br />"I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."<br /><br />Emerson would applaud the argument. After all, he would say, if he was completely correct, there would be no need for you or me to fill in the blanks.MASchiavohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15639031912135091927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-52156318843975049862011-03-17T10:32:06.829-04:002011-03-17T10:32:06.829-04:00_What_ about him? An unfortunate thing about overl..._What_ about him? An unfortunate thing about overlong posts is that one's never sure what comments are about. (If you mean Emerson qua Transcendentalist/Idealist, the ethical system as far as I understand it -- i.e., not very well! Emerson is not a writer I especially like -- avoids fallacy at the cost of arbitrariness, which is reasonable, though I suppose one isn't obliged to agree with _his_ particular catalog of virtues...)Zedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10623092831367861959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5145200404704322540.post-28107792334623578962011-03-17T06:27:57.152-04:002011-03-17T06:27:57.152-04:00What about Emerson?What about Emerson?MASchiavohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15639031912135091927noreply@blogger.com