American Philosophy by John Kaag 

  • [22] "He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed." William James

  • [33] "He who has attainedarupam,the formless, surrenders with it all the petulancy of self, for jealousy, spite, hatred, pride, envy, concupiscence, vainglory -- all these and kindred ambitions -- have lost their sense. He is energetic, but without passion; he aspires, but does not cling; he administers, but does not regard himself an owner; he acquires, but does not covet."

  • [39] "No state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before." William James

    • Consciousness is "a stream that flows despite our best efforts to dam it up."

  • [43] Nothing about life is normal. And nothing about life has to be good. It's completely up to the liver…Each answer is excruciatingly personal and therefore, I thought, necessarily private.

  • [50]"The reason to read the American Transcendentalists wasn't to hang on their every word, but to be inspired by them. This early American philosophy was about inspiration, about moving beyond the inert and deadening ways of the past."

  • [55] In not-so-distant past, philosophy was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the "stuff of everyday life."

  • [65] Thoreau: At present I am a "a diseased bundle of nerves standing between time and eternity like a withered leaf that still hangs shivering on its stem."

  • [66] Thoreau's problems of privilege, the "neurotic difficulties one faces when absolutely nothing is really wrong, the abiding anguish that afflicts those even in a world of heated seats. Thoreau lived at the beginning of such a world, and embodied the strange dissatisfaction that would quietly, secretly come to define it."

    • Thoreau had a hunch that "chatter makes one feel horribly alone."

  • [69-70] Walking with care requires "an attention to the present that is extremely difficult to maintain."

    • "If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!"

    • The point of walking carefully"was to experience the sublime in the mundane."

  • [73] "One cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time." Emerson

  • [82] Philosophy is about being

    • "Fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction thatit is better tobethan to define your being."

    • Philosophy awakens us to life's "nuances and potentialities"

    • Descartes and Hobbes' "modern era" began to lose its existential bearing

  • [98] American philosophers + Kant wanted to see forestandtrees - a "philosophical middle ground"

    • Kant bridged the gap between empiricism and rationalism

      • Empiricists = experience; rationalists = knowledge

      • "There was also a holistic, qualitative dimension to experience that couldn't be dissected in order to be understood."

  • [109] Pursuit of the good life = "profoundly personal, emotion-laden, all-consuming quest for a beautiful soul"

    • Not the stuff of Kant's pure reason. The stuff of "personal vision, insight, and a foolhardy courage to speak the truth"

    • According to William James, it's all about "zest". It's the zest that makes life significant

  • [114] Emersonian self-knowledge:

    • "Not the shallow self-help of the 21st century,but rather an attempt to interrupt the neuroses of our society, to find oneself in nature, and to consider the 'possibility that the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God' ".

  • [140] "Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart."

    • "Faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing."

  • [148] Gardening

    • Results can be influenced but not controlled or guaranteed

    • Nor are they predestined

    • "Best a person could do in life was to cultivate a garden of her own."

  • [166] Modern philosophy's dualisms

    • Mind/body divide

    • Human vs natural

    • Subject vs object

    • Individuals vs neighbors

    • Result

      • "Cartesian solipsism"

      • Schelling and Hegel develop an idealism to unify seemingly disparate parts of the universe

  • [168] Being alone for too long only shows you what you're not: a friend, brother, companion, etc.

    • "Life consists everywhere in a repetition of the fundamental paradoxes of consciousness."

  • [173] "Solipsism is overcome, and only overcome, when I can point out the actual experience which gives me the basis of my conception of companionship."

  • [173] The mysterious isolation of self

    • "I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall, and never Thee?"

    • "We look out at one another from behind masks"

  • [177] Robert Frost, "Revelation"

  • [181] "Philosophy should stem…from a careful evaluation of the widest range of experiences."

  • [182] "He didn't buy the pragmatic idea that truth was that which works, but he did endorse the converse, that untruth or falsity is that which doesn't." *********************************

  • [190]"The most notable feature of the past is that it is irrevocable."

  • [191] "Atonement was to recognize that you'd freely, consciously done the wrong thing, and then to exercise your freedom, in light of that mistake, to try to make the world a slightly better place."

  • [197] Education not something you get

    • It's something you experience, a process you live through

    • Spring training for the rest of your life

  • [198] After first child was born

    • "Existential angst turned into a luxury item enjoyed by those who did not have ground-level responsibilities for others' lives."

  • [211] Pluralism of American philosophy

  • [216] A "second chance" is really just our first chance, continued

  • [220]"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced." Gabriel Marcel

  • [226] Life is "not the sort of logic humans could ever fully master. It wasn't supposed to be mastered at all. It was supposed to be experienced. We play a role in the living and moving and being, and we are free to participate, but never simply as we see fit."

    • "There is nothing more paralyzing than an even remotely adequate sense of the truth." Hocking

  • [227]"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains."

    • "For our final impressions of what the journey turned out to be like cannot but react on our memories of our first impression of what the journeywas going to be like. But when we were actually making the journey, or rather beginning to make it, these first impressions were, on the contrary, held quivering like a compass needle by our anxious expectations of everything that was still to come."

  • [234] Philosophy as cult of the dead

    • Keeping alive meaning and value of human pursuits

    • Why our ephemeral lives have significance

    • **We must learn to "treat the present moment as if it were engaged in business allotted to it by that total life which stretches indefinitely beyond."

  • [245] "William James suggests that the meaning of human existence turns on a strange little word: zest"

    • "Zest, the particular thrill of experience, is the ultimate source of existential value."