6.03  Otium and “The Moral Philosopher”: William James

 

The Cranky Professor

(mumbling discontent) Oh, hey! Hi, um, yeah. 

I’ve been thinking over my otium diatribe from last week, and I gotta say, maybe I went a bit hard against a Latin term that’s been around so long barely anyone thinks about it anymore. Yeah, I could have left that dolphin thing alone, and why throw rocks at a beautiful poem by a master of verse like Andrew Marvell? 

I thought about re-naming the podcast to something like “The Cranky Professor.” Then I could just grouse into this microphone for weeks about existential angst and the imminent extinction of the Oxford comma. But no, we’re going to hold on to our literary focus. And it’s true, as a retired educator perhaps relegated to his otium years, maybe I am taking all this a little personally. I’ve always had something against simple binaries, in any event. Every time we say something like good vs. evil or Left vs. Right or Skywalker vs. Skywalker, I get testy about the simplified universe we narrate to ourselves. I take it personally. 

But why shouldn’t I? And why shouldn’t all of us? When we talk about engaging with literature, we are talking about personally, aren’t we? We don’t mean, connect with the literature as an unemployed Harvard don or as a semi-literate penguin on the McDonald Islands. When we read, you and I, we invest ourselves in story and idea, us personally, individually. And this is how we can all read the same thing and come away with something a bit different from one another. If we’re not engaging and personally interacting with what we read, why are we reading? The way to make our reading move through us and alter our experience is to respond to it, and I’ve already spent some time encouraging us to respond out loud, in front of others, for others, with others, to have hard conversations that sometimes unsettle us.

And you may rightly be asking, too, though, “Why can’t I just enjoy the poem? Why can’t I read Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and just say Wow, that’s really profound and beautiful and he’s right that nature can take us to places of solitude and bliss?” Eh. You can. And it does. But to be frank, I don’t think that’s all we do. Our experience of literature and art works on us: it delivers meaning consciously or it does it sometimes unconsciously. Imagine for a moment if all I ever read in my life was beautiful flower poetry. Do you suppose that, over time, our ideas and attitudes might be altered somewhat differently from the girl next to me who has immersed herself in nothing but anarchist writers like Bakunin and Malatesta and Goldman? What we read matters. And how deeply we read it matters. The problem is that we actually have been reading flower poetry for a long long time; I mean, we have a near monopoly of literature that has casually and perhaps thoughtlessly imagined that otium and negotium, the private and public life, the personal and the civic, are places set in opposition to one another. We’ve read this otium flower poetry for so long in our essays and travel ads and Chevy Chase vacation movies, so long and so completely, that we often don’t imagine anything different. It’s unexamined. Oh, and B-T-dubs, did you know that Ursula K. Le Guin said she would be honored to be called an anarchist? Cool. I hereby honor Le Guin by declaring her an anarchist writer, and I’m not even close to being the first to do so. She writes to rattle our cages.

So. I’ve taken an idea that is so much a mostly-unconscious part of how our culture has defined our lives and I’ve named it and shaken it with a little bit of verbal violence. Do I get passionate when I put two pieces of literature together that disagree or contradict? Absolutely. Often. Does someone else take another approach and think something differently? Absolutely. That’s why we dialogue. And that’s why I ask you to share these episodes with others so you can talk about me if you want to. Argue with me. Take my side. Ask me questions. Challenge. That’s the conversation I’m encouraging us to have.

And it’s even better if you share this episode with someone you know who also likes this kind of take on literature as opposed to simply telling us what happens in the story. And as to that point, are there other ways to understand otium besides my quick rant on the not-skirts of Roman soldiers? Absolutely. Let’s talk about it. 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m in what we’ll call a “strenuous mood.”

Oppositions to Work

Before us is an opposition set up (or at least named this way) by the Romans and adopted by nearly the entire mainstay of Western civilization (and of other cultures that have adopted our behaviors), the distinction between otium (solitude and peace, retirement away from the public, the pursuit of personal development, usually in natural environments) and neg-otium (not that, business concerns, civic life, duty and obligation, usually in more citified or civilized environments). 

The Kings sang it almost 50 years ago: “Nothing matters but the weekend,” and we’ve been living this way before and after. Now we could do a lot of work together on the reasons for this: we could examine the dehumanizing effects of the industrial age, the devouring competition of capitalism, the power politics in trade and manufacturing, the history of indentured servitude, any number of historical factors which make so many of us loathe or perhaps just resign ourselves to our jobs as “payment” in labor so that we can use our money to party on weekends (or perhaps just pay our bills with relief). But that’s not why we’re here. I’m not going to dispute historians, sociologists, and our own experiences. But beneath all of this, an ideology that assists us in our resignation to it (and even our assignment to it), is the otium/negotium opposition.

What’s important about this opposition for our thinking–and important for all oppositions by their nature–is that while they seem to be opposites, they are not. Setting terms in opposition has one effect of creating an illusion, that there are two polar choices, each separate and different from the other. And at first, our testing of this idea seems true: white and black, good and evil, love and hate, day and night. Now let’s blow this idea apart: black is not a color but the absence of color, to which we add all of the other colors until we create white, a physical phenomenon of how light works on our eyes. Good and evil, too, crowd together in grays of moral color, where a single act may have a good motivation but an evil outcome for many: and applying the terms therefore to anything but mythological creatures becomes challenging. Love and hate are both intense passions for another, so they seem to share some qualities for seeming such “opposites.” Day and night also have dusk and dawn. 

The thing is, oppositions aren’t about opposites at all but relationships between terms which are set in opposition, into tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More. Too casually we call them opposites, think of them as opposites, act with them as opposites.They are a rhetorical act, an intentional construction of ideas, which are used to simplify our thinking. We may find them useful tools for understanding, but we must not forget that the tool is not the reality.

But of course, just placing the two terms next to each other in “opposition” demands we see them together, in relationship. If I had placed “love” in opposition to “treebark,” for instance, the juxtaposition would cause us each to think immediately of the relationship, the hidden truth, that links them together.  

These simplifications in binary oppositions are compounded when we combine one pair with another. When I link, say, nature vs. city with solitude vs. crowds. Not only are my terms not neutral (is it solitude or did I mean loneliness?), but equating cities to crowds is not always a reality, and linking nature to being alone suggests that people are the only thing that matter and that solitude (which I might soon link to contemplation, leisure, etc.) may only be found in gardens and KOA Campgrounds. Ah, nature! (Cue the sound of an RV evacuating its compost toilet)

Hardly finally, but for now, the last effect of binary oppositions on our thinking is that we tend to consider one of the terms (usually the first or left-hand term) as more important or privileged than the other: good and evil, love and hate, day and night, . . . white and black. Well, yeah, purity vs, darkness, but . . . um. Can we speak this pairing and not think of race?

So to go back to our otium / negotium binary opposition, last week I grew frustrated by it for all of these reasons and a few others. The first is that we privilege in our minds otium, the tradition idylls of nature and real contemplation, a spiritually powerful moment in Marvell’s poem and nearly all pastoral poetry, this place of simplicity and romance, and the more terms I pile on to the term the more difficult it becomes to believe: we mythologize it into some simple ideal, as any opposition tends to do. And let’s hang on to this idea: it’s a construction. It’s a taming of the world, of reality, through our words, so that we can believe the world to work this way.

And so our gardens are tended spaces of controlled nature and beauty. The weeds and mice and mountain lions are removed so that we can (*sigh*) enjoy nature and meditate in peace. And now I think we can see pretty easily how this behavior itself is an obstacle to clear thought, built as it is on a false concept of nature itself, one that kills and marginalizes the nature we don’t like in favor of the nature we do. In “Vaster Than Empires,” Le Guin asks us instead to love the “Other,” meaning that we must embrace all of it in full understanding. 

Otium as Privilege

Think of our last example, of Marvell sitting in his tended garden, rolling in the carefully tended grasses, eating from the domesticated fruit trees, and protected by the outer walls and the gates of a locked estate of a man of wealth, as a place of cognitive limitation. Or, if you’ve been with me since the beginning of this journey, think of the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews the same way. That is, that this is not “nature” at all but our fabrication, our domestication and control of it. In order for us to fulfill our desire for a nature/civilization opposition, where nature is peace and the city chaos, we retreat to a space and bring a little bit of that city–a trowel, exotic seed, a picnic basket, and a bottle of Round-Up–along with us. Because, without these, let’s be honest, hiding in the reality of that nature side–and I mean the full-Monty nature side of the equation, is something pretty scary. Sure, I can just call it mosquitos and spiders and apply my perimeter sprays, but the nature also has things like darkness and with that, the unknown. Maybe add an electric fence and some night cameras. There, then: we’ve sufficiently subdued it to our own egos and needs. None of this is communion with nature as most of us understand nature, but instead a sort of hyper-separation, the fantasy of connectedness.

But let’s connect this idea back briefly to Epicureanism, those folks who gave us the ideas of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, eudaimonia, an idea of contentment and bliss, and ataraxia, the release of anxiety so we might experience personal pleasure. We find these things by setting aside the cares and woes of the outside world–often the world of work and responsibility–and set about embracing the “now,” the present. You might recall Horace who literally told us to “pluck” or “harvest” the day. Today, this might look like outdoor yoga or simply . . . gardening. It could just as well be riding a truck or doing mathematics in longhand or even the pleasure of synchronizing spreadsheets, but we tend to imagine these EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More ideals with moving towards nature as Horace largely did, while speaking of ethics and patronage and politics in his discussions of negotium.

I bring Horace’s thinking up because this is the kind of topic that was often on Seneca’s mind. We remember him, right? That Roman senator wandering about on the shores of Campania, thinking about these ideas but coming to some different conclusions. Now we won’t spend a lot of time with stoicism today–it’s a huge topic, and Seneca was one of its champions–but it shouldn’t surprise us that the Romans, like everyone else ever, was concerned about human satisfaction, contentment, peace. The Epicureans found it in the now, the harvesting of their days, and the joys of relaxation. Seneca and the Stoics found that peace far more often in virtue, duty, and activism. Seneca, despite his many frustrations in the political world, aligned himself with negotium—the public life—as the most important thing we can do. Otium, said Seneca, is often corrosive, effeminate … it damaged one’s character if taken too far and not balanced with negotium. 

Even so, Seneca understood that a certain kind of otium had its role. You are still picturing him on his Italian shoreline, yes? Good. Otium itself, he said, could be seen as a kind of political behavior. Seclusion, retreats, walks on the Campanian coastlines, could serve the intellect, develop thought, a kind of leisure necessary for the mind to slow and recover its strength. But always, that kind of otium was regarded as set aside in order for the public life to be stronger. Just to make this a bit more clear, this also distinguished another kind of binary for Seneca: his strategy for an otium which prepared for work was good and Roman; the otium of the Epicureans and their eudaimonian loafing was bad and, of course, Greek.

Now I’m picking on Seneca some because it’s fun, but there is a lot more to him than this. And he does make a good point, one that I was grousing about a bit last week: The pursuit of a personal peace (that ataraxia of the Greeks) can lead to a self-centeredness which kind of defeats the idea of compassion for others; we essentially abandon the world in favor of peaceful meditation. It makes impossible an engagement with Other, which Le Guin seems to argue for, and so too understanding, compassion, or love for Other and for difference. Seneca worries about this, too: as humans, we have work to do. 

And so we return to our nature/civilization divide, the binary of the pastoral and the civic, which is dangerous if we privilege a self-centered otium, and is ironically ignorant if the space we do it in isn’t even natural. We can love Marvell’s poem “The Garden,” but we might or even must also ask, “What wealth allowed him to live there?” The “unnatural nature” where Marvell finds himself is a place of privilege, of possibility only for the educated, the monied, the folks who can afford to buy their nature at the nearest plant nursery and Wayfair online catalogs. 

My quadruple-objection to Marvell’s pastoral binary, then, is that 

1. He’s not really meeting nature which he claims he is aligning with for his spiritual revelation but a constructed nature..  And 
2. That by aligning nature to all these other ideas, he does not know the Other at all, but sets his own egotistical needs upon it. This is Le Guin’s concern. The chipmunk does not desire the weight of responsibility for Marvell’s revelations. And 
3. By doing this apart from society and for himself, he forsakes any responsibility to the broader humanity. You can’t love someone you’ve not met or heard. And
4. That he can do all this only from a place of privilege, of wealth and power, which itself compromises whatever enlightenment he may find.

In other words, Seneca is right in his concern and didn’t himself go far enough. Le Guin calls this “the treason of the artist.” There is more still to her concern, but I want to put a pin in this phrase for later and how it fits here; for the unnatural nature poet, the rest of society is “out of sight and out of mind.”

All this, too, and I will now point out that my portrayal of pastoral poetry as just “celebrate nature” verse is itself over-simplified. Many poets of the pastoral, locked as they are, too, in this otium/negotium binary, saw well the rope that ties the two together. How do we write of a peaceful and simple and innocent country life without at least intimating that such a life exists in contrast to something different? In opposition to peaceful, simple, and innocent country life we have violent, complex, and corrupt city life. To paint images of one is to imply the other. As I said, pastoral poets often recognized this, and so made political use of it themselves, criticizing one world by praising the other, building allegories for broader themes.  William Browne, for instance, in his poem “The Shepheards Pipe” takes place in a prison cell for his pastoral discussion, weaving the two worlds together. Otium is a haven from negotium.

I should explain, too, that I am not now accusing Marvell of ignorance in his position. I know well enough that he’s got some complexity to his position. In his poem “A Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” he urges Cromwell out of retirement (otium) back to public politics for a country that needs him. “Forsake the Muses dear” and “leave the books in dust.” A strange position for the guy who was rolling around in the grass a few minutes ago, but closer to what Seneca himself says we must do. 

Where should we stand on this issue? Am I instead supposed to tackle bobcats and roll in poison ivy to make my experience of nature authentic? Should I abandon my job to spend my Tuesday afternoon sniffing sage and meditating? Am I to shake paws with the chipmunk in expectation that he may teach me? Or should I shed my privileges of money and time and place to engage society more actively, in a political fight for justice? And where does that leave my poetry?

Heck, I don’t know. For the moment, I’m going to leave us with these questions, in places of uncertainty. But I’d far rather have these questions on the table for us than pretend they do not exist. We just want to be certain that we have fewer cognitive blind spots in our thinking. 

We’re a long way from “Look at the pretty flower poem” now, and Le Guin certainly wants us to be. But we’re also still a good distance from Omelas and its even harder questions. 

Hideous Bargains: William James

Most of the published editions of Ursula K Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” bore a subtitle at her insistence: “Variations on a theme by William James.” So Le Guin, as we have seen many times already, was writing back, here a response tale to a particular dilemma James offers in his “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” an essay written in 1891. I’ve placed a link to this essay in the Show Notes. James was an American philosopher and psychologist, and fairly popular for writing in a kind of dialogue with his audience which allowed him to bring his ideas to “ordinary people.” If we were going to label his school of philosophy, we would call him a Pragmatist, one more concerned about practical day-to-day behaviors than lofty ideals and abstract arguments like I’ve been making for the past 10 minutes, 10 months, um 40 years.

Now James had read his share of utopias. He thinks of Fourier’s socialist utopia, Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, and Morris’s News from Nowhere. But these are all too small a scale and expectation, he argues. Instead, he poses this simple question: Suppose that millions could be kept permanently happy, all on “the simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture.” 

We can imagine it as easily as Seneca on a seashore. Millions of people always happy: no anxieties or fears, no insecurity or poor health. Satisfied and fulfilled. Happy. If only. One person, way off on the sidelines of mainstream life was alone and tortured. 

He asks, how would we feel if we said yes to this happiness, “deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.” The word he answers with is that our feeling would include a kind of “hideousness.” A hideous bargain.  Our response, he says, would be emotional, our own personally, not just intellectual or collective with others. A personal sort of repulsion as great as our wilder passions: fear and love and indignation–the sense of “moral sensibility” would go far beyond what we might excuse for being a part of a happy community. So powerful is this feeling, James adds, that we would be in a “strenuous mood,” willing to deny ourselves the lesser privileges of the world in order to rise to this moral call for justice. More, such a denial would make the call all the more powerful, adding to what he describes as the “stern joy.”

Perhaps. But I suppose it is entirely possible you are listening to this and thinking, yeah, but, you know, I don’t wanna be cruel or nothing but, you know, real talk, it’s like, only one person, right? You might even be doing a kind of trolley problem on this whole thing, deciding more intellectually that the math adds up. One person is the cost for millions. Let’s say you’re not thinking this at all, but you know somebody–no, you can imagine somebody who might think this way.

Yeah. That philosophy is utilitarianism, where we work for “the most happiness for the most people.” It takes all of Epicurus and Horace and Seneca and whatever their approaches to happiness are and says, “Yeah, but what’s the spread on this? How do we maximize your philosophy by making more people happy?”  

Let me frame the utilitarian a different way, because this thought experiment by James is a direct attack on them. The utilitarian has a kind of mathematical formula for humanity, a callous indifference to suffering, to minorities. It is intellectualized as an empirical problem as much as a personal or emotional one. James recognizes that we think emotionally, personally, and that our moral choices depend on these. In other words, morality is not math. 

I’ll go just a bit further still. There are utilitarians out there who understand that the philosophy implies sacrifice by the wealthier so that the greater number can be happy. I’m thinking of folks like Peter Singer and John Stuart Mill. But our lazier philosophers–perhaps our more casual thinkers, are at their utilitarian best when they are not the ones who have to be sacrificed.  

More, though, I think James works to replace the “Don’t Care” mood of the utilitarian with the “strenuous mood” of the full human, a mood he says which arises from an “infinite and mysterious obligation.” Do we need to take on the origin of morality here? Let’s not right now. Instead, we’ll make space for James’s vote that a philosopher always chooses “the richer universe.” I would argue that it’s a more meaningful one, as well.

James might agree. And maybe this is why I like him, I think. He says in this essay that readers should find themselves with “novels and dramas of the deeper sort” because they are “tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic.” Read and embrace uncertainty. 

Back to Our Garden

In the garden of the Fairfax estate, Andrew Marvell sits and writes a poem. It is a poem pretty enough but reliant upon a privilege. Does he recognize who has suffered in order to create General Fairfax’s wealth which allows him to be there? Hint: it has to do with war. Does he recognize those who labored for Fairfax to keep the garden beautiful? Hint: it has to do with money and class and perhaps people without the opportunity to discover other work. 

Do Mr. and Mrs. Andrews think of the farmers and servants in their employ? Only, it seems, to erase them when it’s inconvenient for the beautiful image of their estate. And what of the aging courtier who composes verse not to erase the servants but to find the young attractive ones, the coy ones, to seduce them?

William James may be right about his moral outrage, the hideous bargain that is set before us. But I’m less sure. As I add my electrolyte sweeteners to my pure spring water in my insert-brand-name insulated thermos, I wonder what we do about the folks erased on the margins, and those maybe not so marginal, after all.

I mean, I’m pretty happy, I think. (Please don’t make me do introspection. But I can get a therapist in a jiff if I need one.) I’m happy–the electrolytes are lemon-lime flavored.  

And I think, at least right now, that most of us won’t–correction, don’t–exist with a strenuous mood. When we frame otium as a withdrawal from the public, from awareness, I remain curious about our frequent resentment of negotium. It’s the nature of negotium that makes us turn away from a public life too violent, too strident, too busy, too demanding, too boring, too dull in its barrage of attention-seeking, too overwhelming to engage honestly or earnestly. And so we head to our porches and online worlds for relief from it, to tune it out; to intentionally blind ourselves, however, briefly, to our accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to it.

Yeah, I’m a bit cranky. But I don’t think I’m wrong. At the heart of all this for me is the impetus to engagement, if not the strenuous mood, the compulsion to accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, if not the moral outrage, and wherever that outrage may come from when we recognize an-Other is suffering, maybe it’s only in what Le Guin suggests in “Vaster Than Empires,” an empathy, a desire to listen well.

Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

James, William. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” The International Journal of Ethics, vol. 1, no. 3, Apr. 1891, pp. 330–54. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1086/intejethi.1.3.2375309.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and C. D. N. Costa. On the Shortness of Life. Penguin Books, 2004.