`The Wild Circus of Thought'

On a Greyhound bus traveling from Youngstown to Cleveland, Ohio, I once tried to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. It was a local run, stopping at most of the rural crossroads in Northeast Ohio, which I had chosen purposely as a form of enforced discipline. Most of my fellow passengers were blacks or service men in uniform. When the driver braked abruptly, you could hear wine bottles rolling under the seats. The experience – trying to read Hegel, I mean – was usefully humbling. At age 20, I had learned I wasn’t cut out for philosophy in any professional sense. It remained my minor but only because nothing else interested me enough, besides English literature (my major), to pursue with dedication.

That’s when I became a philosophical dilettante, reading what interested me, avoiding some crucial thinkers entirely – Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and most other Germans – and returning to others regularly for decades – the Scholastics, Spinoza, Hume and William James. I found support for my philosophy-as-buffet approach in A Stroll with William James by Jacques Barzun:

“I am not the fortunate sort of person who can feed his mind and guide his moral conduct with the aid of a single book or author. I am naturally polytheistic and fastidiously (I hope) promiscuous. When I read philosophy, or to put it more modestly, red in philosophy, whether gymnastically for muscle tone or hedonistically for the wild circus of thought, I am as likely to pick up Montaigne as Aquinas, Rousseau as Pascal, Berkeley as Whitehead.”

Except for the mention of Rousseau, I could sign my name to this passage. As a magpie, I have no interest in constructing inclusive, internally consistent systems. Strictly speaking, Montaigne is no philosopher, nor are Samuel Johnson, Coleridge and Emerson, but all are thinkers and all have contributed to my thinking – and living. A passage in, say, Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer (to pick two Hegel antagonists), can serve as a tool for understanding (or “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke referred to literature). And Santayana was a great prose stylist. So, not only am I a dilettante, I’m an aesthete. If a man can’t write with grace and clarity, I tend to assume he’s not worthy of our attention ( Hegel again). Here’s how Barzun completed the paragraph I quoted above:

“What then is the difference when I go back to James? The answer is that his ideas, his words, his temperament speak to me with intimacy as well as force. Communication is direct; I do not `derive benefit’ from him, he `does me good.’ I find him visibly and testably right – right in intuition, range of considerations, sequence of reasons, and fully rounded power of expression. He is for me the most inclusive mind I can listen to, the most concrete and the least hampered by trifles. He is moreover entirely candid and full of gaiety, lovable through his words as he was in life to his friends. As if this were not enough, he helps me to understand what his contemporaries and mine were and are doing. I stroll with him again and again because he knows better than anyone else the material and spiritual country I am traveling through.”

I’m likelier to spend time with a philosopher whose life and humanity I can perceive, at least sketchily, through the screen of his words. I’m not after answers so much as new ways to pose questions – a James specialty. Leo Shestov, in In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths, contrasted the thought of Spinoza and Pascal:

“Philosophy sees the supreme good in a sleep which nothing can trouble….That is why it is so careful to get rid of the incomprehensible, the enigmatic, and the mysterious; and avoids anxiously those questions to which it has already made answer. Pascal, on the other hand, sees in the inexplicable and incomprehensible nature of our surroundings the promise of a better existence, and every effort to simplify or to reduce the unknown to the known seems to him blasphemy.”