ISSUE No. 1
The first issue of the Ink contains various writings of the director of the Lyceum, David O'Donaghue, on his thinking about philosophy and adult education. These are a bit longer than what will come afterwards but we thought it was important to give the inquirer some sense of the thinking behind this project.

• Adult Education as Philosophical Practice
• Socrates in America or the Art of Transcendental Conversation

ISSUE NO. 2 IS IN PROGRESS!

This article will not address whether these claims are justified. In many ways, philosophical counseling will always have to deal with the 'poor stepchild' status with regard to the prevailing psychotherapeutic culture. It is am important question to ask whether philosophical counseling will ever distinguish itself sufficiently from psychotherapy and psychology or whether it will, in time merely be considered just another form of therapy, like gestalt, transactional analysis, bioenergetics, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or the myriad of other brands offered to the consumer. I am not going to ask that question in this paper. Rather, I am going to suggest a means by which the affiliation with psychotherapy can be de-emphasized and, as a result, perhaps the genuine philosophical article can come to the fore. I want to suggest that the best model for philosophical practice still remains within the educational paradigm, but one that is radically different than what is offered in a standard university curriculum. Through developing alternative models of adult education, I believe philosophy can be instrumental in guiding and informing a process of life reflection and integration which is an entirely different from the aims of current educational practices in academic philosophy.

In the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science because he is inexperienced in the action of life and, furthermore, since he follows his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable (1095a). It is a common Jewish adage that one should not study the Kaballah until he is past the age of forty. Most wisdom traditions maintain that it is only appropriate to take up a particular study after reaching a certain age. Our contemporary culture stresses the acquisition of practical knowledge at a young age which can then be readily utilized in the work force. Formal education is, by and large completed in our culture well before the age most of the wisdom traditions recommend starting one's serious education. I think modern life suffers from this inversion. Increasingly, we see how young people immediately out of high school are not able to focus and commit to serious study because they lack a sense of personal relevance and ownership of their learning process. Too often undergraduate education is merely an extension of the external demands of a system that never touches the real life of the late adolescent. American culture, in particular, emphasizes the importance of 'making a living' at the expense of gaining wisdom about life and so, as soon as a person is set up in a career, one is ostensibly done with his or her education. Yet today, as never before, one is not likely to be able to rest in a career until retirement. Therefore, strictly according to career development, education needs to be an ongoing process. This paper is an appeal for a restoration of a model of education which recognizes that an important, perhaps the most important, aspect of learning can occur only later in life, after one has had sufficient experience in the world, perhaps has raised her family or has seen her labor manifest significantly in work.

I maintain that revisioning pedagogy within the appropriate spectrum of adult learning is primarily a philosophical endeavor in two different ways. First, from the perspective of the system itself, the educational project itself must be reevaluated. This is so because adequately addressing a broader domain of inquiry than that prescribed by a mode of learning predominantly based on skill acquisition requires a thorough thinking through of what is the function of knowledge in a time of life in which practical utilization is not the primary aim. Secondly, focusing on the individual learner herself, the process she embarks on is inherently more philosophical because of the reflective nature of the learning at this stage of life. In this paper I will be making preliminary inquiries into both the philosophy of education for communities of adult learners and the kind of personal philosophical journeys individuals may undertake in the process of adult learning. I will show how both these lines of inquiry are themselves forms of philosophical practice that become manifest as activities in the market place.

A number of factors in the situation of the university in American culture present serious obstacles for older adults to take on a study of philosophy. One is that, due to the failure of our public school system, many undergraduates have insufficient reading, writing and reasoning skills in order to meaningfully engage with the material presented in their classes. This forces instructors to do remedial work to address these deficiencies. This becomes an impediment for the older learner to engage with the material at a level which is meaningful. Another factor that adversely affects the quality of teaching at universities is the emphasis on research and publication. It has been my experience at the two philosophy graduate programs that I have attended that the professor who actually gives time and energy to his or her teaching is the exception to the rule. Most professors are unavailable and distant and do not take the time to get to know the special interests of their students. This seems true both on the graduate and the undergraduate level and it accentuates the feeling of detachment and alienation commonly felt in the educational process. Perhaps presenting professional papers at conferences and publishing books and articles is important on some level, but the constituents of the university are the students and it is a scandal that teaching becomes such a low priority. People who go into teaching should love teaching. They should not merely use the university to hide away in the ivory tower or their "research." There are some dedicated professors out there but many are actually quite lazy and use their status to do as they please with no accountability. A last factor I will mention is that graduate programs are oriented towards a particular developmental stage of formation and initiation into a particular guild or career. This is not an appropriate model for the older student who has already been in the world for some time. She needs to be able to reflect on her life experiences and draw from them examples to test out the validity of philosophical conceptualizations. In normal graduate programs, older students are treated as if they must ignore and even erase their prior learning and experience in the interest of attaining some "pure" approach to philosophy. Professors are either unaware of how prior life experience could be integrated and utilized in their teaching or they are uninterested and inpervious to the background of their students, young or old

It is not a novel idea that philosophy can be taught outside the university. Philosophy has always found a place in other settings, relating to the workplace, the political sphere and religious spheres, in occult circles and revolutionary organizations. Philosophy is expressed in films, on TV, in novels, in pop songs and now, with the world wide web, the public has access to the major philosophers with a click of the mouse. What is needed in this age of "too much information" is some discernment and organization so that one's time of inquiry and study is not just a paddling around in the sea of ideas which do not cohere with one another. A major function of a school for adult learners is to provide some organization to intellectual ideas, whether it be topical, such as feminism, political philosophy, metaphysics; or historical as in recognizing how later ideas are built on an acceptance and critique of those ideas that preceded them.

Book groups have become quite popular in the United States over the past ten years. This demonstrates a need Americans feel to share their learning and reading and ideas with others. With the Internet and the glut of published material in this country, people can have access to reams of information individually, but this does not fill a deeper need for the social dimension of learning. Many Americans look back on their college days as an ideal time when intellectual pursuits were conducted within a shared community. Must we give that up? Or are there ways that we can restore a sense of community among learners even when they are involved in separate work and family lives? List serves and chat rooms on the Internet just does not fill the need for community. Face to face discussions seem therefore to be an important medium to preserve. Is this happening today at our state universities? Sadly no. Classes of 60 - 200 do not allow for any real contact either among students themselves or with their instructors. If you were among the small elite who attended small colleges, you may have been able to find some intellectual community, but it is also likely that the developmental demands of late adolescence may have obscured the value of intellectual intercourse. I don't see any reason to let the possibility of intellectual community disappear either for those who never had it in the first place of for those that long for it again. The development of the small schools of philosophical study would be an important means of stemming the tide of depersonalization that is rife in our contemporary world.

Up until the middle of the last century, education was seem primarily as a form of philosophical practice. Ancient schools, such as Aristotle's Lyceum or the Stoa taught theories of natural science, ethics, politics, psychology and theology which were coordinated around a primary philosophy. This brought a high degree of coherence within each system which accounted for a wide spectrum of aspects of the world. In the European and Middle Eastern worlds of the middle ages, systems of science, belief and philosophy were unified around articles of faith and conformed with the prevailing worldview of the established and controlling religious system. Thought that ran counter to the tradition was dangerous, but even renegade philosophers and mystics organized their thought in response to the prevailing position.

The emergence of a reaction against the prevailing scholasticism of the seventeenth century ushered in the view that the methods of inquiry in the young sciences needed to be purified of any blind loyalty to the authority of a system that was itself under critique. Kant and Hegel are perhaps the crowning thinkers in this movement which critically evaluated the taken-for-granted assumptions of pedagogical practices. The aspirations of the early German idealists to establish a single Wissenschaftlehre, a single science of knowledge, gave way to the more pragmatic considerations that, in order for each of the sciences to develop its best methods of gathering, interpreting and concluding from its own significant data, it must be able to conceptualize itself according to regulative considerations within the discipline itself, rather than from abstract universal categories of understanding or being. This produced the separation of the fields of study into highly technical areas, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, chemistry, physics, biology, which had their own view to the world according to different levels of signification. Philosophy was seen as an obstruction to the establishment of the identities of these fields, which were not seen as aspects of the absolute, but as disciplines joined around common significations, methods and notation.

The identity of philosophy in the past two hundred years has changed significantly from being the necessary foundation for a unified exploration of the world to the position of being an adjunct to the sciences, as sort of bumbling blind child who catches up to the discoveries of science too late to actually influence the results and which therefore can only abstractly notate the discoveries in a highly technical language. The own of Minerva , as Hegel has famously phrased, takes flight at dusk. Philosophy speculates upon the scene after the intellectual structures which have defines the historical moment have already begun to fade. Much of current academic philosophy is searching for an identity within the institutions of higher learning through linking themselves to applied fields, such a bio-ethics and environmental ethics. The technocrazing of philosophy is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, through the application of philosophy to current problems, the field may find a new relevancy. On the other hand, through appropriating the language of the sciences, philosophy may lose its critical distance and thereby become a mere ancillary chapter in the great scientific Weltanschuung. Whether philosophy comes out ahead in this marriage or not, it nevertheless seems apparent in the trends in the universities in the United States that philosophy is becoming more and more the handmaiden of other fields.

In proposing a model of adult education as a form of person-centered philosophizing, I see that philosophy may likewise be linked to other fields such as psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, and sociology. The interest in this case would be a humanist agenda of understanding the Lebenwold, or life-world, of the student within her own milieu. The goal of academic philosophy may be overwhelmingly more interested in technical advances in the field than in using philosophy as a means of understanding self and others. This I find to be quite unfortunate since late adolescents are at a point in their lives in which they are asking important questions of personal values and self-identity, about which most instructors are quite oblivious.

Karl Jaspers writes that "the individual wants to rediscover as his own truth what comes to him as external authority (1971, p. 48). I think this captures exactly the purpose of education later in life. Much of early education is based on memorizing, utilizing, articulating truths that are given from the authority of a textbook. Most students are not encouraged to challenge the authority of the texts because the practical application of knowledge requires that certain axioms are taken for granted as necessary components of a functioning system of thought. Education becomes training for a field of work and learning the trade means one cannot be too critical of its basic assumptions. Perhaps this serves the conditions of the work place and the economic considerations of late capitalism and maintains a social stability but, there may be a time in a person's life where he or she sees behind the curtain ands sees the little man working the levers to maintain the illusion that this is the way it has to be. Mid-life crises is a pop-psychological term for an event of disillusionment in which the system falls apart and individuals realize that they have in some way been co-opted into a social, political and economic system that is purely arbitrary in nature. According to Sartre, "the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence...Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance." We fall into explanations as a means of avoiding the stark freedom that such contigencies burdens us with, but if we can tolerate the freedom which removes us from having to justify the "given" world in which we have been thrown, then real transformation can occur. A means of reconstructing one's world after it has fallen apart may be to critically evaluate exactly what it is in the way things are that does not make sense. This, of course can be done in a therapeutic context or it can be done educationally though an exposure to other minds that have struggled with similar negative epiphanies.

John Dewey writes that "the function of reflective thought is to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious (1939, p. 851). Taken in this simple form, Dewey could be criticized for being a bit naive about the complexities of human dissatisfaction. I believe philosophy cannot and should not promise to make everything transparently clear and thereby settle the anguish of the soul. The promise of philosophy may best be to stimulate some authentic, yet problematic, re-engagement with one's life and world. Ultimately, this re-engagement might lead to Nietzsche's amour fati or even Spinoza's Intellectus Dei. In any case, education after the disillusionment of a mid-life crisis may be instrumental in reorienting individuals to fresh perspectives on meaning and their being-in-the-world.

Jasper's describes the transformation that can occur through education with these words, "As I elucidate the realm of the encompassing for myself, the dark walls of my prison seem to become transparent" (1971, p. 65). I think what he means here is that the various personal conundrums one can find oneself can be opened up though an approach to wider paradigms of meaning, which is the stock-in-trade of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead describes this stage of expansion as 'romance', when, "the subject matter has a vividness of novelty; it holds within itself unexplored connections with possibilities half disclosed by glimpses and half concealed by the wealth of the material" (1949, p. 29).

According to Dewey, another crucial dimension of learning is that it is inherently social. He writes that "all human experience is ultimately social. Experience does not go on simply inside a person... Intellectual organization is not an end in itself but is the means by which social relations, distinctively human ties and bonds, may be understood and more intelligently ordered" (1938, p. 34, 103). Another function of adult learning is the important face to face encounters that are provided for people to create in some way a learning community that is not based on pre-established collegiate models typified in undergraduate life. Europe, I believe, has a much different version of university life that may be more diversified and thereby be more hospitable to the older learner than say the model of "Animal House." State universities in America do offer lots of socializing activities but these are rarely intellectual in nature. The kind of community that may arise with the gathering of interested adults around particular topics can be a fresh model of interactive thinking, as the success of book groups and philo-cafes have shown.

One of the benefits of a so-called 'free-market' is the chance to put a new product on the market and see if it catches on, that is, see if the general public will respond positively and endorse the product and thereby assure its survival against the competition. State institutions no longer hold the monopoly over the granting of higher degrees and there are also a number of 'experimental colleges' that offer hobby-like classes at reasonable tuition. However, I see a need for schools of philosophy which can provide quality rigorous and scholarly education for those older learners who are willing to do the hard work necessary to engage with difficult material but who are not willing to jump through inappropriate and meaningless hoops to be in a degree granting program. Degrees can serve important purposes earlier in life when one is training for a profession, but after one has become established in career and home, degrees serve only a token purpose of conveying a sense of accomplishment. I think there are better ways to feel intrinsic rewards for the diligence of taking on the study of philosophy. The best of these are probably internal and invisible but other rewards and recognition could be papers published in student journals, student presentations and debates before the public. These might give one the sense of being a member of an intellectual community. So I say, within a free economy of education, let the educational options flourish and enable various ways of learning to be available for the general public.

Dewey is known to have been critical of education that only leads to a static social order since such an order does not exist (1934, p. 9), yet in the midst of the forces of ferment and change he also recognized the need for stabilizing influences of tradition and rationality. The many voices of philosophy, represented in their historical contexts, can offer both grounds for radical critique of the current culture as well as also grounding methodologies that require a certain amount of reflective distance and analysis. When this is applied to the lives of the older student it can provide both a means of self-evaluation and life-review and offer new models of unity and coordination of one's being-in-the-world. Through applying philosophy to current problems and debates thinkers such as Gadamer, Jaspers and Benjamin demonstrated various strategies of recollecting the horizon of historical meanings within the newly claimed contexts of the emergent. These can provide important resource of redescription for adults at the crossroads of their lives.

Often what propels adults to go back to school is some impulse or hunger, the satisfaction of which can only be met through the mind. It may be a call to virtue in the Aristotelian sense, that is, toward the actualization of one's fullest potential. Education (paideia) is the cultivation of human potentials and according to Aristotle, our intellectual capacities represent our highest potentials and the very best form of life. Education comes from the Latin word e-ducere which means "to lead out." Education therefore is a leading out of each of us what is best within us. Sometimes this cannot take place between the ages of 18 to 24 but requires a life full of experiences in order to provide the material upon which later reflection can work. I am coming to the position that philosophy is not appropriate for the young but is best pursued in later life. Perhaps it is only after years of experiences in the world of work, family relations, public life, and developmental crises that one can return to an educational process which is truly a philosophical practice.

References
Aristotle. Ethica Nichomachea (Ross. W.D., trans.) in The Basic Works of Aristotle (McKeon, ed.) New York: Random House, 1941).
Dewey, John. Education and the Social Order. New York: League of Industrial
Democracy, 1934.
__________ Experience and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
__________ Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Holt, 1922.
Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy of Existence. (Grabau, R., trans.) Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1971.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. (Alexander, L., trans.) New York: New Directions, 1964.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and other Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

top of page

All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than the soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. The remedy to their deformity is first soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul (1969, p. 68).

But what is soul? And how do we listen to it and follow its wisdom? Perhaps the task of nineteenth Century America was to throw off the shackles of European institutions but this only presented a greater problem: the danger that what would replace them would be far worse. Would Emerson's Soul be strong enough to resist the hydra-headed lust of capitalism and the cold-hearted subjugation of the indigenous people, the devastation of the grasslands and the wildlife of the Great Plains, in short, the spiritual bankruptcy of the rampant materialism in the "land of opportunity?" The destiny of the country was a potent question of the times. Prior to the Civil War, America had many opportunities to become more soulful, as is evident in the number of utopian communities that were established at this time. I wish to speak about just one of the small efforts of three transcendentalists to establish of insuring a connection to soul, in the Emersonian sense. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody sought a means of soul-building through offering public conversations on social, philosophical and literary topics.

The crisis in the developing nation was how to enable the freedom of self-determinacy and encourage self-reliance while at the same time inculcating a sense of national identity and public spirit, which then would allow for a society to work toward no particular individualís good but the good of all. Hegel expressed this succinctly in the Phenomenology when he said that the I must be a we and the we an I. Hegel saw that it might be possible for enlightened individualism and self-interest to be transformed into civic consciousness, if the apparent contradictions of the public and the private spheres could be sublated. We will see that the transcendentalists took a different path to perhaps a very similar goal, whereby the individual in appealing to what is universal within her, could find a harmony with a society which is equally dedicated to the pursuit of the universal in its midst.

In the United States, "Soul" is a much abused word these days. For the past twenty years, the Jungians have had a hey day with soul, throwing it into the titles of their books and workshops ad nauseum to convey some kind of relationship, experience, or perception that should be highly valued in our culture but, for the most part, is ignored in every day life. Soul is often connected with disenfranchised people like native Americans, people of color or women. Soul-music and soul-food, for example, is used to designate some characteristic African Americans contribute to the national character. Soul also seems to have to do with living through suffering and not having much power in the social structure: Women have more soul than men, the poor more than the rich, people of color more than whitey. These conations are not what the transcendentalists were working with. Nor were they working with the purely Aristotelian notion of soul as the form of the body or as the animating principle in life. I suppose the definition of soul used by the transcendentalists can best be summed up in Emerson's Essay on the Over-Soul:

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descended into us from that Over-Soul, within which every manís particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship (1969, p. 95).

Soul, for Emerson, is that experience or activity which reveals the underlying unity of all particular nodes of being and, interestingly, he sees conversation as the highest form of such activity. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody took up conversation as the passion of their lives, believing quite strongly that through elevated conversations souls meet and join and find their common ground in shared understanding and vision.

Though Emerson appreciated and attended the conversations, he was more in his element as a lecturer and essayist, feeling much more at ease behind a podium at a local lyceum than facilitating a discussion. Bronson Alcott, on the other hand, wrote rather poorly and came out best in a certain spontaneity of interactions afforded by the conversations. He enjoyed long travels across the eastern and midwestern states meeting with strangers in their local granges, lyceums or philosophy clubs opening up metaphysical questions about the nature of time, personal identity, and the unity of the Good. Margaret Fuller introduced some of the first opportunities for women to discuss philosophical and literary topics outside of the rigid formality of the educational system of the time. She asked women to think for themselves, and being brilliant and articulate herself, she served as an example of what women could be, even if the culture around them did not encourage such behavior. Her conversations began as places where women could freely speak their minds without the censure of their husbands or other males. Later she opened up her conversations to both sexes but was disappointed with the results because the women, out of habit, deferred to the menís opinions. Elizabeth Peabody opened the first foreign bookstore in Boston, offering to many Americans their first exposure to the works of Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, Voltaire, and Rousseau. The bookstore naturally was a meeting place for like-minded souls who gathered for conversations about the new ideas presented in these works. This happened quite informally at first but too many people were upset with missing out on the spontaneous conversations and so Elizabeth scheduled the conversations, which would then draw large numbers of participants. Paul Brooks describes the times as follows:

At every level of society Education-with a capital E-was seen as the key to the good life. Improvement was the magic word: not only as a means of climbing the social ladder but for enrichment of life as well. "We are becoming cultured up to our ears," remarked the historian, William Prescott (1990, p 5).

The conversations provided an important means by which adults could continue their learning process as well as develop their skills of questioning and reasoning. Apart from the obvious benefits of respectful social interaction for community cohesiveness and participatory democratic process, I would like to focus on the particular transcendental philosophy underlying the conversations because I think it offers, for this conference, the most intriguing food for thought. I am going to concentrate on the writings of Alcott and Fuller because they provide the richest references to the transcendental idealism that underlies the conversations. Bronson Alcott was considered by his good friend Emerson to be a prophet, a mystical visionary who "has lead the life of a peripatetic philosopher, conversing in cities and villages wherever invited, on divinity, on human nature, on ethics, on dietetics, and a wide range of practical questions (1893, p. 536)." Alcott, in turn, said of Margaret Fuller, "She is no New England woman. She might as well have been born in Greece or Rome (Alcott, 1851)."

The similarities in the approaches of the two conversationalists revolve around their shared commitment to a practical Platonism. For both the world was a mere semblance or analogy for greater truths in the realm of the Ideas. The conversations were a means by which the deeper meanings could be uncovered in a slow dialectic approach resembling that of Plato in the Dialogues. This form of the dialectical method directed the participant to see greater and greater unities in what first appeared to be mere particulars. Not being particularly commited to any logical deductiive process, the transcendental unities were established in a sort of gentle haze of romantic sympathies, rather than the analytic rigor of revealing contradictions in particular modes of consciousness that Hegel had perfected in Germany.

In order to appreciate the type of idealism represented by Alcott, Fuller and Peabody it is important to understand how the American intellectual movement called Transcendentalism related to the idealism of Europe. Transcendentalism is a term that has been loosely ascribed to a group of thinkers, orators and writers in the second quarter of the nineteenth Century, centering around Boston, and particularly in the town of Concord, Massachusetts. They were predominantly Unitarian ministers, educated at Harvard, at a time when Harvard was going through a major shift in leadership and orientation from its puritanical theocratic origins to the liberal humanism of Unitarianism. The challenge to the old guard was primarily theological and not philosophical. Therefore, Transcendentalism had a rather loose association with the philosophical traditions of Europe. Although most of the transcendentalists were familiar with at least the First Critique of Kant, they misunderstood his insistence on the limitations placed upon reason. They read Kant for their own purposes and proposed that he ultimately claimed that, though religious truths could not be ascertained through reason, they could be known through the faculty of intuition. These intuitions, however did not secure dogmatic truths, as in the Christian creed, but rather was the foundation for knowledge of the perennial truths of the Divine presence within the human soul, much as Vedantic philosophy claims. Kant repeatedly flatly denies that human being had any sort of intellectual intuition and it took the complex intellectual rebuttals of Fichte and Schelling and others to build a tightly reasoned defense of the possibility of a knowing that was not directly dependent upon the senses. The Transcendentalists seemed to gather the spirit of this reaction to Kant but missed the letter of it. German writings had only recently been available in America; German was only first taught in America at Harvard in 1839 by an ÈmigrÈ, Charles Follen. Some transcendentalists, such as Henry Hedge and Frederick Parker studied in Germany and Margaret Fuller knew German well and was a noted translator of Goethe. What they lacked was a full education in the continental tradition that lead up to Kant and provided the grounds for a strong philosophical rebuttal. America at the time that the transcendentalists were educated was mostly influenced by the English Empiricism of Locke and the Common Sense philosophy of the Scottish philosophers.

The aim that unified the transcendentalists was romantic in nature rather than strictly philosophical. That is why they are more often taught in English rather than philosophy departments in the States. What I mean by romantic is specifically the stress placed upon the personal experience of greater and greater sympathies with other human beings, nature and the Divine. These experiences lead one to a natural appreciation of greater and greater unities, not through a process of deductive or inductive reasoning, but through capacities that awaken within the individual soul which allow for an assurance of an connection to the Source of all things. When Margaret made the statement, "I accept the Universe," Thomas Carlyle sarcastically comments, "My God, she'd better!" but Ednah Cheney related how the expression affected her and I think it nicely conveys the purpose of this kind of thinking:

I found myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had seen in nature, observed in life, or read in books. Whatever she spoke of revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put into true relations. Perhaps I could express it by saying that I was no longer the limitations of myself, but I felt that the whole wealth of the universe was open to be. It was this consciousness of the illimitable ego, the divinity in the soul, which was so real to Margaret herself, and what she meant in her saying, ìI accept the universe,î which gave her that air of regal superiority which was misinterpreted as conceit (Cheney, 1902).

Bronson writes in his work of 1868 entitled Tablets, "Man is a soul informed by divine ideas and bodying forth their image," and in Table Talk of 1877 he goes on, "Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons. Rising naturally from the occasion, the theme, the company, it sets no prescribed rules, obeys laws of its own. Its beauty consists in its suggestiveness, unexpectedness, saliency; it vaults the passes, flashes the whole of things upon the imagination at a glance, sets life and things anew for the moment." In the midst of her conversations in 1840 Margaret went on a personal retreat of rest and reflection and returned from it with a changed attitude about the role she played in the conversations. Whereas previously she desired to deliberately facilitate a process by which the ends of idealism could be reached collectively, her new approach was to let go of deliberate control and allow the workings of the law within her to speak. As was recounted in Memoirs:

She was conscious of looking at all things less objectively, -more from the law with which she identified herself. This, she stated, was the natural process of our individual being, when we did not hinder its development, to advance from objects to law, from the circumference of being, where we found ourselves at birth, to the centre (1852, p. 340-41).

She also realized the limitations of language to express the highest form of idealism:

The best that we receive from anything can never be written. For it is not the positive amount of thought that we have received, but the virtue that has flowed into us, and is now us, that is precious. If we can tell no one thought, yet are higher, larger, wiser, the work is done. The best part of life is too spiritual to bear recording (Fuller, 1841).

It becomes clear here that what Fuller has in mind is the possibility of a transformation of character, which inculcates virtues, in the process itself and she does not stress intellectual comprehension, eloquent expression or the adoption of any particular belief system. Women who recorded the influence of these conversations on them often said that they did not always understand the content of the conversation but they nevertheless felt uplifted and more noble after them. The example set by Margaret herself had a lot to do with this, as I believe many of these women adored her.

One way that Margaret differentiated the realm of the ideal from the prosaic was to see that in everyday life, amid the disturbing influences of other wills, we can not speak from the poetry depths of Truth, so by intentionally creating a shared intercourse of those depths where individual wills are subordinated to the whole, the women in the group can ìbring the latent ideas out of hiding, and burrow far below the surface of their minds (Bell, 1930).î This then is not so dissimilar from what psychoanalysis claims to do. Since her first series of Conversations was on Greek mythology, one could claim that she understood the power of myth to convey collective themes that would be relevant in her day as much as in ancient times. This is reported in the Memoirs:

She spoke of the acceptance of this limitation, but it should be called by its right name and always measured; and we should inwardly cling to the truth that poesy was the natural life of the soul; and never yield inwardly to the common notion that poesy was a luxury, out of the common trackÖ The She spoke of the individual as surrounded by prose, so we may here call the manifestation of the temporary, in opposition to the eternal, always trenching on it, and circumscribing and darkening. fine arts were our compensation for not being able to live out our poesy, amid the conflicting and disturbing forces of this moral world in which we live (1852).

Like Schelling, Fuller sees art as the link between the real and the ideal, which cannot be encompassed through language alone.

Bronson also recognized the poetic ideal of good conversation. He describes it in the Tablets as follows:

Good conversation is lyrical: a penticost of tongues, touching the chords of melody in all minds, it prompts to the best each had to give, to better than they had, what none claims as his own, as if he were the organ of some invisible player behind the scenes.

Bronson is identifying the madness of inspiration in the poetic voice with this ideal of conversation whereby Truth is spoken through the voice of individuals who cannot claim sole authorship for it. The conversation takes on a life of its own and when it is really cooking then truth is spoken and acknowledged collectively. This is why Bronson disdained debate and controversy because he truly believed that the truth, humbly spoken would unify and not divide. Debate for him was merely a contest of egoís fighting on a purposeless battlefield for a meaningless prize. He saw truth as spherical as it could be approached from a myriad of directions, all of which are directed toward a center point. It's an interesting model which allows for a diversity of understandings and approaches while not collapsing into relativism.

Margaret also sought in her conversations a higher unity beyond debate and disagreement. In a letter to William Henry Channing, she writes:

When souls meet direct and all secret thought are laid open, we shall need no forbearance, no prevention, no care-taking of any kind, and each action simple. There will not be always so much to pardon in ourselves and others. Yesterday we had at my class a conversation on Faith. Deep true things were said and felt. To speak with heart and ìtongue affectionate and true,î to enjoy real repose and the consciousness of a thorough mutual understanding in the presence of friends when we do meet, is what is needed (1842).

Both Margaret and Bronson placed a high aesthetic value on the harmony of discourse and shared vision. Participants reported that the manner in which Margaret conducted the conversations brought out the natural gifts and graces of the speakers which gave it "the charm of a Platonic dialogue." Her skill as a facilitator was noted in the way she knew how to address the good meanings of all that was said and make the timid speaker feel glad and not sorry that she had spoken. She consciously wielded her power to direct and focus the conversation, but in a way that did not dominate or suppress. She worried that others would see the Conversations as only a means by which Margaret could exhibit her superior intelligence, and apparently she was able to both carry herself regally (one young participant compared her to Queen Victoria) while at the same time establishing an equality among the women present. She wished to establish an emotional sympathy between the women for she said, along with Antigone, "the aim of women is not to hate but to love each other."

Bronson likewise envisioned the Conversations as being a sort of utopian experiment of heartfelt attention, affirmation and love. He recognized the necessity of wit, humor, geniality and playfulness in good discourse. "We pity the scholar,"he writes, "whose intellect is so exacting, so precise, that he cannot meet his company otherwise than critically, cannot descend to meet, through the senses or the sentiments, that common level where intercourse is possible for most (Tablets, p. 77)." Margaret used the image of Dionysius to emphasize the importance of the intellect warmed by the passions of life. She suggested that Dionysiusí destruction of Pentheus represented how the life forces, when ignored by a sterile intellect, can become destructive if they are not integrated into the reasoning process. This is pretty sophisticated depth psychology for a woman of the early nineteenth century!

The difference between Bronson's and Margaret's approach is interesting because it can be attributed primarily, I believe, to the differences in the strivings of each gender for a more balanced position with regard to the other. Bronson was known for his gentleness and his disgust with conflict and debate. He writes in Concord Days (1872),

Debate is angular, conversation circular and radiant of the underlying unity. Who speaks deeply excludes all possibility of controversy. His affirmation is self-sufficient; his assumptions final, absoluteÖGood discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements. It avoids argument, by finding a common basis of agreement; and thus escapes controversy by rendering it superfluous.

He wished in his conversation for union with others and a shared vision of love, which could be seen as a move from the masculine and competitive position to a more inclusive feminine one. In fact Bronson did think that in many ways women were better conversationalists than men, because they lacked the arrogance and the need to always be right. He appreciated participants who made suggestions of wisdom and allusions that drew the listener closer to a truth rather than those who felt they needed to club them over the head with facts and theory. This kind of egotism had no place in good conversation but all must put themselves aside in the interest of pursuing wisdom alone. He thought the best way to move towards a unity with others was to find the language and the metaphors that all could accept and work within these to rise to greater and greater wholes. He sees that few men are diffident enough to speak poetically on the finest of themes and he expresses the hope that women will become better conversationalists as they become freer of the opinions of men, especially their husbands. A necessary ingredient in good conversation is shared sympathies and Bronson believed that the best conversations were those where the sexes were brought into mutual sympathy. He always encouraged women to attend his conversations and thought that the great themes are feminine and must be dealt with delicately. Debate is masculine; conversation feminine.

Margaret, on the other hand, sought through her conversations to enable women to utilize the knowledge they had learned in school, so that it was not just a wasted bauble of well-brought up girl. By this time in the culture of the eastern United States, and especially around the Boston area, women were given the same educational opportunities up to a point as men. They still were not allowed to attend university, but were beginning to get advanced education in teacherís colleges. Many well-to-do women yearned for a chance to engage with the ideas they had learned passively in school. Margaret writes about this as follows:

Women are now taught, at school, all that men are; they run over, superficially, even more studies, without being really taught anything. When they come to the business of life, they find themselves inferior, and all their studies have not given them that practical good sense, and mother wisdom, and wit, which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning wheel. But with this difference, men are called on, from a very period, to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for the purpose of display (1839).

This deficit is what the conversations were set up to correct. Conversation was to be undertaken not in a passive and compliant manner, but with struggle and questioning, to actively wrestle with the subject matter.

She had a seemingly more masculine agenda than Bronson, as shown in the wording of her goals for the Conversations:

To pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our minds. To systematize thought and give a precision in which our sex is so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements to test and classify what they receive. To ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action (1839).

Margaret sought to organize different areas of thought under her topics so that the women that attended the conversations could likewise arrange the myriad of knowledge they had received in their education into meaningful and useful areas of inquiry. She did this through selecting particular topics in a series of lectures which could be addressed in a deliberate, logical manner. For example, in her series on mythology she explored the human characteristics exemplified by each of the Greek deities in order to build a foundation for further exploration of larger cultural forms such as the nature of beauty (Venus) or the impassioned abandonment of genius (Bacchus). Her other goal of linking the life of thought to action is less obvious in her conversations,. Some saw her little group of overdressed society women as "gorgeous pendants" that took no active part in bringing about the idealism that they talked so freely of. To this criticism one can point out that many of the participants in the conversations later became active political figures in the abolitionist and feminist movements.

Like Bronson, Margaret was also critical of particular forms of intellectual display among her gender. She saw as an obstacle to her Conversations,

That sort of vanity which wears the garb of modesty in which many women fear to lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the art of coterie criticism and the delicate disdains of good society, even to obtain a nearer view of truth itself.

She feared that other women, out of fear or envy, would see her as a paid Corinne, using the Conversations only as a vehicle of vanity through exhibiting her superior intelligence. Through her skills of sympathy and attentiveness, she was able to be in perfect tune with her group. But she was also able to wield a heavy intellectual lance:

She not only did not speak lies after own foolish social customs, but she met you fairly. She broke her lance upon your shield. Encountering her glance, something like an electric shock was felt. Her eyes pierced through your disguises. Your outworks fell before her firs assault and you were at her mercy. And then began the delight of true intercourse. Though she spoke rudely searching words and told you startling truths, though she broke down your little shams and defenses, you felt exhilarated by the compliment of being found out, and even that she cared to find you out (Clarke, 1871).

It was from descriptions like this that many thought of her intelligence as an aggressive, masculine one. Many, later saw her as a special example of what women could be, in their own intellectual power. What she was attempting to do was to break out of the tight constraints placed upon Boston society women, in order to have honest and clear discourse without the prattle of trivialities that made up most of polite conversation.

For both Margaret and Bronson the Conversations provided a method by which both could work out their ideas in a social setting. Margaret readily acknowledged that she could not think alone and depended on the stimulation of other honest seekers to arrive at higher ideas. The overriding goal of her Conversations was to answer the question, "what are we born to do and how shall we do it?" Imbedded in these questions is the assumption of a higher destiny for the soul which must be ascertained, if an individual was to live her life to the fullest. The Conversation for Margaret was a work in progress-a work with others-carried out with the utmost sensitivity. As Emerson notes, "Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companions, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way; and this sympathy she had for all persons indifferently (1895)."

Bronson described his understanding of the transformation that can occur in the Conversations as the shift from being mere individuals to becoming persons.

Excellent people, he writes, wonder why they cannot meet and converse. They cannot. No. Their wits have ebbed away, and left them helpless. Why, but because of hostile temperaments, states of animation? The personal magnetism finds no conductor. One is individual, the other individual no less. Individuals repel. Persons meet. And only as oneís personality is sufficiently overpowering to dissolve the otherís individualism, can the parties flow together and become one. But individuals have no power of the sort. They are two, not one, perhaps many. Prisoned within themselves by reason of their egotism, like animals, they stand aloof, are separate even when they touch; are solitary in any company, having none in themselves. But the freed personal mind meets all, is apprehended by all, by the least cultivated, the most gifted; magnetizes all; is the spell-binder, the liberator of everyone (Tablets, 1868, p. 77-78).

Bronson's idealism was not a spiritual escapade into the perfect forms of another world, but rather a discovery of the primal unity of the human race through its own humanity. Bronson maintained that to be fully human is to be open and connected to others in a shared life and that people, who guard their individuality, against the encroachment of others are missing out on the benefits of gracious company that can lead to the higher ideals. Anticipating much of the philosophy that would arise in the later part of the nineteenth century in Boston and France called Personalism, Bronson already saw the dangers of the rampant individualism of the opportunistic American frontier. He saw that exploitation and self-aggrandizement threatened to destroy both the national character and the community. He believed that the solution lay in part, in sharing respectful conversation with others, and seeking together a higher form of life than that which presented itself in capitalistic enterprises alone. He understood that, as the way to unity came not through some abstract ideal, but in the very concrete living out of one's personality, which will naturally honor and make room for the personality of others. He writes,

Those whoso speak to the Personality drives beneath the grounds of difference, and deals face to face with principles and idealsÖConversation presupposes a common sympathy in the subject, a great equality in the speakers, taking out the egotism, the nonsense; putting wisdom, information in its placeÖ Most people are too exclusively individual for conversing. It cost too great expenditure of magnetism to dissolve them; who cannot leave himself out of his discourse, but embarrasses all who take part in it. Egoists cannot converse, they talk to themselves only (Concord Days, 1872, p. 73-76).

Once again we see that, for Bronson, wisdom is the property of no individual, but comes through persons, in a shared encounter.

The public Conversations of Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott can be examined merely from their historical significance as an effort at strengthening the civic ties and communication necessary for the ideal of participatory democracy. The early nineteenth century did present many such efforts at holding on to a sense of identity and unity in the face of the ever-expanding frontier and influx of immigrants. But what is more germane to this conference is to evaluate the conversations as a form of philosophical practice. The art of conversation is relevant in our shared interests in such things as the Philo-CafÈ, Socratic Dialogues and various approaches in adult education. The past two decades in the United States has seen the burgeoning of discussion groups of various kinds: book groups, self-help groups, political groups or just intentional discussion groups where a topic is presented all present are to listen and respond to only one conversation going on around the table. I have lead and participated in many of these groups, but my question is, is this a form of philosophical practice. If so, how? If not, by itself, then what are the necessary ingredients to make it more philosophical in intent and direction. Certainly Bronson and Margaret considered their conversation highly philosophical, especially since they both had a strong transcendental agenda to convey. We may be less comfortable showing our particular idealistic commitments with others, for fear that we would come across as some zealot or guru. And indeed both Margaret and Bronson played the guru at times in their groups, becoming real heroes for young women and people on the frontier hungry for intellectual stimulation. We probably will never have the impact they did due to all the other stimulation available today, but my question is, can the good facilitation of public discussion offer a form of philosophical practice. I believe it can, but I would like to hear from you and so I will end my paper here.

top of page