The Peripatetic Philosopher Asks: A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 12, 2019

MARGIE WRITES

I just finished reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay on Self-Reliance (does that surprise you?)  I never cease to wonder at the hundreds of hours that philosophers and authors and other inquisitive minds spend studying (or pondering) the same subjects. I seem to have interpreted Emerson as saying "listen to your own heart - be true to one's self” and "don't be concerned with what is past - start anew."

Seems a workable philosophy to me. It appears that he writes of social, cultural, religious, and behavioral issues as is still done today and probably only resolved within one's self (did I interpret him accurately at all?)

I often wonder about people like yourself who read so much and who might be influenced in your thinking and writing by other authors, - does it change who you were/are?

Hope your doctor's appointment brought good news.

P.S. Ole Ralphie and I agree on prayer. I never pray for material things, only thanks, or courage, strength, etc. Mr. Emerson called personal gain prayers "vicious".

PPS. WHAT BRIDGE?

MY RESPONSE

Margie,

Thank you for your comments on my missive, “When I cannot sleep, I ponder.”  BB has taught me how to type with two hands – two or three fingers on my left hand and all working on my right hand.  So, in that sense, I am coping pretty well.  Thank you for your interest.

THE STRANGER THAT IS THE SELF

It is nice that you are reading Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And you are right.  He insists that experience is fundamental to our happiness and well-being, and that knowledge, per. se. is no substitute.   But does that mean we shouldn’t read and seek to enlarge our awareness of life through conversation with others through books?  Of course not.  The danger, and we are all vulnerable to this, is to only read what reinforces our current biases. 

My sense of what Emerson was attempting to do with this essay (you quote) was to guide the individual to connect with himself and hold that self, accountable and responsible – in other words, self-reliant – for his actions and their consequences. 

The hardest thing in life, it has been my experience, is to be true to oneself as that self is often a total stranger to us.  As I have recently shared with my readers, we are often in conflict with our “ideal self” or how we are supposed to be and our “real self” or how we actually are.  Further complicating this matter, we have “role demands” (our job or daily responsibilities) and “self-demands” (how we expect to be treated). 

The Reader’s Digest published a piece I wrote for its June 1993 issue.  The first sentence was:

To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.

Most of us look for friends outside ourselves never considering friendship is not real or sustainable unless it is first authentic with ourselves.  I wrote in my first book, Confident Selling (1971):

Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, and chances are you will accept others as you find them. 

Listen to anyone complaining about someone not there and you will be hearing a recording of what they despise but deny about themselves. 

A WORD ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

British American philosopher Alan W. Watts (1915 – 1973) says we are all philosophers and this has nothing to do with formal education.  Although I also think there is room for academic and independent professional philosophers.  They anticipate and often define drastic or subtle changes in the temper of the times.  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) may have said “God is dead!”  But what was that about? 

He could see secular society was replacing spiritual society and that science, materialism and progress were part of the new agenda of the West, replacing the dominance of religion, especially Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church.  The 19^th century was an energetic playground with wars fomenting new societal arrangements with the appearance of new nations and the disappearance of monarchies.

Read Nietzsche and you find he was a moralist who didn’t live long enough to see much of what he feared would transpire. 

A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

My point in this essay was that it is hard for us to communicate over our differences.  We take a stand or believe what we believed as a child is what others of the same programming would believe as well later in life.  Yet, we all don’t have the same experience.  We can say the difference is because “we read too many books,” when that doesn’t get inside the cause of the “BRIDGE TOO FAR.”

Should you read DEVLIN (2018), you would see how that experience caused the protagonist to be totally disenchanted with his Irish Roman Catholicism. 

But that wasn’t the source of the reference.  When I was with Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida, I wrote an article for an electrical engineering journal that came to the attention of the Director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He asked Honeywell management's permission to interview me.  It was granted. 

He wanted me to come to Cambridge and work with his scientists and engineers who were designing the ring laser gyro that was being built in Clearwater, a separation of 1,000 miles.  The separation proved “A Bridge Too Far.”  

I write about this in TIME OUT FOR SANITY: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2015).  It was also the featured article in the Quality & Participation Journal (July/August 1999). 

I would spend the better part of a month at MIT confirming much of what has been shared here.

Be always well,

Jim