American Wisdom: The Wisdom of Living - The Scope of Wisdom

Continuing our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, Yutang's thoughts on the American philosophy of life are presented:

The only important problem of philosophy, the only problem which concerns us and our fellow men, is the problem of the wisdom of living. Wisdom is not wisdom unless it knows its own subject and scope. That scope cannot be, must not be, may not be other than the field of living for living men. I would reduce it to this utter simplicity and not tolerate the intrusion of that most unfortunate branch of knowledge, metaphysics. The problem of the living man is a vast field enough, of which we know so little, vastly alive with human entiments, hopes, and longings; with our animal heritage, of which we now and then try to be ashamed; with our primordial, dark, subterranean urges, known in Christian theology as the demon in us, and with our inexplicable nobility, inexplicable considering our background, known in Christian theology as the God within us; with our fantastic cleverness and what to do with our cleverness; with our noble patriotism and love of the national flag and the excitement of brass bands and the not so noble slaughter of international warfare. The world, the living world, is a subject much to be thought about, sometimes too much. Can we not leave alone the problem of immortality, which is the proper subject and precinct of the dead? They are dead in our sense, and if they are not dead, they will be in a better position to discuss what they know; we know necessarily so little about it until we cross the frontier. I hope they have better luck with their subject than we do with ours. Emerson noted in his Journals, "The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution" a much quoted line. It may well stand; the evidence is of a negative character and appeals to a kind of subjective compulsion within our minds. But its chief merit is literary, consisting in the use of the adjective "blazing"; otherwise it would not be so much quoted. But a Chinese may, with just as much felicity, say, "The blazing evidence of mortality is that we all turn up our toes." The scope of wisdom, whether American or otherwise, is therefore a simple proposition; we all die, but in this short span what can we do best with life?

"Knowledge of the possible is the beginning of happiness," says George Santayana. This seems to sum up in a line for me the best that Americans have said or thought about the proper field of wisdom. I am aware that Santayana is a continental Latin in his intellectual make-up and an American in that he was born of an American mother and grew up and taught in Boston and Cambridge, but he is a cosmopolite and I want to include him because American wisdom would be immeasurably poorer without this titan of human and naturalistic wisdom. His thoughts have the character of a city built high on the top of a mountain plateau; the air is rarefied, but the atmosphere is still intensely human.

But knowledge of the possible in human life has not been the characteristic of Western philosophy. Idle speculations, with few concessions to the realities of living, seem to me to occupy the content of Western formal philosophy speculations about immortality, about free will, about absolute truth and essence and substance, and the possibility or impossibility of knowledge. John Dewey once dryly remarked, "There is something ironical in the very statement of the problem of the possibility of knowledge. At the time when science was advancing at an unprecedented rate, philosophers were asking whether knowledge was possible." Dewey might have added correctly, "and denying that it was." How the question of free will was even posed is itself indicative of the idle speculative temper. Any man asked by a waitress whether he will have tea or coffee, with or without cream, cold or hot or iced, Ceylon tea or China tea, with lemon or milk, and one, two, or three lumps of sugar, knows that he is free. Any murderer, after perfecting his plans, knows that at the last moment the decision to do it or not to do it is dependent upon himself; even an abnormal temporary paralysis of the will through hatred or jealousy or fear only proves that a normal will functions. Yet the ink that has been wasted in the discussion of free will and determinism is enough for a hippopotamus to swim in comfortably.

There is a complete separation of the intellect and the senses in such Western philosophers; in fact, there have been a feud and a distrust and mutual suspicion for the last three centuries. The Western philosopher is a man who, by the evidence of all his speculations, is stamped as one who distrusts his senses. He cannot even observe his own mental process in ordering tea or coffee; probably only William James ever said quite plainly that after a lecture in Cambridge he was free to go down Divinity Avenue or Oxford Street as he chose. Perhaps it would be simpler to describe a Western philosopher merely as a man who doubts he exists; perhaps we may even say it is the business of Western philosophy not to know. How the robust American sense of fact staged a persistent revolt against this sort of idle futility we shall soon see. But I may quote here one of the wisest of modern Americans, Clarence Day, who had the humor and the perception to remark, "Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality; a dislike of men as they are. They are free to dislike them, but not at the same time to be moralists. Their feeling leads them to ignore the obligation which should rest with teachers to discover the best that man can do, not to set impossibilities before him and tell him that if he does not perform them he is damned."

Wisdom is principally a sense of proportion, more often a sense of our human limitations. Let those who will rack their brains about whether the ultimate absolute is spirit, or essence, or matter; they will rack their brains only for the pleasure of it but will not wreck the universe. The universe will go on, and life will go on in spite of them. Some one has wittily remarked that Bertrand Russell is angry with God for not existing, for he would like to have the pleasure of smashing him if he did. Wisdom for me, therefore, consists in a keen sense of what we are not that we are not gods, for instance coupled with a willingness to face life as it is; in other words, it consists of two things, a wistfulness about living and common sense. John Dewey, a typical American spirit, is only trying, by the heavy and ponderous road of abstract philosophy couched in sentences of sustained dilution, to tell us to rely on experience and have faith in experience, which he once identified with common sense.

Long ago there was an American who did not have to recover his common sense but had it with him all the time. He was a man singularly gifted by God and perfectly born of his mother, who looked at the world, enjoyed it and was content. He was not distracted. Benjamin Franklin, that charmer of lightning and ladies, was wistful. He knew what he was about, what the world was about, and what America was about. How few of us can say that of ourselves!

It is, therefore, with that wisest of Americans (perhaps also the greatest) that I wish to begin my selections of American wisdom, awakening a sense o wistf ulness about living. All philosophy, all depth of human thought, must begin with a facing of the short span of man's life on this earth and its vanity, and once that is faced honestly, common sense goes with it.

One day in 1778, while living in Passy, then a suburb of Paris, Franklin went out in the company of Madame Brillon to Moulin Joli, an island in the Seine about two leagues away, where a society of cultivated men and women spent a pleasurable day together. Franklin observed there a kind of insect, the ephemera, whose life span was less than a day, and wrote the following piece, which was rapidly passed round and became well known among his friends in Paris society. He composed this for Madame Brillon, whom he was courting gallantly and whose husband was still living. The result of the courtship was that Franklin did not get what he wanted, the favors of the French lady what he called "Christian charity" but he did compose a number of bagatelles, often under her direct inspiration, which must rank among the best of his writings and show him as a gifted writer.

"What will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists?"

by Benjamin Franklin

You may remember, my dear friend, that when we lately spent that happy day in the delightful garden and sweet society of the Moulin Joli, I stopped a little in one of our walks, and stayed some time behind the company. We had been shown numberless skeletons of a kind of little fly, called an ephemera, whose successive generations, we were told, were bred and expired within the day. I happened to see a living company of them on a leaf, who appeared to be engaged in conversation. You know I understand all the inferior animal tongues. My too great application to the study of them is the best excuse I can give for the little progress I have made in your charming language. I listened through curiosity to the discourse of these little creatures; but as they, in their national vivacity, spoke three or four together, I could make but little of their conversation. I found, however, by some broken expressions that I heard now and then, they were disputing warmly on the merit of two foreign musicians, one a cousin and the other a moscheto; in which dispute they spent their time, seemingly as regardless of the shortness of life as if they had been sure of living a month. Happy people! thought I; you are certainly under a wise, just, and mild government, since you have no public grievances to complain of, nor any subject of contention but the perfections and imperfections of foreign music. I turned my head from them to an old gray-headed one, who was single on another leaf, and talking to himself. Being amused with his soliloquy, I put it down in writing, in hopes it will likewise amuse her to whom I am so much indebted for the most pleasing of all amusements, her delicious company and heavenly harmony.

"It was," said he, "the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joli, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labour in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! for in politics what can laws do without morals? Our present race of ephemerae will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joli, shall come to its end and be buried in universal ruin?"

To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemerae, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante. . . .

- "The Ephemera" (addressed to Madame Brillon)

It may be appropriate to mention here that the insect juyu, whose life span was less than twenty-four hours, was mentioned by the Chinese philosopher Chuangtse, who often used the monstrously big and the absurdly small in birds and animals to illustrate the relativity of the phenomena of life. Once he tried to drive home the sense of futility of wars by his story of the "Battle of the Microbes." The King of Wei, like many modern rulers, was caught in the dilemma of war and peace. The enemy had broken a peace treaty, and he desired revenge. One general suggested assassination of the treaty breaker, another suggested a punitive expedition, and yet another regretted the destruction of cities that were built with so much human labor. Both preparedness and unpreparedness for war seemed reckless, and the King was puzzled as to what to do. I permit myself for once the telling of a Chinese story here because modern man finds himself in the same dilemma. A Taoist philosopher went up to the King and told him that the solution lay in Tao. On being asked to explain, the Taoist asked the King, "Have you heard of a thing called the snail?"

"Yes."

"There is a kingdom at the tip of the left feeler of a snail, and its people are called the Chus. And there is a kingdom at the tip of its right feeler whose people are called the Mans. The Chus and the Mans have constant wars with one another fighting about their territories. When a battle takes place, the dead lie about the field in tens of thousands and the defeated army runs for fifteen days before it reaches its own territory."

"Indeed!" said the King. "Are you telling me a tall tale?"

"It s not a tall tale at all. Let me ask you, do you think there is a limit to space in the universe?"

"No limit," replied the King.

"And if you could roam about in the infinity of space and arrive at the Country of Understanding, would not your country seem to exist and yet not to exist?"

"It seems so," replied the King.

"Now," said the philosopher, "in the center of the Country of Understanding there is your country, Wei, and in the country of Wei there is the capital of Li and in the center of the city of Liang there is Your Majesty. Do you think there is any difference between that King and the King of the Mans?"

"No difference," said the King. The philosopher withdrew, and the King of Wei felt lost.