American Wisdom: The American Sense of Fact

We continue our series on Lin Yutang's masterpiece on American culture, "On The Wisdom Of America," with Yutang's presentation of a certain philosophical trend towards ungrounded abstractions, contrasted with a certain trend in American thought towards more solid conclusions found through experience and intuition:

One of the most remarkable and clearest facts about American thought is the strong American sense of fact. It would gladly sell its tons of encased philosophic systems for a strong touch of the fluidity of experience. It feels the ground cautiously as it advances and is not likely to accept or worship an Idea until its fingers can close around it, and test its color, texture, weight, and worth for possible manufacturing purposes. From Emerson to James, Santayana, and Dewey, it is all the same story. Take the famous question whether I exist, perhaps the idlest of all philosophic questions. Descartes proved the thinker by his thinking. How on earth, one may ask, did Descartes, who could not on prima jade evidence accept his existence as real, believe that his thinking was? That was the beginning of the dark ages of European philosophy, for even a European philosopher who denied his body accepted his consciousness without question as the final fact, and proceeded to build a universe entirely out of that consciousness, until with some maternal pride, it recognized the universe as its own child. The natural upshot or conclusion is, of course, that the universe exists in me, and not I in it.

How did some of the American minds respond to such preposterous German idealism? The facts are rather encouraging. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "Let me turn to your puzzling letter of May the 12th, on matter, spirit, motion, etc. Its crowd of skepticisms kept me from sleep, I read it, and laid it down; read it, and laid it down, again and again; and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, I feel, therefore I exist!" That statement, the emphasis on feeling, is one of the most reassuring things in a nation that was destined for a fructifying and abundant existence. In 1848, Henry Thoreau wrote to Harrison Blake, "I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past and anticipate the future. I love to live ... I know that I am." In 1854, Walt Whitman wrote ("Song of Myself"), "And I know I am solid and sound ... I exist as I am that is enough. If no other in the world be aware, I sit content. And if each and all be aware, I sit content." Those utterances, I think, are significant of the true American spirit. Probably Justice Holmes in his essay "Ideals and Doubts" sums up the position best. "If the world were my dream, I should be God in the only universe I know. But although I cannot prove that I am awake, I believe that my neighbors exist in the same sense that I do, and if I admit that, it is easy to admit also that I am in the universe, and not it in me. When I say that a thing is true, I mean that I cannot help believing it. But as there are many things that I cannot help doing that the universe can, I do not venture to assume that my inabilities in the way of thought are inabilities of the universe. I therefore define truth as the system of my limitations, and leave absolute truth for those who are better equipped." That is good enough for any American, as it is good enough for me. Elsewhere, in the essay on "Natural Law," Holmes signifies his content with this position. "If we believe that we come out of the universe, not it out of us, we must admit that we do not know what we are talking about when we speak of brute matter. . . . Why should we not be content? Why should we employ the energy that is furnished us by the cosmos to defy it and shake our fist at the sky? It seems to me silly."

The wise, thoughtful American is wistful enough. He shows a certain impatience with theories as such. The most famous case is perhaps that of Emerson. Emerson had no system, was notoriously without it, the critics say. It makes it somewhat hard for Paul Elmer More to trace the influence of Goethe, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Conceivably, if Emerson had been able to outline his thought into a speculative system the very thought of it is unthinkable it would help nobody except some postgraduate student to write a doctoral dissertation with greater ease and precision. But what would have happened to Emerson the thinker then? Emerson's thoughts, which were always fluid and in open and intimate touch with reality, would have become all "solid," and his universe with it which would have scared William James. What they gained in sharpness of outline they would have lost in fluidity and the varied contact with the fresh experiences of life. Far better his impatience, his distractions, his refusal to yield final ground and become solidified! The adjectives Santayana applied to William James may well fit Emerson; he was "restless, spasmodic, and self-interrupted," lest the real life escape and we become encased in a dead car cass of a system where rigor mortis has set in. Perpetually dissatisfied, perpetually afraid of not having the whole truth and suspicious that the facets of truth served up by classificatory systems were only slices of reality, Emerson was famous for interrupting himself. He was for ever distracted, though by nothing except real life itself. What troubled him was the sight of a girl passing in the street, and being a Yankee, he felt he had to square his thought with such a reality, such a piece of life. He speaks his mind most clearly on this subject in his essay "Nominalist and Realist," where at the end he makes a confession of his mental processes. "There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care! insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others." That was why when Emerson came out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous atmosphere of the lecture room, he heard nature whispering to him, "Why so hot, little sir?" That little whisper, "Why so hot, little sir?" was the salvation of Emerson, as it was of William James later.