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.

American Wisdom: Preface on a Sunday Morning

Lin Yutang was an inventor and prolific author. In the preface to his 1950 masterpiece on American culture, Yutang describes the impetus and the themes of American wisdom and spirituality, through the literary lens of some of America's most celebrated writers:

I lived for over ten years in the United States without daring to write a book about the country. For that matter, even with my almost ten years in Manhattan, I wouldn't dare to write a book about New York, that dark, fathomless, mysterious city. I wouldn't dare to write even about Eighty-fourth Street. I don't know enough about it. It seems a much easier task to write about the spiritual journey through American writing from which I have just returned. I daresay I have never given myself such a wild holiday, with time so liberally and wholeheartedly spent on visiting all the inspiring sights of America's spiritual topography, without a thought of the morrow. I had taken many excursions before and the landscape is not unfamiliar. But I did enjoy visiting more leisurely and at close hand the broad pastures of Oliver Wendell Holmes, the snow-capped peaks of Emerson, the granite monolith of Thoreau, the dark cavern of Edgar Allan Poe, the seven-thousand-foot-high plateau city of Mount Santayana, the laughing valley of Ben Franklin, the awe-inspiring sculptured rocky dome of Lincoln, the Greek edifice of Jefferson.

Returning from such a grand tour, I have put down these notes of a journey, of what I as a Chinese observed, what I think, what I love and what have been my disappointments. I have soliloquized along the way. The point of view is individualistic, and limited, I know, as every personal viewpoint must be. What interests me is to see the American approach to life, noting how some of the great American minds have grappled with the problems of God and life and im mortality, and the toils and struggles and joys of human life, those things which mean so much to me. As William James says, "The most interesting and valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs," the over-beliefs and basic assumptions about God, and religion, and the home, and marriage, and life, and death, and about what constitutes happiness. Thus my quest is a quest for American wisdom about living. There can never be a synthesis of the American philosophy of life; America is so diverse. Yet a general sketch of these vistas of American wisdom may be made, however inadequate and however limited it may be by a personal vision.

A society without a philosophy of life is a frightening thing. Such beliefs, so far as I can see, are in complete rout and confusion today. If we cannot obtain a general agreement as to what the American nation as a whole thinks about such problems, we can at least obtain a view of what some of her best and most perceptive minds thought about them, what their perplexities were, and of what they were assured, convinced. Every nation has its clear visions, its moments of clairvoyance, its honest grapplings with the things real but unseen that lie at the bottom of all the motive forces for our conduct and being. To be spiritually reinstated in some of those beliefs and over-beliefs, one must go back to those who have gone before us and who were able to see life without sentimentality and without illusion. To seek the calm and balanced quality of the thinking of American sages, who present the inner and the outer life of man in some pattern of order and harmony that must be the aim of this quest. In a way, all the important thoughts of any nation should be considered as efforts toward such clarity of relationships.

God save us from the absolutist attitude that we shall know all the truths! Truth we shall never know; it is only clarity we are striving for. A wise man is content if he makes one good guess at truth in three, or if through hard thinking and striving for some general principle, as Justice Holmes did, he finally arrives at an imperfect but tolerably workable formula for living. Perhaps even more important than knowing the truth is the general unsettling of our complacent beliefs and gilt-edged assumptions that must ever mark the beginning of any kind of thinking life. No one begins to think until he has some of that brute complacency thoroughly thrashed out of him with the rawhide of the wiser minds. Humanity constantly drowses, is thrashed, wakes up, and falls to drowsing again. Each generation begins its own thinking this way. We all make a bet on life, not because we like to gamble but because we are already born and have to live through this span of sixty or seventy years and so perforce must bet on some faith or other.

Yet some have made better guesses than others, and great thinkers like Emerson, Franklin, and Santayana are merely those who seem to the majority of us to be the better guessers. The voyage of life is long, and we are all in it, and the passengers all try to guess at the final destination the so-called "end of living." On the horizon stretches an impenetrable mist, and at different ports we put off a few passengers, urging them to come back and tell us what is the port so as to help us in our calculations, and a few promise; but they never return. And so, like the ship Saint Christopher that Santayana tells us about, captained by St. Peter and heading for Mechanopolis and trying to find the blue heaven, we continue to ride the waves, and all the philosophers can tell us is to keep up our pluck. The best of them, however, tell us that the important thing is not to worry about the port of destination but to enjoy the voyage on which we are likely to be a long time and where we are now at any rate, that we make the voyage livable while we go along, "Let us sail for the sake of sailing," cry some of the true sailors. As for seeking the blue heaven, why, it is over our heads all the time (so says Santayana).

I remind myself that there has been some pretty vigorous thinking and writing in the last hundred and seventy years of American national life. American thinking minds have traversed the journey before, have undertaken the quest and explored life s beauties and possibilities again and again. No matter how great they were, in their personal lives they faced the same problems of living as ourselves. The lively correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on religion and philosophy and old age and death seems as fresh today as ever. The Americans have some good ancestors; too bad they don't have ancestor worship. Do they worship their ancestors? I often wonder. It is good to know one has good ancestors; it's a kind of subconscious feeling that makes for strength and pride. None of them is very old, but their past (we can stretch it to three hundred years) still can be admired. I do not mean the killing of the Indians and fighting the Mexicans; I mean that there have been some redoubtable men, hardy, strong, and cheerful, like Jefferson and Franklin, who make some of the moderns, bent on analyzing the foibles of their insides and presenting them as worthy of respect, seem by comparison rather ridiculous.

Who are the great American ancestors? And what is the American spirit? Who knows? A man has a number of ancestors, some creditable and some otherwise. A person who has a pirate sea captain for one of his great-grandfathers and a bluestocking grandmother and a Scotch great-grandmother can have quite a mix-up in his blood. The combination of the sea captain's love of adventure and Scotch prudence can be a terrific thing. Even Jefferson admitted that "as to commerce, indeed, we have strong sensations." Emerson talked about finding "the sources of the Nile" and discovering the "infinitude of the private man." Mark Twain thought of money, Herman Melville laughed at fame, Hawthorne brooded, and Walt Whitman proposed to plant the "brotherly kiss" on everybody, thus establishing a democracy of ambiguous sexuality. But Franklin talked like an American Confucius, with good hard sense yet with wit and imagination, and Oliver Wendell Holmes rambled in his talk like an American Montaigne.

Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again. Before the cock crows thrice we deny Truth again and again.

It will be seen that in writing this book of American wisdom I have relied as much on letters and journals as upon the learned men's published essays. I have definitely shut out formal philosophy. I rather think it should consist of thoughts, intimate rather than formal, presented rather than argued, thoughts somewhat unshaped and plastic, but spontaneous and tender, suggesting tolerance, waywardness, individuality, and a highly personal tone. It should consist of thoughts kodaked, as it were, at the moments of their birth, when the universe or life tickled these writers and produced a tintinnabulation in their brains, no more than that. Such thoughts are sometimes likely to be clairvoyant and lucid, as these same authors thoughts are not when they set out to present an idea to the public and get so involved. It seems that in collecting these spontaneous thoughts I am like a listener at a lecture who watches, not principally for the development of the speaker's scheme, but for the escaped smiles and half-suppressed emotions, and particularly for the moments when the speaker forgets his notes and is carried away into a sudden burst of spontaneous eloquence. I love to see a speaker lose his notes and to overhear, when I can, what he whispers to the chairman.

For my part, I can only promise to be serious, but not solemn, and intimate as far as I dare. Emerson says nobly that the maker of a sentence "launches into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and the old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight." I wish I could feel that way, but very rarely have I that comfort. More often I am like Mrs. Emerson, who gives a new order to her maid in the kitchen and feels like a child who throws a stone and runs away.

One word more. In looking at American as well as at Chinese thought, I have always felt myself a modern, sharing the modern man's problems and pleasures of discovery. Wherever I say "we," I mean "we moderns." I have kept my Oriental background as far as I can, but I have leaned backward not to make comparisons with Chinese analogies since this book is to be about American wisdom. What there is in my whole point of view, in what I have read and absorbed into my being from my Chinese reading, will, I am sure, be reflected in its emphases and preferences and enthusiasms. The Chinese are always enthusiastic (I may say excited) about something, particularly the problems of daily living. You cannot tell them not to be. But I suppose that is all to the good. When Christopher Morley talks about "The Last Pipe" or when David Grayson talks about the binding power of doughnuts, rich, brown, with just a bit of white sugar to set them off, or of a deep, thick, golden-yellow pumpkin pie, baked in a brown crockery plate, and exclaims, "A wonderful pie!" we understand each other. Not faith, hope, and charity, but doughnuts, hot muffins, and pumpkin pies will make the nations united, which is a unity considerably more real than that of the United Nations at present.