Read an Excerpt
Failure and Success in America
A Literary Debate
By Martha Banta PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10070-8
CHAPTER 1
The Insufficiency of Survival
In 1878 William James examined the issue of survival in the essay "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence." As James phrases it, Spencer in his Principles of Psychology of 1855 had decreed that if survival were to be named the highest good:
We should then have, as the embodiment of the highest ideal perfection of mental development, a creature of superb cognitive endowments, from whose piercing perceptions no fact was too minute or too remote to escape; whose all-embracing foresight no contingency could find unprepared; whose invincible flexibility of resource no array of outward onslaught could overpower; but in whom all these gifts were swayed by the single passion of love of life, of survival at any price.
Having stated his version of Spencer's position, James then thrusts forth his own observations:
There can be no doubt that, if such an incarnation of earthly prudence existed, a race of beings in whom this monotonously narrow passion for self-preservation were aided by every cognitive gift, they would soon be kings of all the earth.
Even so, James speculates, Spencer would be unable to "hail with hearty joy their advent ... while the common sense of mankind would stand aghast at the thought of them."
Years earlier, William's father, the senior Henry James, had included in certain autobiographical fragments (made available in Matthiessen's The James Family) a statement of his own opposition to "the lack of any idea of action but that of self-preservation." Devoted as he was to spiritual fineness and social rejuvenation, the elder James abhorred what he called "the worldly mind." Wherever he found its taint in political or religious arenas of action, he named such self-interestedness "their curse, because they thus conflict with the principles of universal justice, or God's providential order in the earth, which rigidly enjoins that each particular thing exist for all, and that all things in general exist for each" (pp. 20-21).
The generation of which William James was an eminent representative was more complicated in its responses to the self and society than the generation his father chastised. Social complicity gained in merit, while bold self-aggrandizement became increasingly suspect. But William had more on his mind when he placed Spencer's views under attack than the good of the community set off against prizes seized for the self alone. If the notion, prompted by the Spencerian drive to survive, of total adjustment of mind and body to the environment is contemplated with horror by men of common sense, what were they to make of the desire not to adjust at all? May violent failure to stay alive be justified over mere survival? If so, one's ability to keep in line with biological realities no longer has much to do with ideas of success.
Three young men, boys actually — Arthur, Tom, and Sam — recount their hearts' desire:
My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or desires — for they amounted to desires — are common. ... (p. 15)
The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris — cannibal banquets — groves of coconut — coral reefs — tattooed chiefs — and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with breadfruit trees — carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters — savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols — heathenish rites and human sacrifices.
Such were the strangely jumbled anticipations that haunted me during our passage from the cruising ground. I felt an irresistible curiosity to see those islands. ... (p. 5)
Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero, (VII, 15-16)
These "boys" (projected by Poe, Melville, and Mark Twain in the opening pages respectively of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Typee, and Roughing It) seem uninterested in living long enough to become "men." They demonstrate the possible truth of the theory put forward as well by the narrator of Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse." By favoring thrills that lead toward destruction, the "boys" deny that self-preservation is the urgent fact dominating human existence. Like the "sports" of Darwinian conjecture, they exist as excrescences which nature might cut away for refusing to conform to the basic requirement for survival: desiring it over all.
It is argued by some observers of the American scene that the boy-heart and the perverse imagination are all too characteristic of the national type. But let us return to William James — no boy — to determine whether he is able to sustain his advocacy of gaudy adventure and to justify deviations from nature's norms that fly in the face of prudential adjustment to the way things are. And to see whether he can yet pluck survival from his argument for "more than" that.
It is telling that, in his essay on Spencer, James says he speaks for common sense. Asking why "common opinion" craves "greater 'richness' of nature in its mental ideal," he quickly offers his own answer:
... survival is only one out of many interests. ... Most men would reply that they are all that make survival worth securing. The social affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophical contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit — some or all of these are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable....
Those persons who help satisfy such impractical desires — the story-teller, the musician, the theologian, the actor, the mere charmer — are given the world's approval, James insists. Even if they themselves are weakly adjusted to life, such non-survivors are valuable because they speak to more than the externalities of existence. Through them James makes clear his belief that ideal wants must be taken into account in any argument touching the nature and value of survival.
James particularly honors qualities incompatible with survival — self-imperiling generosity, recklessness, heroism: "Even if headlong courage, pride, and martyr-spirit do ruin the individual, they benefit the community as a whole whenever they are displayed by one of its members against a competing tribe." Sounding the note heard in his father's autobiographical comment, he adds a remarkable new edge: "'It is death to you, but fun for us.' Our interest in having the hero as he is, plays indirectly into the hands of our survival, though not of his."
Our fun, your death, a good covenant, for the one side of the bargain, at least. Was this perhaps the position taken by the Lord God in binding the first settlers contractually to His pleasure when He offered them America in return? That this is so is implied by Caroline Sturgis when, upon addressing the "conversation group" of 1841 recalled in Margaret Fuller's Memoirs, she specified the reasons for God's motives in creating the earth: "God creates from the fulness of life, and cannot but create; he created us to overflow, without being exhausted, because what he created, necessitated new creation. It is not to make us happy, but creation is his happiness and ours." From this we might conclude that whoever "invents" a place rather than merely discovering it (as Henry James's pert French Noemie Nioche comments about Columbus in The American) gives far more weight to the self-gratifications of creation than to sound survival. What this implies in general about the need for the imaginative act in America will be a constant motif from here on. But first to revisit William James's debate with Herbert Spencer.
James wished men to resist Spencerian pressures to devote themselves to a formula marked by "unity and simplicity" which, in turn, equated success with self-preservation. (In this James was consistent since he also denied his father's methods of "unity and simplicity," even though he, like the elder James, argued against taking self-survival as the sole human good.) In his essay on Spencer, James asks instead for multiplicity and extravagance. He gives his consent to that "luxuriant foliage of ideal interests" which "co-exist along with that of survival." Extra appendages like the tail and the appendix give human animals no direct aid in their bumbling along, but they are interesting to James for that very reason. He believed that even Spencer might allow practical consideration to the "secondary consequences and corollaries" of the law of survival — qualities such as "Conscience, thoroughness, purity, love of truth, susceptibility to discipline, eager delight in fresh impressions...." Although these qualities were not "traits of Intelligence in se," they "may thus be marks of a general mental energy, without which victory over nature and over other human competitors would be impossible."
At this point in his essay (in ways typical of his method of literary argument) James stops leaning over backward to give Spencer the chance to look clever and even profound; he now straightens up with a snap and demands that we face the main issue.
But here it is decidedly time to take our stand and refuse our aid in propping up Mr. Spencer's definition by any further good-natured translations and supplementary contributions of our own. It is palpable at a glance that a mind whose survival interest could only be adequately secured by such a wasteful array of energy squandered on side issues would be immeasurably inferior to one like that ... in which the monomania of tribal preservation should be the one all-devouring passion.
Here we come to the center of James's argument. Is the human intelligence that spins past prudential concerns a digression from, perhaps the perversion of, the human need to survive? Or is the intelligence the means by which we succeed best, since it enables us to live in possession of more than biological life? In this essay of 1878, James is speaking in generalized terms about the nature of all human existence. Yet his observations serve us in a more particularized examination of what life in America has to offer. It lets us ask whether America, specifically, gives men the best of first chances, or the hope of a second chance when the original try fails, or only the final nudge toward failure and death.
The economics of existence (which meant so much, as we shall see, to both Franklin and Thoreau) concerns William James greatly. Before moving in to demolish the advocates of Spencerian unity, simplicity, and frugality, James candidly admits, "If ministry to survival be the sole criterion of mental excellence, then luxury and amusement, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius, stellar spectroscopy, diatom markings, and nebular hypotheses are by-products on too wasteful a scale." Such excesses, indeed, accumulate into a slag-heap that "abstracts more energy than it contributes to the ends of the machine." Therefore, "every serious evolutionist" must consider the need to reduce the "number and amount of these outlying interests, and the diversion of energy they absorb into purely prudential channels."
If such "economics" is a crucial matter in determining the weight and worth of our existence, where are we to find the "Greenwich Mean"— the sound standards — for our evaluations? "Here, then, is our dilemma," James says:
One man may say that the law of mental development is dominated solely by the principle of conservation; another, that richness is the criterion of mental evolution; a third, that pure cognition of the actual is the essence of worthy thinking — but who shall pretend to decide which is right? The umpire would have to bring a standard of his own upon the scene, which would be just as subjective and personal as the standards used by the contestants. And yet some standard there must be, if we are to attempt to define in any way the worth of different mental manifestations.
Characteristically, James takes for granted that all human standards have a subjective source; he assumes that no one can ever know who is right, once the debate has wound to its end. No matter how vital absolute answers might be to our comprehension of why we exist and how well we do at it, he declares against the fundamental dishonesty of believing in the existence of such absolutes. Still, other commentators on the American scene have not joined with James in his stand on the essential tentativeness of standards of evaluation. The Puritans, Thoreau — and even Mark Twain in certain moods — are among those who maintain that they are able to make out certain laws which are eternal, universal, and ultimately verifiable to the minds of men. Obviously it makes a difference whether a lasting formula for the economy of success is recurrently revealed to successive generations, or whether each man in his own time must fabricate mathematical metaphors to express a personal ratio of expended mental energy to the yielded quality of survival.
There is yet a further complication in the relation of human intelligence to physical survival viewed as both quantity and quality. Many fathers are unable to forgive the wastefulness of their prodigal sons, certainly those fathers who decree that success goes to whoever learns that "Penny wise is pound foolish" and "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." But although such fathers — and they are legion — frown upon fleshly extravagances and ill-kept books, some adhere to an even higher economy which urges, to use William James's words, "the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life." To such, the wasteful, the relative, and the vague replace the frugal, the absolute, and the concrete as elements of the successful try at getting more than survival.
This statement by James of his resistance to an economics that gives value only to what can be marketed in measured, packaged units comes in the midst of his chapter, "The Stream of Thought," contained in the original 1890 edition of Principles of Psychology. If a thought-stream is intended to represent the life we possess by means of our consciousness, James seems to prefer rivers with great sprawl and diverse natures. He likes, as it were, the dangerous, fascinating Mississippi (with its sand-bottom, shifting banks, two-toned muddy/clear waters, and capacity for destroying men's fortunes and lives); he prefers the Mississippi-mind to one likened to the tidy, rock-bottomed European rivers upon whose readily charted waters commercial success comes more easily:
The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.
But James, no traditionalist, states his own fascination with the unmoulded:
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it ... leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image by the name of "psychic overtone" or 'fringe.'"
For William James the trick was to survive in the midst of the destructive element, while being other than the flotsam on the flood; to be of the world, and yet more than it; to be both the object and the halo-glow surrounding it; to be in serious relation with the thing and also to become its playful extension.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Failure and Success in America by Martha Banta. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
