Benjamin Franklin: Unmasked!

Benjamin Franklin by David Rent Etter, after Charles Willson Peale, after David Martin (1835). National Park Service photo [Public Domain].

The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin by Carla Mulford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have taken Mortimer Adler's advice to heart and so I try to read an author's work before delving into "companion" volumes. But there were many questions I had about Benjamin Franklin, in particular his autodidacticism and his thirteen virtues. How did this happen? What resources did he draw on in developing this process? What did he mean by "Moderation"? This volume, edited by Carla Mulford, answered many of my questions in the first two chapters: "Benjamin Franklin's Library" and "The Art of Virtue". Funnily enough, the first thing I noticed is that Franklin had a habit that was mirrored by Adler (p. 15):

Marginalia provide a way to make a book more practical as well as more personal.

Franklin also found the need to organise his books, although his personalised system was much more pragmatic than mine (p. 18). I discovered, too, ideas about Franklin's pedagogy. For instance (p. 53):

The lecture, the sermon, and all forms of face-to-face hierarchical instruction seemed to Franklin to avoid enlisting people in the creation of mutual understanding and of new forms of knowledge. Such one-sided articulations forced people to accept established truisms, unexamined claims that served and preserved the old order.

Further (p. 54):

His memoirs document his abandonment of methods of forceful assertion and concerted argument in favour of an equivocal, Socratic method.

Franklin saw "enlightened reason" as what we would call today a "democratic" faculty (p. 78), and he believed that (p. 79):

...all received knowledge could and must be tested empirically.

Franklin's views on religion are interesting, if not pragmatic. He advocated for Congress to begin with opening prayers (p. 100) (this still happens in the Australian Parliament) and saw religion as a way of keeping "the ignorant masses from sloth and insurrection" (p. 83). In terms of virtues, Franklin looked not only at individual virtues, but those in relation to "social customs through an evaluation of their results" (p. 108). One point that clarified the dilemma I had noticed but could not articulate (p. 142):

Franklin... simultaneously preached the doctrines of self-denial and good living.

There is so much more in this small volume but best of all it is an academic work. Which means my marginalia focuses almost exclusively on the detailed notes and references provided to each of the essays. I wouldn't recommend reading this before at least reading Franklin's autobiography, but as a companion to the Great Man, this volume is excellent.

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Idealism's fine, but actions speak louder than words...

Eleanor Roosevelt and Fala at Val,Kill in Hyde Park, New York. Photo taken by FDR, November 1951 [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

Tomorrow is Now by Eleanor Roosevelt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am involved in a research project focusing on the four pillars of women, peace and security, emanating from the United Nations' Security Council (UNSCR) Resolution 1325. So I have been doing a number of courses by UN Women and learning about the UN's "gender mainstreaming" project. The basic premise is that gender matters in how people experience their rights, and from here, I decided to read some of Eleanor Roosevelt's work because she was instrumental in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Without Roosevelt, the document that has become so important as a guiding principle for much of the UN's work may not have come to fruition.

There are many critiques of the universality of the declaration, because it starts with a liberal premise, as in the individual is key. I have Roosevelt's autobiography to read at a later stage, but this work intrigued me as it has an introduction by Bill Clinton, and Roosevelt (effectively) stayed alive to finish the book, and died soon after it was completed. (The book was published a few months after her death.) There is much that will make the "Yay, Democracy" crowd happy, and it is clear that the examined life is her idea of the right life:

Self-government requires self-examination, action by the individual, standards, values, and the strength to live up to them.

This is not too far from Mortimer Adler's idea of The Great Conversation. Roosevelt was sceptical of science, and no doubt would have disapproved of the "I f*#king love science" crowd, channelling Huxley and Orwell (p. 123):

...each provided us with an appalling picture of the future of mankind, a life dominated by scientific method in which the humanities and the human spirit had been destroyed... [rather than] use science as an enlightened tool to make this world closer to a Utopia than man has ever dreamed.

Nothing for me to disagree with here, but I attended a number of research presentations lately looking at post-colonial African politics, and the findings were disturbing. So much of the liberal tradition does not readily apply to the rest of the world. I recall Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography (he was Eleanor's uncle) where the politics of the United States were so corrupt at the beginning of the 20th century, more than 100 years after democracy had been instituted. How are poor, post-colonial countries meant to transition to democracy (which assumes that in itself is a good thing) in a few years when it took the world superpower over a century? These are the questions that concerned me as I read Roosevelt's ideal future. But it certainly fits with my own liberal ideals, for example (p. 124):

I have emphasised in this book two areas in which we must begin preparation today: education and the essential need of sparking in a new, deep, and fervent sense of responsibility in every individual.

Yet I immediately think of Margaret Thatcher and the extreme ends of individualism - all extremes lead to the same rot. That is not to say that Roosevelt's work isn't important, or that it isn't timeless. But is is certainly worth questioning from a non-liberal perspective. The ideas of the United States are seen as a panacea for the ills of the world, and I just can't see how that idealism means much today.

In her life she achieved so many things and many of these were of benefit to those who needed it most. She saw the benefits of education and travel, and was impressed by her grandson's education in the Peace Corps - he learnt that systems of manners are as important as fast access to clean drinking water, and that honouring one's culture enables collective action, so she was certainly not an individualist in the modern sense. Rather than find value in this work as a program for the world, I found value in the program for the self, or, to quote James Allen (1921, p. 48)

...he who has conquered self has conquered the universe.

For Seneca Daily Stoic, p. 241):

Many words have been spoken by Plato, Zeno, Chrysippus, Posidonius, and by a whole host of equally excellent Stoics. I'll tell you how people can prove their words to be their own - by putting into practice what they've been preaching.

Eleanor Roosevelt personifies this idea: actions speak louder than words.

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Rilke: Is it better to choose one's career carefully, or to know oneself through trial and error?

Monument to the poet Rainer M. Rilke in the city of Ronda, Spain. In the gardens of hotel Reina Victoria.
Photo by Wwal [Public domain] via Wikimedia

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rilke wrote a series of letters to the young poet, Franz Xaver Kappus, beginning in 1902. Kappus was reading Rilke's poetry under the chestnut tress at the Military Academy in Wiener Nuestadt when his teacher, Horaček, noticed the volume. Rilke had been a pupil at the Military Lower School in Sankt Pölten when Horaček was a chaplain there, and Horaček had known Rilke personally. 

The military proved not to be for Rilke, and he continued his studies in Prague. Kappus, however, felt that his own choice to pursue a military career was "directly opposed to my own inclinations", yet would continue his military career for years after. In the meantime, Kappus decided to write to Rilke to ask for feedback on his own poetry, and Rilke maintained their correspondence despite his constant travels. 

By Rilke's tone in the letters, it is obvious that he enjoyed his correspondence with Kappus, and often told Kappus that if he wished to be a poet, he would need to change careers, or, at worst, he might find time in barracks life to keep at his poetry. The book provides Rilke's correspondence to Kappus, beginning with his return letter of 1903 and continuing until 1908. 

The book also includes a second work, The Letter from the Young Worker, which adopts a letter format to "a polemic against Christianity". This style recalls the dialogues of Plato and others, but in this case is one side of a potential written conversation. In many ways, the style mirrors the way we read Rilke's correspondence with Kappus, only having (mostly) one side of the narrative. In his first response, Rilke provides some important feedback. He suggests that Kappus' poetry lacks an identity. He suggests that Kappus is looking to the outside, but the answer is (pp. 6-7):

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write? Dig down deep into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple "I must', then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a witness to this urge... A work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity... Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist... Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside.

Imagine having such a mentor? Rilke was patient, kind, and wise. His connection with Kappus has, perhaps, something to do with being a poet while in the military system, something I identify with personally (having found that the military was, once I neared the tell-tale signs of the evening of my youth, "directly opposed to my own inclinations"). 

There is so much in such a short work, with Rilke's advice becoming "Candidean" - "take refuge in [subjects] offered by your own day-to-day life" - and focused on the individual rather than the work (and not in a mean-spirited way but as a mentor). 

Given that Kappus continues his military career and does not become a poet of any note, and that Rilke was the opposite in springing from the military's well, it makes me wonder: should we take care in choosing our careers so we do not waste time in the wrong station? Or should we learn what really floats our boat through trial and error? I suspect, based on Rilke's care for Kappus' work, that Rilke really knew himself as a result, while I felt that, perhaps, Kappus had taken the easy option.

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