11/19/23 proposal draft – not for distribution
C R O W D A Y S I N L A T E S U M M E R
Stephen Rowe
Essays from 2019-2023
Glimmers: The Call of a New Way
Finding Life Affirmation in Troubled Times:
Humanities as Practice Toward Maturity
Loving Democracy, Flying at Dusk
From Individualism to Moral Disease
Nihilism and the Threshold We Must Cross
Return to Life
Ode to the Humanities – and Invocation
Regard as Bedrock
Democratic Awakening: A Meditation on Amor Mundi
Loneliness, Nothingness, Possibility…
Toward a Relational World from a Western Perspective
All of these essays and the Peimin Ni Foreword are now posted on my website: <www.drstephenrowe.com>
Three Epigraphs
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention.
. . . all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him [sic] to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement.
. . . I am as good a son [sic] as any rationalist among you to our common mother.
Frederich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Man [sic]would rather have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.
Elizabeth Minnich, Transforming Knowledge
Democratic pluralism, on the face of it a fine position, cannot be espoused in today’s world as if all we had to do was choose it. To achieve a truly egalitarian pluralism conceptually and politically, it is necessary for all groups to achieve self-knowledge, developed from within rather than imposed from without…. [We need] to think much more subtly and to live and work with more complexity and fineness of feeling and comprehension, taste and judgment. We begin again to create ways of thinking that support democracy rather than undermining it….”
11/19/23
INTRODUCTION TO CROW DAYS IN LATE SUMMER
Stephen Rowe
I.
Here are some essays from what is still an extremely difficult period – one that may not end, or may intensify. We really don’t know.
It is a period bookended on one end in 2019 with the onset of the Covid-Trump Pandemic, the consequent move to on-line teaching, and my own decision to retire – after a half century of vigorous engagement with embodied liberal education, especially in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Shanghai, and Claremont. The other bookend is late 2023, with the world in general and America as my location within it so endangered and tenuous that it seems the whole human project could slide into the abyss at any moment.
How are we to breathe?
It has been a time of turmoil and great loss. My university and higher education more broadly have suffered collapse of that vague but essential ideal of the liberally educated person and citizen as necessary to both individual and collective well-being. The falling apart has occurred under the heat of critique coming like a perfect storm from across the political-cultural spectrum. We have had, under the influence of the Frankfurt School, Marx, and the pragmatic revolution in hermeneutics, the effective reduction of all interactions to the dynamics of interest and power (intoxicated by critique to the point of forgetting about the necessity of affirmation, enchantment, the sacred quality of life). In the global context the urge to reduction includes the critique that America is more about exploitative capitalism than democracy.
From another side, the country has been afflicted with weird and frightening visions of what it would take to make it “great again,” where this means restoring America as God’s gift of the Promised Land to “Christian” Europeans at the expense and denigration of indigenous and other populations.
On a third side we have had considerable talk, curricular reform, and other forms of action oriented toward the emergence of a new lifeway and vision of human maturity, one that can make it possible for humans to move on to a place beyond the severe dangers and pain of the present phase. This voice is sometimes hard to hear, this new and renewed ethic and spirituality as the hope of our time.
It is as if all the veils covering the evil deeds of ancestors (most associated in America with white supremacy and exceptionalism) have been pulled off simultaneously and suddenly. Being “woke” is coming into the extremely harsh and searing light of the realities which had previously hidden beneath both ideals and lies. This condition is radicalizing. It breeds defensiveness, polarization, “weaponization,” and retreat from meaningful engagement, retreat into pillboxes of ideological assertion. It becomes extremely challenging to find any public space in which authentic human encounter can occur. We now live in a culture – maybe even in a species – with the worst imaginable autoimmune disorder.
It is bleak, as Trumpism’s threats of violence and revenge cast ominous shadows over the land. Moments of sincere contact with others, with friends and even the strangers we interact with as we move through a day, become our best inspiration in the resolve to live as though life is a gift, neither denying the grief nor wallowing in it.
II.
So yes, “Crow Days:” A particular kind of day in which a distinctly ontological anxiety hangs in the air, and then a bird cries out from the middle distance, providing perfect articulation. It seems that to be human on this fragile and incomplete planet is to live with a certain number of these days, days more or less saturated with the pathos of that bird’s caw. Curiously, though, it is sometimes those very same days in which our nobility and true self shine forth, as we somehow remain present through them, neither caving under their weight nor fleeing into some fantasyland.
I present the essays in this collection in the continuing and consciously naïve faith that talking with each other about these dynamics can be helpful – or at least interesting, energizing in its way. But, as Plato and others have pointed out long ago, writing is really only a fallback option after the public square and the classroom have failed. Face to face talking in full presence is always better, if we can have it (“if you can keep it,” as Ben Franklin said about the American Republic).
III.
I am an old relational liberal who still thinks we have a responsibility to know what is going on in a circle larger than that of our local circumstance, a larger world in which the local is embedded. This, it seems, is also a basic element of being human.
Considering the challenges of maintaining a healthy and effective interpretation or perspective on the world drama, and the dangers of turning this function over to another, autocrat or otherwise, brings me back to that great American poet, Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” I recall the influence of mentors like Hannah Arendt, with their understanding that the knowing – or “poetry” — involved here is a dynamic group project, that my knowing is only vital when it is continuously refined in the interaction – the “dialogue” – with others. Refining and growing in a form of knowing which opens onto wisdom, and discovering how this “thinking” element is interdependent with action and relationship, we begin to live a way of life which exhibits what Arendt is appealing to when she calls plurality “the law of the earth.”
IV.
So here are some essays written in and to the conversation on which our lives depend, what some have called “the conversation of civilization” – the “democracy” which is often juxtaposed to the senselessness of “autocracy” in the either-or of our time. The essays are offered, perhaps absurdly, in a world where all credentials except those of demographics have been cancelled, essays by who knows who (some professor from Michigan), about how it could be possible to live well in what may not necessarily be the last days. In this respect these essays can be taken as a reappropriation of the old, Socratic “knowing nothing” – where “nothing” is not absence but source, an opening onto vitality itself.
Foreword to Stephen Rowe’s essay collection, Crow Days in Late Summer
Stephen and I are longtime colleagues and friends, and collaborators on many projects in both China and the U.S. (and elsewhere). About thirty years ago, we drove down from Michigan to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to attend a dialogue between Masao Abe, the author of Zen and the Western Thought, and a group of scholars from the Christian tradition. When the host of the dialogue introduced Abe, he mentioned not only how prominent Abe was as a scholar in Zen Buddhism, but also the fact that, by the age of around 80, Abe had “retired” many times from his various posts, and each time turned out to be a new beginning of his career.
After Stephen retired from Grand Valley State University in 2019, this seems to be happening to him—although he no longer shows up on the University campus regularly as he used to for about 45 years, he has remained active and kept writing, so much so that I can hardly keep up with him.
One thing about Stephen’s case that differs from Abe’s is that, during the years when Abe kept rolling back from his retirement and remained active, the world was full of hope. After the ending of the cold war and decades of fast development in technology and spread of democracy, there was an increasing sense of the need to develop humanity. Hence maturity or genuine adulthood as one of the primary themes we share in our work. The world’s most influential philosophers were post-modern critics, aiming at moving beyond the limitations of modern rationality. The need to transcend “self” and its very limited understanding demanded an openness to others as well as to the roots of one’s own tradition. With lived experience of this way of being – something both “new” to most people and yet well-grounded in the traditions (and something, in any event, most wanted to find in their own heritage), “multiculturalism” was moving beyond mere tolerance and into appreciation of differences and the relational mode of “dialogue.”
Abe was fortunate, because in that context he did not need to engage much of his inner strength to continue what he was doing; he could keep doing and remain peaceful in his inner life – still at some distance from the consequences of the moral disease of Trumpism and nihilism.
The world that Stephen and we all face today is sadly different. Far beyond what we could have anticipated back then, today’s world is a world in which conflicts are pushing more toward having a nuclear war than a world in which we live together in peace and work collaboratively to build a commonly shared future. The absurdity of the world today makes me wonder, when Confucius lamented “I wish to say nothing” (The Analects, 17.19), whether he was like how I feel today, so disappointed and hopeless as if all our efforts were in vain.
Yet, Confucius was a man “who knew that it could not be done and yet kept doing it anyway” (ibid., 14.38). He knew that “Had the Way prevailed under heaven, the common people would not dispute about state affairs” (ibid., 16.2), because there would be no need to. His world, like ours’ today, was not such a world. That was why he kept trying, like Sisyphus, who kept pushing a boulder uphill, although it would roll down every time. This is what makes Confucius different from merely being a teacher and a philosopher who is willing and able to accept things just as they are. He is also a spiritual leader, a leader ion walking tall and living well right in the midst of an impossible situation.
Likewise, Stephen is profoundly spiritual. That is what keeps him from losing his hope and giving up.
In addition, Stephen is no less a poet than he is a scholar and educator. This rare combination of qualities makes his writings distinct—instead of filling the pages with scholarly jargon, he mixes passion and prophet-like callings with penetrating insights. In the present book, this distinct characteristic of his writing is even more obvious. As if he is tired of beating around the bush for the sake of satisfying demands for “scholarly rigor,” he goes straight to the points he wants to make. Given the urgency of the situation, he cries loud to us about what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to change it. As he puts it, this is a world we “must save as well as one which we must outgrow.”
Stephen might be too idealistic. I once mentioned to him about a conversation I had with an environmental philosopher—when I compared the existential condition of humans on this planet to a caravan rushing toward the edge of a cliff, that philosopher said to me, “No. We are already off the cliff.” Stephen did not say that he disagreed with this philosopher’s assessment. Instead, a few months later, he told me that he has put together a collection of new essays, and asked me to write a short Foreword.
So here it is, the book in front of you, by a deeply spiritual and poetic philosopher in the relational-democratic mode. What does this mean, this mode? It means to say that with the essays in this book the spiritual, the poetic, and the relational-democratic converge on living well and maturing into a fresh affirmation of life, even in terribly troubled times.
Peimin Ni, late Spring 2022
In Grand Rapids, MI
Dr. Stephen Rowe 