Good afternoon Professor Schliesser,I hope this finds you well and does not create an inconvenience for you.I am currently working on an essay on escapism within society and its justifications. Within the research process I found your blog and found your text on philosophy as escapism [here] rather interesting, wich is why I was wondering as to whether you hold an opinion on the value of escapism in our contemporary society.Any opinions you would like to share are very much appreciated."--[Name withheld], sixthform at a grammar school in England.
A student's question is most capable of exposing my babbling.* My first reaction to reading the email was a discomfort growing into panic that I had no idea what 'escapism' meant, followed by a sense of mortification that I had used it without giving it thought. I went back to my own essay, and saw that I used 'escapism' to signify an activity that displaced discomfiting feelings. (Yes, I noticed the lurking practical regress.)
Online one finds claims that escapism is a modern term (sometimes also used to describe genre) originating during the great depression in the 1930s. Playing around with google.scholar/books I found no use prior to 1800 in English, but tantalizing hints that escaping had migrated into something like escapism in the more recent sense. But it's true that reliable hits for 'escapism' only start to occur in the 1930s. So, for example, one can read in an essay,"His first published novel, One Man's Initiation, appeared a year later. It had evidently been written in the trenches, and was, strangely enough, a quiet, thoughtful book that made no attempt to be harrowing, but sought patiently to understand. In it, however, predominate those twin maladies of escapism and individualism which Dos Passos had acquired at Harvard." It's notable that escapism is treated as a disease here.Willa Cather noticed such pejorative usage of "escapism" (and, I hasten to add, "individualism"), and has a fantastic essay on the subject (1936) that I warmly recommend reading.
But it was another early use that caught my attention. In the Monist (1933), I found a transcript of a "A paper read at the tercentenary commemoration of Spinoza sponsored by The Philosophy Club of Chicago and held at The University of Chicago on December 9, 1932." The author is one T.V. Smith about which more below. It's an incredibly critical essay of Spinoza. I start with a long quote:
[T]here is little profit in honoring Spinoza unless it leads us to honor our own opportunities the more. And surely our opportunity is not yet reduced to making the best of the worst; we may still hope to make the worst less bad and the less bad better. The tendency in some quarters to canonize Spinoza leaves me uneasy, though I joy to honor all those who did their part toward fortifying the philosophic mind in adverse days. It leaves me doubly uneasy, however, when reverence for Spinoza is made to ornament a modern escapism. I refer to the tendency to mythologize physics with theological aureoles, to romantize mediaevalism in morals under the guise of good taste founded on uncriticized tradition, to realize Platonism by glorifying contemporary dictators as the long sought philosopher kings. I refer, in a word, to the rationalized romanticism of those who would purge the social sciences of every element that makes them social and present them as logic to be got at dialectically rather than experimentally.
Such attitudes are defeatist, and while they find in Spinoza and in Plato logical prototypes, they wrong the noble dead by accommodating them to a logic of events more pregnant than their ancient logic of discourse. With reference to our social problem and the fruitful attitude toward it I am convinced that Spinoza is a splendid example of the way not to do it in modern times. Passing as a political realist because he built his system on power, Spinoza actually romanticized the distribution of power which prevailed at his time and place. Now power itself is not given to men in a sacred lump with implied anathemas against any who would increase or reallocate it. It waxes and wanes in quantity and migrates here and there in habitat. Our task is, as Spinoza truly said, to understand power, its nature and incidence-not however in order to achieve blessedness under the worst distribution of it but in order to facilitate a more blessed redistribution of power. Spinoza is not our logical leader in the effort through science to increase power; for though engaged in what for his time was a scientific profession-lens grinding-he elected to seek personal salvation through discovering and contemplating the whole of things rather than social amelioration by detailed mastery of his own specialized part. He performed few experiments, wrote only one thing on his scientific pre-occupation, and that without distinction. Nor is Spinoza our logical leader in the task of distributing power more justly to all men; for he could not get along with men well enough to understand, much less to improve, the forms of social relations. Not wholly in his stars but partially also in himself must have lain the cause of his lifelong isolation. (34-35)
After this majestic example of victim blaming it comes as no surprise that Smith was the "editor of the International Journal of Ethics" and soon also turned to politics being elected (as a Democrat) to the Illinois State Senate, then the US House, and briefly the US Senate. (That is consistent with his views in the essay, which promote an embrace of messiness of reality in order to do good.) I have to admit that today -- I have a student to answer! -- I have little interest in fully untangling the nature of modern escapism even though I am interested in the public image/role of Spinoza. But the passage made me wonder: if there is such a thing as "modern escapism" of which Spinoza is the ornament (ca 1930), what is, then, the original (pre-modern) escapism, according to Smith?
It turns out, Spinoza is the source of (original) escapism! Spinoza
discovered how to make the best of the world at its worst. Now this is an immortal discovery in a world that some of the time for all of us and all of the time for some of us permits little alternative to the worst. All honor, then, to Spinoza for discovering how to snatch one compensation for the withering sterility of cosmic neutrality, i.e., an emotional appreciation of understanding itself. When mind eats mind, mind need never wholly starve, though its resulting life be but a sort of living death (31-32)
Smith, a man of action, is no friend of this kind of escapism. He clearly thinks it risks quietism and deference to inherited status quo. But he does grant it is authentic escapism. I am inclined to agree with Willa Cather ("give the people a new word, and they think they have a new fact") and that Spinoza only managed the not insignificant feat to make it seem as if something new was being said because he tapped into a vital need in a new (linguistic and conceptual) register.
It is a tantalizing possibility that an emotional appreciation of understanding itself was discovered after the 1650s and, allow me this play of words, to create, in violation of the principle of sufficient reason (or at least ex nihilo nihil fit) , surplus ("compensation") out of something sterile ("cosmic neutrality"). If I were a Marxist historian of science, I would say that the spirit of capitalism was thus given matter in Holland.
But to wrap up. Escapism in this sense -- an intellectual joy in being with [one's] thought** -- is a human need in all places. For, no society will manage to abolish the possibility of people with only lousy options. And, so, long after the one-time philosophical Senator of Illinois is forgotten, Spinoza keeps being rediscovered.
*This is why I endorse the cliche that you only understand something after you have tried to teach it.
**It's not clear if such thought belongs to any particular I. But see here.
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