The Idea of America and the Possibility of the Mind

A slightly curvaceous line from the evergreen to the boat, and to the mountain summit. Singularities that occupy fields as if each were a calling. The mind abstracts out of nature concepts like “field” and “calling,” and yet each of them refers to precise realities.

An Everyday Beginning

Speaking of the Idea of America and the possibility of the mind’s existence, I’m reminded of my friend Fred Matero talking about the two of us solving the world’s problems when we get the chance during a fishing trip. I say so, because the power of the title I’ve chosen might call exclusively upon the formality of high style, while I want to stay down to earth.

Otherwise it’s the kind of thing that seduces writers to pretense when they can’t possibly find the time to meet the challenge fairly. I’m making a point of beginning with the everyday, instead. I have no idea of what I might do in the future to update this post attached to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) I’ve selected, but for now it’s only going to introduce the idea.

I make of that point of the everyday, no less, as a retired supermarket worker. . . who inquires about what the Idea of America is and the possibility of the mind. Steven Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer remarked, “I am somehow less interested in the convolutions of Einstein’s brain, than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” I am forever honored to have worked with gifted people at manual labor, one of them a severely dyslexic meat cutter who left art school after a bad acid trip, the school having attempted to make good on his condition and testing his IQ in the process at over 160.

As far as I know, he told only me, as it was the nature of our conversations to involve the mind.

The possibility of the mind is a thought coming to me nearly 40 years after the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a book I read entire, with mixed feelings, more than a decade ago. During the years I drove as a courier for New Jersey’s largest credit union.

I believe the American nation has lost its grip on the mind. Not having lost it entirely, we’ve slipped enough that some of us may look to the future as a time of possible rebirth, not simply because of recent politics, but because of what amounts to the abandonment, over the course of decades, of the Great Books.

Tradition or the Mind?

The abandonment of tradition wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but before we would throw the whole bathtub out, think of the Constitution of the United States. That’s a tradition I don’t want to see abandoned, and if we abandon the Great Books, we do abandon that constitution’s origin in ancient Greece. With no connection to that origin—what remains of the constitution?

I’ve written elsewhere, not only on Homer and my enrollment at St. John’s College, but about the need to abandon not the Western mind, but to abandon the cultural relativism that makes a mockery of given nature and the spirit of truth.

People think “the Western mind” refers merely to the sociocultural realities of Western Civilization, rather than being an attitude of the mind that looks out upon an independent natural world. I will be the first to say that mind and nature are ultimately united and that consciousness alone is the mover of the human world. But the issue at stake is that metaphysical givenness of nature, which we, too, ultimately belong to, rather than belonging merely to what we produce from it.

And yet what we produce from it is a serious issue, no greater producer than America having ever arisen in mankind’s history. The American Idea is the frontier, not limited to the physical—ever expanding in knowledge, artistic expression, technology, and space. I believe America will find history exonerates its responsibility for climate change, when science and technology largely originated here solves the problem.

God or Nature?

Much of my writing refers to nature without reference to God in turn. As I survey the history of the West, the culmination in the Scientific Revolution identifies nature, not God, as the primary fact. When it comes to belief, I confess I can be no less than a wizard at it, but when it comes to fact, I know nature is beyond my powers of origination.

So that is where I identify the source. That is the beginning from which I can confidently proceed. It’s the basic origin of everything humanmade, including the products of the mind. As I began to point out earlier, the mind is fundamentally natural, though that’s a position I would have to fight harder for than I’m willing to in this particular post I’m writing tonight.

The Natural, as Opposed to the Sociocultural, Mind

Everyone seems to believe the mind arises, fundamentally, from the acquiring of language between caregiver and child. That it’s essentially a sociocultural, not a natural, process.

I rule that out immediately as one more symptom of the belief in human beings as separate from nature. Anyone can grasp that language arises from social encounter. But the origin of the mind as such has deeper reality. Deeper than the consciousness of a particular individual. Deeper than the products of social interaction. We know the unconscious exists because of processes involved when it becomes conscious.

If we go deep enough, we become aware of being united with existence and lose our ego awareness for the givenness of its origin.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a genius at imagining how the Spirit evolves through history, and I think of his work as a fitting closure for my thought tonight. The notion that the spirit, geist, or mind evolves to full self-consciousness or freedom. Tonight, I think of it as the possibility of the mind’s rebirth. That as advanced as we have become, the spirit, geist, or mind is going through a phase when it’s lost itself through the very sociocultural influences mistakenly believed to be fundamental.