Wisconsin College of the Air; Introduction to the human enterprise; 1; Philosophy and the human enterprise

Those are some of those early lectures. And now to introduce the series. Here is Professor Otto. Let me explain first of all why the early like shows were not recorded. The explanation in one sense is very simple habit. H A B I T. I wasn't used to having class discussions recorded and so didn't take to the idea at all. Possibly your habits your orators who happen to be lessening exert no power over you. Mine are different. They do quite a lot of power. But there was a deeper reason also. It seemed to me that recording class like jurors and discussions was like inviting someone to look over your shoulder or to eavesdrop who wasn't really part of what you were doing or trying to do. It had been mined ever for years to establish a certain intimacy of communication between student and instructor and intimacy that is by no means easy

to achieve and is extremely easy to destroy. Once it has been achieved or achieved to a certain extent I just couldn't shake off the feeling that I was letting the students down and was inviting certain failure for myself. Alas Professor Ray Stanley is a resourceful and persuasive gentleman. He suggested one device after another to overcome my various objections and he kept right on exerting a gentle kind of pressure until I had agreed to give the class recording at least a trial. After that everything was easy for him. Anyway that's how we happened to have arrived where we are now we must imagine ourselves in a room that is crowded with students men and women standing around a wall and a big crowd at the door.

I can imagine it very easily. Perhaps you can to some extent too. So we began. A number of years ago Robert Frost talked to some New England students on the subject of education. I quote a few remarks from that talk. The freedom I'd like to give is the freedom I'd like to have that is much harder than anything in the world to get. It's the freedom of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite to you if you started him talking everything he read last night in the order in which you read it. That's the school board. That's just the opposite of what I mean by a free person. Robert Frost goes on in this fashion. There's too much sequence and Largent all the time are reciting what we learned overnight. Your whole life can be so logical that it seems to me like a ball of hairs on the

stomach of an Angora cat. I wonder why he sat Angora cat. I wonder why an alley cat would have done just as well. There's probably some profound reason. The person who has the freedom of his material says Robert Frost is the person who puts two and two together and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time ridge down here in time and off they're in space. And here is my tool to put together. Here's my idea. My thought. That's the freedom I'd like to give he said. Why am I beginning with this quotation. For one reason primarily. I wish we might make growth and the kind of freedom. Robert Frost is talking about. I wish we might make that kind of freedom. The aim of our working together in this course for this semester.

Look back for a moment at that quotation. Such freedom is much harder than anything in the world to get a good many things in the world that are hard to get. Robert Frost says freedom of this kind is harder than anything else in the world to get it demands hard work not escape from work. Such freedom is freedom with material. It has substance it has stuff. It's within the material and not away from the material. Such freedom is creative but it's not lawless. It's novelty is conditioned novelty. It's putting two and two together two and two together putting something together something together. But differently from the way they have been put together before either by you or by anyone else.

Freedom of my material. This then is what we are to aim at and what is the material. By and by we shall have to ask ourselves what is our freedom. But just now what is the material. Ultimately it is life not life in the abstract not even life in general but specifically your life. Each life represented here in all its ramifications life. This is what the material is ultimately I say immediately and directly however the material is the material of our course. Freedom of that material philosophy 123. It is what we shall be. We we shall busy ourselves with in regard to it inside and outside of class. That's where we aim to have freedom of the material. I like to say a special word about books three of them although there

are other books which will be suggested as we go on. Three books which I suggest that you arrange to get at once. Two of them you may have to place orders for the book stores didn't get enough copies. They didn't have any notion as I did not of the size of this last you may have to place orders for them. Although there is or are copies in the library one of them but one of the books the most important one you won't have any trouble getting at all. It is my hope that we can work together in such a way that those books those three books will become books you won't want to part with that you will make them a permanent part of your library. But if they are to be that it won't be because of what is in the books as they come to you but because of what you put into them. One of them is a book by a Frenchman a very interesting Frenchman

named Charles Meyer and a y e r. I never know how to pronounce that. I probably will mispronounced it many times in the course of the semester the early part of the semester when we talk about him. Charles Meyer or mayor Mann comma mind or matter. Question mark. I say he's an interesting French month just turned 70 a man of science who was a thorough going materialist and I hope we can read that book and study that book in order to get his materialistic point of view. The other book is by a man who has the same name as I myself had. It's called the human enterprise but it was published in 1940. That's not only 10 years ago but it was before Pearl Harbor.

The proof for that book was read in a village on the Pacific coast when the United States government was searching the coast for spies who were masquerading as innocent fishermen along the coast. A sea coast of California. It was a different world from ours from the world in which we now live. It was different and it was a different man who wrote that book and who read proof for that book because he lived in a different world. It would be interesting I think or might be it might even be fun to try to think naturally of these two partitions. The one who is talking to you and the one who wrote that book it will be a harder job for you to do than for me though you may not think so but if we succeed in doing that if you succeed in doing it then that if I succeed in doing it then we will have a certain freedom of the material that we cannot

otherwise have. Suppose we try. The third book. The most important of the three is a book that each of you has to write for yourself or perhaps I'd better say each of us for I mean to do it too. The first thing to do then is to get a blank notebook. You will probably be satisfied. I mean each of you you students will probably be satisfied with one of those looseleaf things with a big metal rings sticking out of the back of them. Not for me thank you. I went to three bookstores and I found this blank book which I have in my hand at the co-op. It's strongly and neatly bound good paper and invitation to do good work upon it. It's too small. I want a larger one. I have to get two or three

volumes of this reason that's too small. Is that the price of the larger want to frighten me. I suppose you're used to those prices too. I wasn't frightened me and I took the smaller one lower in getting at. I knew it wasn't the one I wanted but after all it's what goes into the book isn't that not the book it goes into which is the important consideration. Well what is to go into this book. I'll answer with some quotations. I take them from the beginning of this little book which I have here and which I have begun. One of them is from Emerson. A man should detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within. If I had to write that rewrite that way and idea to rewrite something that Emerson. Has written.

But that's just the way we ought to act. Let's have a little courage even if it's foolhardy. If I were to rewrite that I would say it this way. A man should watch for the gleam and learn to detect the gleam which flashed across his mind from within them within. See Emerson says a man should detect and watch that limb of light which flashes across his mind from within. And there is a good reason for saying it that way. You should detect it and you should watch the gleam develop it get what it has to say to you what I am saying at the other way. Watch for the gleam and learn to detect it detect those flashes across your mind from within. And then there is one from HL Tomlinson's latest book The face of the earth where that marvelous picture of Tomlinson in the

beginning what you could stand it seems to me for the face of mankind in all its struggles and all its victories and defeats. He says that he finds reason for faith. And I am quoting odd moments when a hand does come Obert reality hit the two fabulous truths that may be everlasting yet is contrary to all our experience. Odd moments when a hint comes of a reality hitherto fabulous Of a truth that may be everlasting yet is contrary to all our experience. Novel ideas are shy I'm speaking now for the man who was talking to you. Novel ideas are shy. They do not come storming and blustering into the room of your mind and take over the

conversation and elbow everybody else out of the way. They come tip toeing up the stairs and knock softly on the door of your awareness. Too often we are busy. What a deadening word that is busy too busy for we do not hear the footsteps on or the knock. Sometimes we do faintly keep the idea waiting idea can wait. We're busy but these novel ideas do not wait. They go away. They tiptoe down the stairs and are gone. So I'd like to quote from this man a quotation which he has developed for himself and that's in this little book to be careful to entertain unusual extraordinary even weird ideas for thereby Some have entertained great

ideas unawares. Two suggestions then about this book that each of us has to write for himself. Let's make it a book of spontaneous ideas and feelings unusual ideas and feelings ideas and feelings we have not had before. Let's watch for them. Let's try to detect them. But an idea is not valuable just because it happens to occur to you. A feeling is not noble just because you happen to have entertained it. Though there are some of us who believe in that philosophy the very fact that an idea has occurred to us makes it true. The very fact that a feeling has arisen in US testifies to its validity and its value. Now let's have these ideas let's entertain these ideas

and let's see what we can do to support them with facts of experience and surrender them give them up because I miss a miss missed the target. When they do not find the support of experience and lets work at this each day that seems to me extremely important each day. Each last day. But who is going to check on you. No one's going to check on you but yourself. Whenever James used to tell about a man who wasn't Sarah it wasn't curious what he did like to know. I'm not a kind of a man too and I'm not the slightest bit curious. But I really do like to know. And so I'd really like to know how many of you will start on this book how you'll keep at it and what you put into it. I'd really like to know

but I'm going to crush down that curiosity I will not ask you to let me see it. And if you should by chance offer to let me see it I will refuse to look into it it's your book your going to check it and your going to keep track of it and you're going to do it or not you ought to do it as your inner self dictates. But it's to be your best means of growing in the freedom of your material. In this course if you don't do it something very important in this course will be lost. I've been talking in this way to this last conscious of the people who were standing around who were aware that it was tiring to stand on your feet. And it was tiring death to be aware of their getting tired and that crowd around the door.

And so at this point it occurred to me that I could take care of that situation very easily just stop talking and just mess them. So that's what I proceeded to do by reading one more quotation which is in line I think with what we've been saying. It's from Virginia Woolf's book a room of one's own. Here then was I. Call me by any name you please it is not a matter of importance sitting on the banks of a river in fine a fine October weather lost in thought thought to call it by a product name than it deserved had left its line down into the stream. It swayed minute after minute and there in the other among the reflections on the weeds letting the water lifted and sink it until you know the little tug the sudden come glamorization of an idea at the end the ones line and then the cautious hauling of it in the careful ing of it out

alas laid out on the grass how small how insignificant this thought of mine looked the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water. But however small it was it had nevertheless the mysterious property of its kind put back into the mind it became at once very exciting and important. And as it darted and sank and flashed hither and the other set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. Here we are then you and I nameless as you please. The name is not a matter of importance but this fishing is. Thank you Professor Otto. This has been the first in the selected number of electors in the course of philosophy in the human enterprise recorded during the first semester in the classroom of

Professor Max Otto because not all of the early lectures were recorded. Professor Otto has consented to repeat some of them in our studios philosophy in the human enterprise will be heard again Thursday at 3 o'clock. When Professor Otto's topic will be did the world have a beginning. We invite you to join us again Thursday at 3. For.

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