Stieglitz and LoveWisdom: A Contemplation of Salon Culture and Wisdom-Based Learning Experiences
Salon Culture, Salon Nature
“Photography is my passion. The search for truth my obsession.”
“If what one makes is not created with sacredness, with wonder; if it is not a form of lovemaking; if it is not created with the same passion as the first kiss, it has no right to be called a work of art.”
Alfred Stieglitz
We begin with some necessary introductory remarks, dear reader. Please bear with them, and forgive me for slowing us down. Please, in the first place, make sure you read the above quotes carefully. Take another look at them. Let them sink in.
This essay exposes philosophy from a certain point of view. Philosophy—LoveWisdom (PhiloSophia). That’s something every human being engages in.
Every human being embodies and expresses philosophical views. People have philosophies of relationships, parenting, learning, dancing, negotiating, and more. If we do something in a particular way (and we always do) we express a philosophy of how to do that thing—including how to live a human life.
Human beings cannot get out of philosophy, most especially if they love anything at all, for if we love something or someone, we want to understand how to best relate to and care for that thing or that being. We want wisdom about how to love, and our love in turn gives us wisdom. This is LoveWisdom, the meaning of PhiloSophia.
Wisdom, Love, and Beauty are the functioning of every human being. From this point of view, the purpose of a philosophical encounter, say in the context of a philosophy course (whether inside or outside of an institution, such as a university or monastery), or the purpose of a group of spiritual friends (a spiritual community, such as a church, a sangha, or just a group of deeply committed spiritual friends), is to help people as they follow their own Way—the altogether Way of the Cosmos and the community of life.
In other words, helping people follow their own Way—as a matter of practicing the whole of life onward—is the heart and soul of philosophy. This can never be a “personal” way. Every philosophy worthy of our soul must arise as a cosmic philosophy. Our philosophy of life is not about “me,” not about our ego or our self-centeredness or our conscious human purposes. Thus, the heart and soul of LoveWisdom has to do with empowering people to follow the Way of the Cosmos—in their own unique manner, in fulfillment of their own irreplaceable purpose.
In this essay, we include under the category of “philosopher” every human being and many non-human beings. We include under the category of “philosophy teacher” many people who would certainly think of themselves that way (with great humility of course) and also many who might not think of themselves that way—unless we again emphasize the dimension of genuine Wisdom, Love, and Beauty. When we do this, we can see that the artist and the philosopher make the same basic gesture, take up the same basic approach to life, and we can easily see Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Stein on a list of philosophers that would include Plato and Nietzsche.
We should make clear that LoveWisdom has a certain precedence over art per se. LoveWisdom is already Wisdom, Love, and Beauty, and artists do not move a culture forward without first and foremost making philosophical gestures. The gestures of a paintbrush never outdo the gestures of the soul. All artists have a philosophy of art and life that comes before they make a work of art. Some artists have an awareness of this, and explicitly seek to explore philosophical views and insights. One can see this in the work of artists such as William Blake, Minor White, Alice Coltrane, and others.
Some philosophers were quite artistic, including Plato, Zhuangzi, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, and many others of times and cultures far and wide, and also including present day figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Dzigar Kongtrul—the latter two being active artists as well as teachers of LoveWisdom.
In any case, by exposing philosophy in the right light, we can see something about ourselves and our world, and something about art too.
This essay also makes an exposure of the figure of Alfred Stieglitz and the history of salon culture. Why? Why salon culture? Why Stieglitz?
The life and work of Alfred Stieglitz help illuminate certain key characteristics of what good salons should be like, and this in turn will illuminate what good philosophical practice and good philosophy teachers should be like—speaking, again, from a certain perspective, which is merely one perspective among many which have compelling aesthetic and rational virtues.
We only touch on some basic but important qualities of salon and community here (communitas, sangha, circles and spirals of spiritual friends), and let us make clear that Stieglitz was no sage. Nevertheless, in his humble and fallible practice, he can teach us and turn us toward wondrous things we can discover and create for ourselves, perhaps with even greater spiritual/philosophical clarity and coherence, with greater wisdom, love, and beauty.
LoveWisdom has to do with relationality, a vitalizing connectedness to other sentient beings and to all of sentient being, an intimate participation in the Cosmos and the community of life. Salon culture is a practice of inspired and inspiring relationship. A proper salon arises as the expression of philosophical community, and so studying the most vibrant aspects of salon culture helps us to gain insight into the best ways to practice our own lives, to live our lives as an act of Love, which also means an act of Beauty and Wisdom. Wisdom, Love, and Beauty always go together—something we should remind ourselves of often.
One caveat: “Salon culture” sounds urbane and even silly. We take an ecological view, with an aim toward re-indigenizing the “western” soul. Most salons have operated on the basis of ecological ignorance. That doesn’t mean they have nothing to teach us. We must take care of wisdom wherever we find it, and always seek to understand the limitations of any given idea or practice while seeking ways to transcend those limits into greater mutual care, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. We might use the term “ecologies of practice and realization” in place of “salons,” but maybe that sounds cumbersome. “Wisdom circles” might work. But, before we get to a better name and a better set of practices, we can first learn a little something from the tradition of salons, and then seek to go beyond their limitations.
As a final introductory thought, let’s note that Stieglitz’s life exceeds the vague descriptions that fit in an essay of this size. We will touch on a few things that stand out in relation to what philosophers and philosophical gatherings, communities, or encounters (i.e. salons) in general should be—at least some of them . . . there are, after all, many ways of practicing LoveWisdom (and running salons), and the approach outlined here does assert itself as the way of philosophy or salon culture.
We must keep this in mind when references arise to what should happen in a philosophy course or a philosophical encounter, or what “a philosopher” should be or do. Those references pertain to philosophy and philosophers exposed in a particular light, from a particular perspective. They do not pertain to all philosophical encounters, to all philosophy courses inside or outside of the academy, or all philosophers. The Way discussed here is in fact pluralistic in the sense of wanting to acknowledge and take care of vitalizing forces wherever they appear, and in whatever form they take. One thing WEIRD cultures can learn from other cultures is that multiple “worlds” can peacefully, and even beneficially coexist.[1] Ecology teaches us this lesson too.
We should also note that many philosophers and philosophical encounters (in classrooms, cafés, meeting halls, or elsewhere) embody aspects of the Way described here, even if they have little interest in the fuller picture we will examine. In spite of this, or because of it, the Way of philosophy explored here could seem revolutionary with respect to what happens in certain other kinds of philosophical encounters. This is just fine. On a personal and global level we need revolution. Philosophy can help best if at least some of those “teaching” and “studying” “it” understand at least some of the dynamics that Stieglitz’s life and work make clear. The approach to philosophy advocated here actively appreciates and nurtures these dynamics. The goal of this kind of philosophical encounter or engagement is to inspire, invigorate, embolden, and empower people as they discover and do the things they know (or sense, or suspect) that they must do. The discussion about Stieglitz and salon culture gives a sense of the spirit this kind of philosophical practice seeks to embody.
This lengthy introduction does not seem avoidable. It helps to clarify our practice here. By inquiring into salon culture, we want to inquire into the relationship between passion, wisdom, sacredness, and wonder—ultimately the relationship between wisdom, love, and beauty.
Plato and Aristotle agreed that philosophy begins in wonder, and Plato, in the Symposium, gives us a vision of philosophy as a form of lovemaking. Lovemaking and wonder appear in the quotes above. Why? What can we learn about philosophy (LoveWisdom), about our own function in life, if we meditate a little on Stieglitz, on a life and a body of work that dedicated itself to beauty, passion, sacredness, and wonder?
Let’s begin with some reflections on Alfred Stieglitz. We can first recall about Stieglitz that he started making photographs when photography had not yet become accepted as art. Indeed, many argued it was specifically not art. Stieglitz fought hard to gain proper recognition for this fascinating medium, in the process becoming a technical, aesthetic, and cultural pioneer. For instance, he made the first successful photographs of night, rain, and snow (thought of as technical impossibilities at the time); he helped to develop and evolve the aesthetic sensibilities of photography through, among other things, the founding of the Photo-Secession and the publication of Camera Work; and he helped get photographs exhibited on equal footing with other works of art.
We can next recall that art in general went through some big changes (revolutions) during Stieglitz’s lifetime. Stieglitz not only championed, fostered, and contributed to the evolution of photography, but he also had a big influence on the spread of modern art to the U.S. and the development of very new modes of expression in the art of the U.S.
People experienced the gallery he helped to found, 291, as a magical place. It was one of the very first galleries to introduce modern art to the U.S., through a series of rather “scandalous” shows. Although Stieglitz may have always viewed his work with Photo Secession, 291, and Camera Work as part of the growth of art in general, he chose to transcend any paradigm that restricted these outlets to photography alone. This may have arisen in a decisive moment. As Brooke Shieb tells us, a young artist came to Stieglitz seeking advice. As he looked at her work, he tells us that he felt that it “illustrated exactly what I was feeling at the time,” and so he “decided then and there to show her work.” Cherchez la femme. In a good way. In fact, in a very interesting way, because that artist was Pamela Colman Smith, the woman who went on to create the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck (Rider was the publisher, Waite was the esotericist who commissioned the work and presumably provided some sense of what he wanted––but the artist, an esotericist herself, made all the images). Starting with that synchronistic decision to exhibit Colman’s art, Stieglitz became intimately involved in the avant-garde, not only in photography, but in painting, writing, and other areas at the leading edge of culture.
For instance, Picasso’s first one-man show in the U.S. took place at 291. The critical reaction was . . . reactive. One critic wrote that, “Any sane criticism is entirely out of the question . . . the results suggest the most violent wards of an asylum for maniacs, the craziest emanations of a disordered mind, the gibberings of a lunatic!” Reactions to two earlier shows, of works by Rodin and then Matisse, were pretty much the same. The Picasso show had the artist’s drawings for sale at prices ranging from $20-40. Only one drawing sold. Picasso had done it when he was 12. Stieglitz felt so badly he bought an additional drawing himself. The entire collection could have been had for about $2000. Imagine if someone had made that “investment”.
Stieglitz argued vociferously in favor of people’s support of living artists, but not as an “investment” in the purely economic sense. He felt that people should buy the work of living artists as a way to nurture the growth and development of those artists and thus of art itself. One invested in art itself, and in artists, and in human culture. Dead artists won’t starve, and they don’t need time and materials to make new work, so buying the work of dead artists doesn’t help anyone as much as the investment in art here and now. Thankfully, Picasso managed to get by.
Incidentally, an issue of Camera Work that came out several years later presented a comparative look at the development of the work of Picasso and Matisse. Stieglitz wanted a special text as literary accompaniment for this retrospective, but couldn’t find just the right thing. Then, with typical synchronistic timing, an unpublished author came to him with a manuscript she had submitted to every publisher in town without success. Stieglitz read it and decided it was perfect for this special issue. It was the first time anyone had published anything by that author. The author was Gertrude Stein.
Stieglitz also put together at 291 the first exhibition of African sculpture displayed as fine art rather than anthropological specimens, in 1914. The following year he put together an exhibition that featured work by Picasso and Braque along with a wasp’s nest and a reliquary figure of the Kota (a Bantu ethnic group from Gabon). This juxtaposition provoked consciousness of relationships like art and nature, Western and African, naive and academic.
Importantly, Stieglitz let the power of 291 work on him. In 1907, while in Paris, Stieglitz went to a gallery showing Cezanne watercolors. In his words he saw, “what appeared to be pieces of blank paper with scattered blotches of color on them.” When the gallery owner told him the pieces sold for 1000 francs, Stieglitz replied, “You must mean for a dozen.” In 1911 Stieglitz welcomed many of these same watercolors to 291. His response indicates his personal transformation:
The box of framed Cezanne’s was opened, and, lo and behold, I found the first one no more nor less realistic than a photograph. What had happened to me? I realized then what the years at 291 had done for me.
Clearly, 291 was a special place. As such, it attracted a wide variety of artists from all fields, including such luminous figures as William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Waldo Frank, Carl Sandburg, Isadora Duncan (who loved reading Nietzsche, and called him “our dancing philosopher”), and Theodore Dreiser. Some of these people merely passed through now and then; others became regular visitors, and a social circle developed around the place.
Something about Stieglitz himself contributed to the energy of 291 . . . perhaps a combination of factors which would at minimum have included his love of art, his desire to see art grow and to nurture in any way he could the art and the artists. One of those artists, John Marin, tried to explain Stieglitz and 291 this way:
The Man and the Place
Quite a few years ago . . . there got to be—a place . . .
The place grew—the place shifted––for when the door was closed the place was where this man was. This statement will have to be altered––juggled––or built upon–– for the man is quite apt to say
“You don’t get it.”
Let’s see––This place shifted.
Shift is quite a word––a here––there––everywhere sort of word.
—Shift—is something that cannot be tied—cannot be pigeonholed.
It jumps—it bounds—it glides
—it SHIFTS—
it must have freedom.
. . . you have here an intangible word––a spirit word . . . .
It seems those who do that worth the doing are possessed of good eyes—alive eyes—warm eyes— it seems they radiate a fire within outward.
The places they inhabit have a light burning— a light seen from near and far by those who need this light— and this light sometimes dim—sometimes brilliant—never out—….
A place that is never locked for those who can produce a key. A place that is never locked to anyone–– anyone can enter and walk about––
but if one got nothing then the Inner remained closed–– they hadn’t the key.
To realize such a place— a very tangible place was and is this man’s dream.
We can appreciate the poetic quality of Marin’s attempt to capture the spirit of Stieglitz’s work.
Georgia O’Keeffe also put it quite nicely:
There wasn’t any other place where people were not doing just academic things, and the things that you saw at his place moved you off into the world, just like his conversation did.
It was the place, when you thought of something that would help you to take your own road, that was the only place you could go to find it.
The poetry by Marin and these two quotes from O’Keeffe fundamentally express both what a good salon and what a good philosophy “teacher” should be. This is why we go to a philosopher or take a course in philosophy or take up a spiritual/philosophical practice: To be in a place that will help us take our own road, think for ourselves, see with fresh eyes, exercise our creative intelligence, embody wisdom, love, and beauty.
Here, then, is one reason why “teacher” is best put in quotes. No one can really teach us to be ourselves. A “teacher” of philosophy helps us to discover and create ourselves, helps us awaken our vision, helps us to move off into the world, helps us to answer our highest calling and follow our own Way.
A “teacher” of philosophy helps us release in our way of being a state of inspiration, a state of empowered receptivity, a beginner’s mind, a light touch, a fiery passion, a deep love, an abiding fearlessness, a state of serenity and wonder. The “teacher” cannot do this to us or for us but creates a space in which we can do this ourselves—supported by the whole community of life. In other words, we don’t really do it ourselves either. We are it, and the whole community of life realizes itself in, through, as this realization. It is like being saved by all sentient beings in the course of offering ourselves up to care for them and to save them. A good teacher helps create the context or the ecology in which such a realization can come to fruition. All of this happens most effectively when the teacher has experienced their own breakthrough from incoherence and suffering to some measure of insight, and thus has realized these qualities in their hands, in their words, in their heart-mind-body-world, in the whole of their presence and activity, as much as possible.
This place we go to get help for following our own Way, it shifts, it has freedom, it is freedom, never locked away from us, never completely dark. The philosopher must be this place. The philosophical encounter, or classroom, or dojo, café, campfire, wisdom circle, ceremonial space, must be this place. The students are this place. This holds with the teachers of philosophy one encounters in books as well.
Let’s take a few moments to shift tracks and consider the power of the salon, which stands as something of an equivalent for the power of philosophy. One way to define philosophy or LoveWisdom is to call it “the art of being together,” or, in a more Buddhist phrasing, “the art of interbeing,” “the art of weaving the intwerwovenness of all things.” We can also look at it as an embodiment of Buber’s I-You relationship, but it also goes beyond that. The roots of this way of looking at LoveWisdom go back at least as far as the Socratic and Platonic dialogue, and a major drive of ancient ethics was to help people become good citizens. The dimension of being-with seems inseparable from many, if not all, ethical orientations. It takes the form of being with ourselves, being with other humans, being with the more-than-human world, being with the sacred.
We find many ties here to art, and we can think specifically of photography. Recall the opening quotes by Stieglitz. Or this one from him: “When I photograph, I make love.” Or consider John Daido Loori Roshi’s book of photographs, Making Love with Light. Or one of his photographic koans: Show me Love. Or Minor White’s commandment:
Be still with yourself
Until the object of your attention
Affirms your presence
In all of these gestures we can sense the I-You spirit, the spirit of being-with, the spirit of reverence and relationship and love. We can call it the practice of relationality—not relationships between pre-given beings or objects, but pure relationality, since the “beings” and “objects” only exist relationally.
We might even think here of sohbet, dokusan, and darshan, all of which are forms of spiritual “transaction” between a teacher and a student, through which the student is supported in their work toward realization of the pure relationality of life. A good philosophy course (and a good salon) embodies this I-You (or non-I-and-You, not-two-not-one) sensibility.
We notice then that the aesthetic and the mystical share a sense of intimacy and interbeing which might make it natural for someone like Stieglitz to find within himself the savoir faire for creating a salon. It also suggests why salon culture helps human beings get in touch with life and with their deep connection to life’s mystery. Salons can nurture remarkable things.
We might not see it that way at first. As Malcolm Gladwell points out, “We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works, whether it’s television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas.”
Gladwell cites the work of Randall Collins, author of The Sociology of Philosophies. Collins claims that the number of major thinkers in all of history who were true and genuine loners can be counted on one hand. As Gladwell puts it, “Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another’s spouses.”
Even in the case of someone who founded a movement, say Freud or Aristotle, the movement really begins to grow when the group dynamic starts to nourish it. Moreover, we must note that Freud and Aristotle moved in other groups before founding their own. For instance, we can only begin to imagine the inspiration Aristotle must have received from the group surrounding Plato, a group to which he belonged for many years. Gladwell emphasizes that, “Collins’s point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction—conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re onto something.”
Simple but engaging conversation can move us in astonishing ways. Plato learned this lesson from Socrates. Conversation is not yet spiritual or philosophical dialogue, but both conversation and dialogue may have functioned as cornerstones of Plato’s school and Socrates’ practice of life. Genuine dialogue can have an almost mystical effect on us, and we see this in the arts, sciences, and in the therapeutic realm. But even good conversation can have powerful effects, because conversation can veer into dialogue.
Einstein offers a compelling example of the power of conversation and dialogue. He relates the following in his article on how he created the theory of relativity:
By chance a friend of mine in Bern (Michele Besso) helped me out. It was a beautiful day when I visited him with this problem. I started the conversation with him in the following way: “Recently I have been working on a difficult problem. Today I come here to battle against that problem with you.” We discussed every aspect of this problem. Then suddenly I understood where the key to this problem lay. Next day I came back to him again and said to him, without even saying hello, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.” An analysis of the concept of time was my solution. Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity. With this new concept, I could resolve all the difficulties completely for the first time.
The way Einstein writes about it, the insight seems to have emerged by way of interbeing. His interlocutor does not seem to have specifically offered or directly prompted the insight. Rather, the insight emerged because that’s what happens when we engage one another in a deep way.
We will not elaborate the meaning of dialogue and the way it contrasts with conversation. But we should say a few general things. Dialogue means the practice of returning to the interwovenness of life, and that means the interwovenness of mind. We can consider dialogue a practice of wisdom—also the practice of love and beauty, but let us focus a moment on wisdom.
Wisdom means thoughts that come from a larger ecology of mind, and original thinking means thinking that transcends our skull and accords with the way life actually functions. We can therefore consider dialogue as a philosophical or spiritual practice of arriving at wisdom, arriving at insight from an original mind that can transform and heal difficult situations in ways that ordinary habitual thought cannot accomplish.
Dialogue functions because it puts us in touch with wisdom (also love and beauty), puts us in touch with our original mind, prior to all our hopes, fears, and confusions. Conversation usually doesn’t do this—in fact, it almost never does. Conversation can proliferate cleverness, but only with very good context can it instigate insight—at which point it has shifted, even if only temporarily, into dialogue.
All of this gives us some sense of the limitations we might find in Gladwell’s discussion of what he refers to as “group think” (a catchy yet silly phrase . . . perhaps a bit worse than “hive mind,” neither of which accentuates a fuller sense of spirituality and ecology—we want to touch the ecology of mind and the mind of ecology). Nevertheless, we can also learn some valuable lessons.
Gladwell uses the original cast of Saturday Night Live as a prime example of Group Think, but he cites other examples as well. He discusses, for instance, a book by Jenny Uglow called, The Lunar Men. It details the original Lunar Society, a remarkable salon founded by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. This network of friends included Mathew Boulton (big time industrialist), James Watt (of steam engine fame), Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame), and Joseph Priestley (of chemical fame). They met at every full moon, and in between meetings they corresponded heavily, offering advice, encouragement, insight, and excitement.
“What were they doing?” asks Gladwell:
Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it “philosophical laughing,” which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.
Uglow tells us, for instance, that the Lunar men were active in the campaign against slavery. Wedgwood, Watt, and Darwin pushed for the building of canals, to improve transportation. Priestley came up with soda water and the rubber eraser, and James Keir was the man who figured out how to mass-produce soap, eventually building a twenty-acre soapworks in Tipton that produced a million pounds of soap a year. Here, surely, are all the hallmarks of group distortion. Somebody comes up with an ambitious plan for canals, and someone else tries to top that by building a really big soap factory, and in that feverish atmosphere someone else decides to top them all with the idea that what they should really be doing is fighting slavery.
We can safely put aside the notion of one-upmanship, even though it does in fact play a role in some groups (thus indicating how, if we don’t root ourselves in wisdom, love, and beauty we can perpetuate ignorance while trying to do good things—and no lack of wisdom goes without its consequences for us and the world). We aren’t required to think of people trying to outdo each other for a salon to work, nor do we have to engage in such habits of thought and action—indeed, we must transcend such ignorance. Instead, we can co-discover and co-create a synergy, a synchrony, synchronicities and inspirations, a wonderful vitality that feeds every member of the circle, and an opening to the forces that guide us from the “outside,” the sacred powers and inconceivable causes that bring about all things, including our lives together.
It’s worth noting that salons differ radically from brainstorming sessions. As Jonah Lehrer has pointed out, brainstorming has become a fixture in many corners of society. It appears to have been invented by Alex Osborn, a successful advertising executive who described the strategy in a book called Your Creative Power. A crucial feature of the strategy has to do with the nature of the social interaction: We think together only, and we do not ever criticize another’s idea. Osborn insisted that criticism would reduce creative thought. This assumption, and other assumptions about how to think in a group, have persisted. Unfortunately, these assumptions have persisted in spite of evidence that they express an incorrect view.
Lehrer tells us that the first attempt to test brainstorming was done at Yale in 1958. There, scientists divided participants into twelve groups. One served as a control group, in which participants worked on the target problem by themselves. The other groups followed the brainstorming protocol. The solo thinkers came up with twice as many solutions, and a panel of evaluators rated their solutions as preferable, so brainstorming did not fare so well. Later studies confirmed this finding. This seems to clearly illustrate the importance of the quality of our ecology of mind. Being together demands skillful practices of being together. If we don’t know how to skillfully relate with others, we cannot reliable achieve good results. The more we learn about and practice skillful ways of relating with ourselves, others, and the world, the more vitalizing our ecologies of realization can become.
Even a simple, limited adjustment to brainstorming improves the ecology and thus the quality of results. Recent studies have quite conclusively shown that merely adding a critical element to brainstorming significantly improves outcomes. If participants enter a group setting, and if they can criticize the ideas of others (in a respectful way), they come up with more and better solutions to problems, both individually and as a group. Remarkable stuff. Remarkable, too, in that science has thus “discovered” salon culture.
We should stress the incredibly limited approach we leave ourselves with if we do nothing more than have people come together in this way. A wisdom-based approach to thinking together involves practices by means of which people become more intimate with the mind of Nature and the nature of mind. Most people think without any clear and useful sense of what mind is, what Nature is, what reality is, what a human being is. We need to do better.
The ecological dimension of thinking reminds us that our thinking is not exclusively accomplished from the inside of our skulls, and we could go so far as to say that thinking alone in a room merely simulates real thinking, and only when we actively think with the community of life can we arrive at real thinking. Our intelligence is not only embedded in the whole of the heart-mind-body, but in the whole of the “environment”––the whole of the Cosmos even.
At any rate, this excerpt from Gladwell bears good news for any salon or philosophical practice, and not just about opening our minds to where our intelligence lies and what our potential is. There are at least two other key notions, related notions, that are important for a good salon or philosophical encounter. First, no one can be sure what it will actually be. Second, it may turn into something quite astonishing, as long as we keep a beginner’s mind. In his essay, “The History and Meaning of Salons,” Benet Davetian echoes the same sentiments: “It does not take millions of people to change social reality. Salons of previous eras have shown that it takes only a handful of creative and concerned individuals to trigger large scale positive change.”
But let’s finish considering some of the historical dimension of salons. Salon.com has a wonderful nutshell history of salons on its site, written by Gary Kamiya. If we consider the spirit of the salon to be Gladwell’s Group Think, or, as Kamiya tries to capture it, “the search for knowledge through conversation with others,” then the roots of the salon are the roots of human culture. We of course need a broader vision than this, and we again encounter the limitations of conventional thinking—perhaps a symptom of the need for salons about salons, or salons on the nature of thinking.
The clearest indications of these limits comes from both philosophy and science. Gregory Bateson wrote a book called, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. The title says a lot, and if we want to think about the roots of human culture, we should start by giving up the insane duality between Nature and culture.
Bateson’s work clearly indicates, in precise scientific terms, that evolution is a mental process, and that mind functions as an ecology. Thus, salons only replicate the functioning of mind—thus the functioning of Nature. And we must therefore recognize again the importance of expanding and deepening our sense of what a salon is—nor can we overstate the importance of this, and so it bears repeating.
With all this in mind, we can return to Kamiya, who goes back to ancient Athens, noting that Socrates might very loosely be considered the founder of a salon circle. Perhaps Plato would have written an ode to him similar to Marin’s ode to Stieglitz (maybe the Platonic Dialogues, in whole or in part, constitute such an ode).
Kamiya reminds us that, at about the same time Socrates was engaging souls in the Acropolis and in those wine-soaked symposia, there was a remarkable woman who seems to have created one of the first true salons in the West. Cherchez la femme. Again. And in a really good way. Again.
The woman in question was Aspasia, mistress to Pericles. She was a member of a class of Greek women known as hetaerae. Something like orians (predecessors of the geishas), these were usually ex-slaves or ex-patriots set apart from ordinary women because they were educated and extremely talented. As such, they were not only allowed to voice their opinions at symposiums and elsewhere, but those opinions were respected. Yes, by men—crazy as it may sound.
It turns out that feminine energy has consistently nurtured salon culture—unsurprising to lovers of Sophia, goddess of wisdom, the divine feminine aspect of all reality, or the feminine face of the nondual Cosmos. Socrates himself, great proponent of dialogue, was initiated into the path of LoveWisdom by a woman, and the first “official” salon was founded by a fascinating feminine presence, and these energies became the archetypal pattern for salons that sprang up all over Europe in subsequent years. Here’s how Kamiya tells it:
In the early 17th century, the behavior of male aristocrats still reflected the idea that physical strength and military prowess were a man’s most important virtues. Around 1610 a young noblewoman, fed up with the prevailing loutishness, did something unprecedented: she abandoned Louis XIII’s court and set up her own “alternative space.” The Marquise de Rambouillet remodeled a mansion near the Louvre, creating a suite of adjoining Salons, or large reception rooms, culminating in her sanctum sanctorum, the so-called chambre bleu. In this room (also known “the sanctuary of the Temple of Athene”), the marquise received her visitors from her bed.
De Rambouillet’s Salon was the first of what the historian Mary Beard calls the “feminine institutions of civility” that were, for two centuries, “the greatest single influence in developing civilized social behavior, promoting lucidity of written expression, and inciting talents to flower in arts and letters.” Her Salon, and the famous ones led by the Marquise de Sévigné , the daringly sensual Ninon de Lenclos, Madame de Staël and others, were attended by the great writers and thinkers of their day.
Whew. Feminine energy as “the greatest single influence” on society and culture . . .
. . . . Instead of electing a President in the U.S., maybe we should be electing a salon. We all know that Presidents are only as good as the group they choose to surround and support them. So why not let us elect a group, a salon, with a woman at the helm?
Better yet, why not have a salon-by-sortition to serve as the executive branch and another to at least regulate, if not serve as, the legislative branch? If we had set this country up in a saner way, the norm might be the election of a woman to head the White House Salon (with the salon itself chosen by sortition, by lot), and we would now perhaps be entertaining the question of whether or not a man could handle the job. Or maybe men would have learned by now how to do a better job of nurturing cultural and biological life.
We failed to maintain the insights of salon culture, structurally speaking. Which suggests that we do need to know some history—and learn from it. Of course, salon culture would not be immune to the problems of ideology and spiritual materialism, and we would need to cultivate a wisdom-based approach to salons—or wisdom circles, compassion councils, or whatever we might call them.
Let’s shift tracks again, to briefly give a sense of the typical structure and values of an atypical philosophy course or philosophical learning experience. The values have appeared throughout this essay, in clear enough expression. These values and the structural principles of the salon come not only from the history of salon culture, but also from the principles of any philosophy that takes the realization of its ideals seriously. For one thing, these philosophical learning experiences will almost always take what we can call a wisdom-based approach, which means a wisdom-love-and-beauty-based approach. Among other things, this means they require a contemplative dimension of one sort or another (or several), and they will remain attentive to the synchronization of heart, mind, body, world, and Cosmos. In more familiar terms, we mean by “contemplative” that learning must root itself in meditation, which constitutes the “beauty” dimension of a wisdom-love-and-beauty-based approach.
But this must go altogether with wisdom and love. It means that such learning experiences must root themselves in skillful and realistic visions of ecology and cosmology, of the meaning of life and the purpose of a human being, of the nature of meaning and communication, and of the mind of Nature and the nature of mind.
Such an approach also demands skillful and realistic ways of knowing, and this in turn means participants take up a practice-based orientation to the subjects at hand, and the cultivation of their awareness takes an important place in the curriculum. Thus experiments and experience rule the day.
We have many good reasons to take up such an approach. For one thing, a more contemplative and practice-based approach makes it easier to get in touch with an I-You orientation, open ourselves to inspiration, calm our reactiveness, free ourselves, and be what we are (to practice being what we are, that is, with no distinction between path and goal). Another reason for a more contemplative and practice-based approach connects to an understanding of philosophy I share with Aldous Huxley. I have often cited his 1941 article in The Saturday Review of Literature. There Huxley argues that:
there is really very little point in reading the best, or most scientific, or most modern, or most medieval books, unless the reader is provided with a technique that permits his Self to implement in psychophysical practice the ideals set forth in these volumes.
Joan Stambaugh, commenting on a quotation from Dogen in her study, The Formless Self, echoes the idea as follows: “Any performing musician knows that [they] have to practice until [they] ‘get it right.’ How many students of philosophy and religion realize that they ought to do the same?”
We will never enjoy the full extent of the promising benefits of our most profound philosophical and religious ideas until more teachers and students of philosophy and religion (and all other subjects too) submit themselves completely to the deeper and wider demands of the work our own values along with ecological realities demand of us. That means practicing and realizing the fullest meaning of our ideals, and getting much more realistic about how our world functions, how our mind functions, how meaning functions, how love and compassion function. To realize something is both to understand and embody it. The two go hand in hand. Failure to embody means, to one degree or another, a lack of understanding, and this lack of understanding appears in the world as suffering—including the suffering of non-human beings and ecologies.
We don’t all have to be Socrates, Buddha, or Christ to teach the most profound ideals, and to enter into their practice. However, we have to at least be able to say we have submitted to the demands of those ideals, submitted to the practice in which path and goal are not divided. This seems an essential step on the pathless path to the fulfillment of our highest ideals and the most intimate experience of life. We can now say it seems essential to life on Earth, for the ecological degradation we see everywhere arises from our ignorance and thus our failure to realize our own ideals. None of our ideals have to do with destroying the conditions of life, creative inequality, or perpetuating injustice. Moreover, none of our ideals have any meaning if we have no thriving ecologies in which they can take root and blossom. The health of our ideals depends on and also appears in the health of our ecologies.
This “submission” to our ideals and to the demands of ecological and spiritual realities involves a joyful surrender, something empowering, opening, freeing, and humorous, something completely natural. It does not come without risks and dangers and challenges.
This pathless path does not “culminate” in a no-person. But for anyone to think they will be themselves plus wonderful strengths and insights and feelings of love and compassion is quite misguided. The “I” on the other shore is not the “I” with which we are familiar.
Some of the surrender ends up being a giving up, a letting go, a dropping away; other parts of the surrender end up being a flourishing, an awakening, a growing strong. This holds for anyone, not just “teachers” of philosophy. In conjunction with whatever our path is, if we take up the practice of philosophy with a sincere willingness to let it help us as we follow our Way, we will indeed find ourselves venturing into the unknown.
There is something else to keep in mind with respect to the practice of philosophy described here, and that is the general problem of spiritual materialism. One aspect of that general problem is another general problem: A major obstacle to fulfilling our ideals is the attempt to fulfill our ideals. In other words, we try to do it. The doing way of being is a central problem. Even if we seem to have “good ideas,” these are as nothing compared to a simple and direct connection to our lives, an intimacy with life from moment to moment. F.M. Alexander had a decent word for doing our ideas. He called it end-gaining. End-gaining is his term for the critical human problem discussed by Krishna in the Gita, Buddha in his sermons, and Rumi in his poetry, Jesus in his sermons. It appears again and again in countless religious and mythological images, stories, and parables. It is Buber’s I-It orientation. It is what Laozi might call acting in ignorance of Dao. Philosophical practice (which means the practice of life and love, art and wisdom) must eschew end-gaining. A philosophical encounter involves conversation for the sake of liberation—mutual liberation, illumination, and nourishment—and not for the sake of winning arguments, proving points, or even “changing” or “saving” ourselves or the world.
The lead question in Davetian’s essay on salons is, “Why Bother Talking With One Another?” Why bother starting a salon? Why bother coming? (In other words, why bother teaching a philosophy class, and why bother going to one? Why live a spiritual-artistic life? Why make art?) Davetian ponders the issue and offers some insights:
We are perhaps one of the most informed civilizations in history. It is a wonder that our minds and nervous systems have managed to handle all the information coming at us from a myriad of sources. The invention of trains, airplanes, radios, telephones, televisions, computers, and the internet have literally transformed the meaning of being ‘in tune with the times.’
Yet, this feast of ‘facts’ and ‘data’ has exacted its toll. While it has increased our mobility, personal autonomy and privacy [those last two are doubtful at best], it has greatly diminished our sense of community and the means available to us for ‘making sense’ of our world with the help of similarly interested individuals. More importantly, it has tarnished our ability to appreciate inspiring conversation for its own sake. Pressured by a scarcity of time, the need to continually update skills, and a life very often overpopulated by hundreds of ‘convenience’ and ‘entertainment’ products, we find ourselves evaluating human relations based on ‘bottom-line’ goals. Will this meeting with so-and-so be ‘useful’? Will we arrive at a ‘conclusion’ if we talk things over . . . If not, then why bother? What are the ‘opportunity costs’ of conversing just for the sake of it?
Winning back our ability to talk with one another (as opposed to talking ‘at’ one another) is the ultimate and most precious goal of a salon.
It is in such environments that great ideas are born . . . and where people find the energy to have a positive influence on the world.
Any salon can foster good ideas. But we have had enough good ideas. I mean that mostly rhetorically. We will always need good ideas. At the same time, good ideas won’t save us. In a sense, we really could say that we have all the ideas we need, especially of a certain type: the philosophical and spiritual ideas—like love, peace, wisdom, joy, sacredness, wonder. Life demands our ability to live our ideas, to embody them, to body them forth moment to moment in our way of being. This is the real work of philosophy.
“Winning back our ability to talk with one another” means “practicing the art of being together.” It means “cultivating a state of inspiration.” It means “following our own Way.” It means, to quote Chogyam Trungpa, “the essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery,” which in turn means:
refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. Within our lifetime there will be great problems in the world, but let us make sure that within our lifetime no disasters happen. We can prevent them. It is up to us. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with.
To begin with. The implication: We must find it in our way of being, from moment to moment. If it’s in our way of being, it’s there to begin with, and we don’t have to try to do the solutions. We will be the solutions. This does not mean “doing nothing.” This does not mean we have no style to our character. It means touching life with our hands, with our particular gestures, with our way of moving. But, to begin with. Not the added stuff. Not the reactions or the abstractions. As an academic philosopher, the thing I find most shocking is how full of abstractions the average human being is, especially those who try to write of philosophy as a bunch of abstractions. LoveWisdom means an end to our abstractions about life, and an entrance into real intimacy, an entrance into the heart of wonder.
This means letting go of our ideas and beliefs. Life doesn’t need our “ideas” about what we are or what is right and wrong, no matter how well grounded those ideas seem. Nor does it need our “knowledge”. Experiences that become “knowledge” are just ideas we have awarded a pedigree. Experience that is—as knowing or gnosis (not “knowledge”) and as not-knowing, as connection, as in-the-moment activity without the traces, alive in the unknown—that is a beginner’s mind in an expert body. Those are the bodies that will sit in wisdom’s loving circles. Even if they don’t see it. Nonetheless, that is how they are seen, by Life and by those open to clear vision.
The best way to understand what this kind of philosophical practice would be like is to participate in its ongoing reemergence. It will be what the participants are. It will accomplish the mysterious and impossible things that are most needed right now. It will begin in conversation, juicy conversation, and it will shift into authentic dialogue, challenging yet compassionate dialogue, dialogue that opens us and liberates us into larger ecologies of mind, dialogue that carries us into the unknown and makes genuine wisdom possible, dialogue that touches life, including the suffering we see in every direction, dialogue that makes us full participants in the Cosmos and the community of life here in this world. From our being together, what needs to be done will get done by means of nondoing. We start with that article of faith, and doubt it with every fiber of our being so that, with great determination, we can realize its truth—for the sake of all beings.
References:
Perry Miller Adato, Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye
Benet Davetian, “The History and Meaning of Salons”
Malcolm Gladwell, “Group Think”
Gary Kamiya, “A brief history of Salons”
Dorothy Norman (ed), The Selected Writings of John Marin
Brooke Schieb, “Alfred Stieglitz and Gallery 291: A Modern Art Revolution Before the Armory
[1] WEIRD cultures are “Western,” “Educated,” Industrialized, “Rich,” and “Democratic.” Only one of those terms can go without quotation marks.