USA > Connecticut > New London County > New London > Fiftieth Anniversary celebration publication, Connecticut College, 1911-1961 > Part 5
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Let us look briefly at the account we find in Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, published in 1927. Heidegger's ultimate goal is an ontology, a description of Being such as we find in Greek philosophy, but he is forced to admit, at least for his whole preliminary inquiry that Being in this sense is inaccessible to us, and here we see a reflec- tion of the disappearance not only of the Greek cosmos but also of the universe of the Enlightenment. Man's starting point must be his own existence, or what Heidegger calls Dasein, and this is im- mediately experienced as "being-in-the-world." The mood of this existence is dread or anxiety, and "what anxiety is anxious about is 'being-in-the-world' itself."3 The individual finds himself thrown into the strangeness (Unheimlichkeit) of a world in which he is never at home, and where he is threatened by the nothingness of the world and by death.4 And Heidegger argues that most of us, though half aware of this threat, try to evade it by a retreat into anonymity, the anonymity of "everyone" and of technology and bureaucracy. But Heidegger himself insists that when man faces and accepts his "being thrown," his "being-in-the-world" and his "being toward death," he in some way transcends them and achieves authentic existence.
Rainer Maria Rilke in his poetry translates this existentialist experience into a very different form, and one much more easily ac- cessible to most of us. However I do not think that what he is talk- ing about is so very different from what Heidegger is talking about, and indeed Heidegger is reported to have once said that all he had done was to develop in thought what Rilke had expressed in poetry.5
On man's place in the world, Rilke's central affirmation in his mature period is that man is here a stranger and never at home. As an illustration, let us take the poem, The Great Night, written in
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January 1914. The poet pictures himself at the window of an inn, looking out at the surrounding city which is the "world":
. . . it still seemed to warn me off
The strange city, whose unpersuaded landscape
Looked darkly toward me, as if I didn't exist. Even the things nearest to me Took no trouble to make themselves understandable to me. The street Thrust itself up to the street-light, and I saw only that it was alien
A clock struck
But I began to count too late, and the hour escaped me.
As a strange little boy, when at last they invite him to join them
Still can't catch the ball, and knows none of the games
Which the others play with one another so easily. He stands there and looks away-where?
But in the remainder of the poem the mood changes, and Rilke transcends this alienation. It is important to note that the strange- ness and alienation is transcended; it is not done away with:
So I'd stand, and suddenly realize that you, a grown-up Night, were playing with me, and I gazed at you with astonishment.
Where the stone towers looked angrily at me,
And where a city whose fate was not my own surrounded me,
And where hungering strangeness prowled round about my casual flares of perception,
There, lofty night, you were not ashamed to recognize me.
Your breath passed over me, and your smile given to deep seriousnesses Passed into me.º
Rilke often compares this alienation of man with the at-homeness of the animals. In the first of the Duino Elegies, for example:
.. . the quick-witted animals already notice
That we are none too securely at home in the world that we know .?
And if man is lost in the world of space, so he is alien to the world of time which threatens to destroy him with its ceaseless flux. Man has no homeland in time.8
But if Rilke develops in manifold ways the alienation of man in the world and time, he also affirms that when man fully faces the terror and the strangeness, it is, as we have seen in The Great Night, transcended and reversed, much as in Heidegger a man reverses and transcends his limitations and his nothingness by the full acceptance of them. In the poet's own words:
The danger, the whole pure Danger of the world ... turns to security Just as you feel it most fully.º
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And nature itself, according to Rilke, risks man and gambles dan- gerously with him, for only if he has the courage to realize his total unprotectedness, will he ever find security:
.. . What finally shelters us Is our defenselessness, and that we thus Reoriented it to openness, where we felt it threaten, So that we might somehow .. . affirm it.10
But what happens to the "world" on the other side of the reversal and reorientation, after one has completely accepted the world as world and admitted to oneself all the threat of secularization and relativization? I think we can see something of this in the poems of the late Rilke, and I'd like to look at these briefly, specifically the Valais Quatrains.11
In these Quatrains Rilke sings joyously of the noble country of the South, of its peasants, its vineyards, its fountains, and its church- towers. But it is also another picture of the world, though it is now a world reconciled and not a world estranged. Indeed there is danger that we may read the poems as simple idealizations of an age that is passing or past, a remembrance of a childhood Garden of Eden. But the truth of The Great Night is always present, and the Valais is never the naive, untouched holy order.
In the Valais, then, the danger and the alienation are not absent but rather transcended. Here is a country with a terror-inspiring sun, and where the presence of the invisible lends a terror-inspiring clarity.12 But for all that it is primarily a joyous land, "a land which sings while working."13 And the Valais is joyous first of all because of its full acceptance of itself, with all the paradox and tension which this involves and finally conceals:
Far from attempting to escape itself This is a land in agreement with what it is And so it is both gentle and intense Both utterly threatened and saved.14
What is perhaps for our purposes the most important of the Qua- trains looks at the Valais in its relation to time and to its own past:
Everything here sings the life of yesterday But not in a way which would destroy tomorrow,
One recognizes, strong as in their first strength The heavens and the wind, the hand, and bread. This is not at all a yesterday which spreads Everywhere and fixes forever the ancient lines of the land;
It is the land which rests in its image and which consents to its first day.15
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Well, we have traveled quite a long road, and I thank you for your patience. It has been mostly a hard road too, and I am grateful for our brief stay in the "noble country" of the Valais. What remains?
First of all, in the Western inheritance which binds us today there stands unchallenged the old demand embodied in Job and Socrates. Our final decisions must be our own; in questions of ultimate seri- ousness there can be no mere hearsay, and we may accept nothing without examination.
Secondly, I think that we of the West are committed to and cannot avoid the challenges of secularization and relativization in relation to any single and absolute holy order; this commitment and this challenge are all the more demanding when they are supported by our primary obligation to go beyond hearsay and to accept the obli- gation of self-examination. Whether or not we are historians or nat- ural scientists, I believe that we do as a matter of fact accept the presuppositions of these disciplines with all the consequences for what our common "world" must be. Whether we are devotees of Heidegger and Rilke or not, I do not think we can say that in their description of the human predicament they were simply talking about somebody else. I think they speak to us and of us.
I am not asking whether we like this; I am not asking whether we can imagine something which would be more comfortable. I am simply suggesting that this holds true of us. The argument is not in- tended to be exhortatory or hopeful; finally it stands or falls by the facts which we are. And if the argument stands, then it is only through the full recognition and acceptance of these obligations and commitments that we can, if at all, achieve the blessing of the Valais. In place of trying to escape ourselves we would then be "in agree- ment with what we are." We could accept our yesterday in a way that would not destroy tomorrow, and we too might be a land "which rests in its image and which consents to its first day."
In conclusion, I would like to notice something of what this might mean for us and for the rest of the world.
In the world of today, it is notable and in some ways tragic that everywhere traditions and inheritances are being broken and de- stroyed, and there seems no longer anywhere to be the possibility of a simply traditional society. There is in Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture a moving myth which she heard from an old man of the Digger Indians in the West. "In the beginning" the old man told
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her "God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life. They all dipped in the water, but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away."16
It is important for us to recognize that it is primarily the West which in one way and another has broken these cups of clay, through the spread of Westernization in its technological and bureaucratic forms. Old cultures, simple or complicated, have been disintegrated, and for many of them, unlike the Valais, there will be no tomorrow.
Perhaps it is even more important for us to realize that it is by no means accidental that the West has broken the cups of these other traditions and other civilizations. What was broken was in each case a unique and absolute holy order and the West has broken such orders even when they were Western. But the difference is that what happened to these other cultures and civilizations hap- pened as it were from the outside and in no positive relation to their inner obligations and commitments. I do not see how these other cultures could have regarded some of the aspects of Westernization other than as a demonic disruption of the right and holy order of things, a disruption which one could face at best only with bitter courage. In the West, however, the transformation of the tradition was not from the outside, it was our own doing; it was not, I think, an action of weakness but rather one of strength in acceptance of obligations and commitments inherent in the Western tradition. Something of this I suggested earlier in saying that maybe the West- ern tradition possessed us and that maybe it wasn't always a comfort- able tradition. But my point now is that if we are committed to this tradition, then we must continue to affirm it, then we must continue to think it through, not by hearsay but with examination. Most im- portant, we of the West should be the ones best equipped, possibly the only ones who are equipped at all, to deal with the predicament in which Westernization has placed modern man, not only within the West but in other civilizations as well.
At this point I shift from fact to hope. We have not, to my knowl- edge, done as much as we should have done in recent years, though there are pioneer explorations such as those of Heidegger and Rilke. But if we look back to our "first day" or our "first days" perhaps there is ground for hope. There is Jehovah's commendation of his creation in Genesis; there is the Greek faith in the goodness of the cosmos; perhaps most directly relevant, there is Paul's belief that while he had been crucified to the world and the world to him (Gala-
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tians VI, 14), it was in order that finally "the world, or life, or death, or things present or things to come" all should be his (I Corinthians III, 22).
It is clear that for a multitude of reasons we cannot give up for ourselves or for other civilizations the "world" of natural science and history, for this is the world in which we have most successfully found the possibilities of avoiding our natural evils and of obtaining our natural goods. But if this world, with its secularization and its relativization, is not one in which man can humanly live, what of the worlds in which he has lived humanly, his villages, his countries, his civilizations, and his faiths? Essentially it seems to me that we must be prepared to reaffirm these old orders or to create new ones in a different modern Western context, a context which can posi- tively recognize that we are, in the language of the New Testament, sent into the world but not "of it," in the language of Heidegger, that we are "thrown" into the world but yet able to transcend it. These orders will have their glory, but like the glory of the Valais Quatrains they must always presuppose and in some sense continue the alienation of The Great Night. They would have to be accepted, I think, as orders of grace in relation to power beyond man, as orders of creativity in relation to power which is human.
But where the "world" is everyone's, such orders could only be "mine" of "ours," and to discuss them would be to face a very differ- ent problem from that of the common Western tradition which has so far concerned us. We should have to move from the context of "fact" which has so far been our starting-point to the context of grace, creativity, and love, from the domination by past and future in history and science to a human present, open to the future like the "new creature" of Paul (Galatians VI, 15).
This is another story, and I hope a long story, which some of you may partly write, but which the West has not yet written. For our interim I know of no better advice than the moving remarks of J. Robert Oppenheimer in The Open Mind:
"This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends, and his tradition, and his love, lest he be dis- solved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love noth- ing. . .
"This balance, this perpetual, precarious, impossible balance be-
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tween the infinitely open and the intimate, this time-our twentieth century-has been long in coming; but it has come. It is, I think, for us and our children, our only way."17
And to close with a last quotation from Rilke. The poet begins:
My next-to-the-last word Will be a word of misery
It is not altogether unjust to suggest that for many the next-to-the- last word of the West which we have studied has indeed been a word of misery.
Yet Rilke concludes: "But my last word of all shall be good."18 May it be true of the West!
FOOTNOTES
1. Quoted from R. B. Stevenson, The Poem of Job (London, 1947) p. 20.
2. Werner Heisenberg, The Physicist's Conception of Nature (London, 1958) p. 24.
3. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit I, 6#40 (Tübingen, 1953) p. 187.
4. Ibid. II, 2#57, p. 276.
5. J. F. Angelloz, Rainer Maria Rilke (Paris, 1936) p. 3, cited by O. F. Bollnow, Rilke (Stuttgart, 1951) p. 18.
6. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke (Wiesbaden, 1955- ) II, pp. 74-5. Translation in part from Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems 1906 to 1926 tr. J. B. Leishman (London, 1957) pp. 170-1.
7. Sämtliche Werke I, p. 685.
8. Ibid. I, p. 145.
9. Ibid. II, p. 131.
10. Ibid. II, p. 261.
11. Ibid. II, p. 557 f.
12. Ibid. II, p. 558 and 531.
13. Ibid. II, p. 568.
14. Ibid. II, p. 568.
15. Ibid. II, pp. 562-3. In the whole preceding discussion of Rilke, I have relied heavily on O. F. Bollnow, Rilke (Stuttgart, 1951).
16. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, 1934) pp. 21-22.
17. J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Open Mind (New York, 1955) pp. 144-5.
18. Rilke, op. cit., II, p. 520.
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A Crusade And Some Crusaders
MARY FOULKE MORRISSON, Secretary of the Board of Trustees
Presented at Connecticut College on October 12, 1960 as the second of a series of annual lectures in the Mary Foulke Morrisson Lectureship, endowed in her honor by the League of Women Voters of Connecticut in 1959.
I T IS A HUNDRED and twelve years since the movement for the emancipation of women took definite shape in the United States of America, at Seneca Falls, New York. For forty years American women have enjoyed the political freedom which is both the cul- mination and the guarantee of the rights won in a seventy-two year crusade. To two generations now, that freedom is a matter of course, taken for granted like sunshine, and very few have any idea of the hard work and sacrifice that won for us our liberties.
But it is a great, an amazing story. As you study it, as you consider the courage, ingenuity, patience and selfless devotion of the cru- saders, the variety and kinds of obstacles they had to overcome, then you realize that the history of the Woman Suffrage movement in the United States is not merely an episode of the past, but full of vital meaning to all who are grappling with the problems of government today. We need to know it to understand the difficulties that beset us and to gain fresh courage with which to meet them. We must know the price paid for freedom, if we are to value it, to save it.
Let us see how far we have come. In the early days of the nine- teenth century, according to the common law of England and the United States, "Husband and wife were one and that one the hus- band." A married woman was said to be "dead in law." A man con- trolled his wife's property, could collect and spend her wages, had absolute power over the children and could legally beat her with a stick "no bigger than the judge's thumb." If a woman was injured in an accident, the husband sued for damages due him for the loss of his wife's services. She did not get them. American women were pretty well treated on the whole, but there was no recourse against brutal husbands; and the doctrine of the Divine Right of Man to rule over Woman was believed by nearly everybody, even those who
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had a large part in upsetting the equally old doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
Up to 1833 no colleges were open to women, no public high schools; a few private Dame schools taught the three R's and accom- plishments to the daughters of the rich, the poor went without learn- ing. Here and there bold spirits said they thought the new public schools should be large enough for both boys and girls but there was a storm of protest on the still familiar ground of economy. The female brain was supposed to be of different stuff, incapable of mastering matters like Greek or mathematics. As for the sciences, a woman who lectured on physiology to a group of other women as late as 1844 and used a manikin to illustrate, found her audience pulling down their veils, leaving the room and some actually faint- ing at the shock of such horrid indelicacy.
The greatest excitement was caused by a few women who dared speak from a public platform in behalf of causes in which they be- lieved. Two young South Carolina women, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, horrified to learn that one of the slaves they had inherited was their own father's son, freed them all and came North to tell of the evils of slavery. They were gifted, courageous and eloquent, and they knew whereof they spoke. Their influence spread and the crowds threw rotten eggs and brickbats and burned Independence Hall almost over Angelina Grimke's head. But they kept on, as did others.
Some of these women were among the ablest speakers in the move- ment and were sent as delegates from their respective societies to the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. When they presented their credentials, a debate arose that makes very curious reading. They were implored to be ladylike and not force the issue. They replied that they had no choice; if they withdrew, their organ- izations would be unrepresented. One learned divine said that to admit women as delegates would not only violate the customs of England but the ordinances of Almighty God. It was pointed out that the ruler of England at the time was a woman whose voice was often heard in public and to good effect. And that this tender regard for the customs of England seemed odd in a body whose purpose was to upset the customs of the United States. But the men, and especially the clergymen, asserted so vehemently that to admit the women would upset the foundations of society and fly in the face of the Lord that their credentials were refused.
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Walking back to the hotel from that stormy session, Lucretia Mott, who was a delegate though denied a seat, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a bride whose husband was also a delegate, decided that if women wanted to fight slavery or any other wrong they would first have to win freedom for themselves. Then and there they resolved to call a Woman's Rights Convention and state their case to the world.
There were delays; Mrs. Stanton paused for a baby or two, but the Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York in the spring of 1848. It was decorous and orderly and set forth a Woman's Bill of Rights, asking-for the right to an education, to enter the trades and professions, to own their own wages and control their own prop- erty, equal guardianship of the children, the right to make contracts, to testify in court, to vote and hold office.
The Convention created a great sensation. Editors attacked and clergymen thundered, but many rose to the women's defense and the movement grew. From 1850 to 1860 a National Convention was held in every year but one. They had their share of mobs and violence, but Susan B. Anthony, a resourceful lady, charged admittance to the halls so that the persecutors at least helped to pay the bills.
The next year saw the first woman doctor of medicine, Dr. Eliza- beth Blackwell, obtain her degree. During her three years of study, the women in her boarding house never spoke to her, and when they passed her on the street, pulled aside their skirts to avoid contamina- tion.
At a teachers' convention Susan Anthony rose to speak to a ques- tion whereat the delegates wrangled for an hour before allowing her to be heard. The question was "Why is the teacher held in less re- gard than the members of the other professions?" When Miss An- thony finally got the floor, she said, "Don't you see, gentlemen, that as long as society says a women is incompetent to be a lawyer, mini- ster, or doctor, but has the ability to be a teacher, every man who chooses this profession tacitly admits he has no more brains than a woman." That hit them hard.
Speaking in 1860, Miss Anthony said the progress of the Woman's Rights movement had been remarkable. Where they had had abuse, they now got serious debate. One distinguished man after another rose as their champion. Few people had any idea how near the women were to victory. But in 1861 came the war. The women dropped suffrage and did valiant work. Dr. Blackwell, returning
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from England where she had worked with Florence Nightingale, organized the Sanitary Commissions, precursor of the Red Cross, the finest thing of its kind the world had yet seen. Thousands of women worked in them and Lincoln paid high tribute to their services, but after they really got under way, Dr. Blackwell had to resign. The prejudice of men doctors at having to work under or even with a woman was so bitter that she got out rather than jeopardize the work. Another woman, Josephine Griffing, organized the Freed- man's Bureau, the one practical attempt to cope with the appalling problem of negro refugees. Later the politicians took it over and she was forced out. Its final record was tainted with many scandals but it did indispensable work for a long time. Vast numbers of women worked in every conceivable way, running farms and businesses, fill- ing in everywhere.
They did so well that the men were surprised and grateful and the women were prepared to take up their campaign again after the war when they found their cause hopelessly entangled in the two red hot political questions of what to do with the negro and how to keep control of the southern states. The 13th Amendment, freeing the negro, had passed Congress and awaited ratification. Now, like a bolt from the blue, came the 14th in which, for the first time, certain rights of the "male" citizens were defined, thus slamming the door on women as voters, while throwing it open to negroes, still in the com- plete ignorance of slavery. I shall not go into the details of that sorry chapter of our history. The women, deserted by all their former friends-Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher-were forced to stand aside on the pretext that "this is the negro's hour, the woman's hour will come."
"To get that word 'male' out of the Constitution," said Mrs. Catt, "took fifty-one years of pauseless campaign, 56 campaigns of refer- enda, 480 campaigns for the submission of suffrage amendments, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to include woman suff- rage, 277 campaigns for planks in state party platforms, 30 cam- paigns for planks in national party platforms, 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses for the passage of the Federal Amendment, and the final work of ratification. Millions of dollars were raised, mostly in very small sums, and spent with economic care. Hundreds of women gave their entire lives, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands constant interest and such time as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless chain of activity. Young suf-
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