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8. Emma Goldman: 1869-1940
Emma Goldman is widely known as an outspoken anarchist, atheist, and feminist. Like Elizabeth Haldane and E. E. Constance Jones and others, she too left an autobiography. That work, Living my Life was published in 1931.106 She was born in Lithuania of Jewish parents and had a harsh childhood with little formal early education. Her family moved frequently, first to Konigsburg (on the Baltic), then to St. Petersburg in Czarist Russia. She became attracted to the political philosophies of the socialist assassins of Czar Alexander II, and was abhorred by the harsh discrimination against Jews and against women. She leaves no doubt that it was her early exposure to oppression and discrimination (rather than her later year as a student nurse in Vienna attending Freud’s lectures and studying Nietzsche) that formed the foundation for her social, political and religious philosophies. When the already sexually-active
Emma was sixteen years old she emigrated (with an older half-sister) to Rochester, New York where she joined another, married, sister.
The press coverage of the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago, coupled with her own exploitation as a factory worker stimulated Goldman’s interest in the various activities of labor organizations and trade unions, whose efforts to secure an eight-hour workday were at that time considered radical. Although the identity of the person whose bomb killed several policemen in the Haymarket was never known, the press labelled participants “anarchists,” probably because the German anarchist Johann Most had several years earlier recommended violence as an appropriate means of dealing with the exploitation of labor by employers. After the Haymarket affair, Goldman began attending socialist worker meetings in Rochester and began to read Most’s newspaper Die Freiheit. That then, was her formal introduction into anarchist activism. After marrying, divorcing, remarrying and re-divorcing a family friend, the Ukranian Jacob Kersner, Goldman moved to New York. There she met Johann Most in 1889.
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Most was one of the leading figures of the Social Democratic party (from which he was expelled by the more-powerful Karl Marx) who sup-ported the assassination of Czar Alexander II. He had been among those imprisoned for supporting violence in the Haymarket riots. Most had the poor judgment to reprint a half-century old essay in support of political assassination the day before the assassination of President McKinley (1901) and was re-imprisoned for that. Johann Most fostered Goldman’s speaking career, urging her to go on a lecture circuit among radical political groups across the United States. The two became sexually involved, and it was Most’s views of Goldman as an obedient mistress and disciple that eventually disillusioned her. However, she continued as a public speaker (in Yiddish) to advocate anarchist causes, and played a large role in planning the assassination of the American millionaire Henry Frick. Following a year’s imprisonment for inciting to riot, Goldman studied nursing and English, mastering the language sufficiently to begin lecturing in English throughout the United States. She had founded, in 1906 Mother Earth magazine to provide a forum for anarchist views.
Goldman believed that along with political liberation must come sexual freedom. In 1908, Goldman was lecturing and providing information on birth control in support of Margaret Sanger’s crusade. Shockingly, for the time, Goldman argued that contraceptives were as necessary for single women as they were for married women. She believed that working
women in particular, in whose ‘drab and monotonous existence the only color left is probably a sexual attraction’ should not be compelled to stifle their sexuality, nor to face the consequences of abortion or unwed motherhood.”107
In 1911 Emma Goldman published Anarchism and Other Essays. Still widely available, this collection covered a range of topics including an analysis of the nature of anarchist political philosophy, the psychology of violence, unethical prison practices and policies, the immoral use of patriotic sentiment, and, discrimination against women and its connec-tion to prostitution, suffrage, and marriage. She continued to advocate the right of single and married women to contraceptive information. In 1915, Goldman seriously confronted the issue of birth control through methods of non-violence and civil disobedience. In 1916 she spent fifteen days in New York’s Queen’s County Jail for dispensing birth control pills.
In short, Goldman argued for the importance of contraception, but she did so, at least in Mother Earth, from a viewpoint as a free speech question and its relationship to the despair of working class mothers over frequent pregnancies. She was concerned only secon-darily with contraception as a method of woman’s emancipation.108
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The following year she was sentenced to two years in prison for con-spiring to help young men avoid the draft. Goldman and Berkman were then deported to Russia and had the opportunity to view the Revolution first hand. Its excesses led to the eventual publication of My Disillu-sionment in Russia.109 An excellent, but incomplete bibliography of her works can be found in Martha Solomon’s Emma Goldman.110
9. A. M. (Maud?) Bodkin: b. 1875
I confess to some hesitation in identifying a philosopher who wrote under the style A. M. Bodkin, and who is referred to in the philosophical literature as “Miss A. M. Bodkin” with an author Maud Bodkin who wrote somewhat later on closely related subjects. The date of birth given above is that of Maud Bodkin, who may or may not be the same person as “Miss A. M. Bodkin.”
From her works, it can be seen that Miss Bodkin’s interests were in the philosophy and psychology of aesthetic experience in art and liter-ature. Her first philosophical publication was a lengthy two part article
in Mind, “The Subconscious Factors of Mental Process Considered in Relation to Thought.”111 In it she looks at “grades of consciousness” ideas, feelings, sensations, etc. that are less than fully present to the conscious mind, yet which are not wholly inaccessible to it through introspection. The mental objects that she wishes to analyze are those elements which
... are readily passed over and hard to verify; yet the consideration of them may nevertheless be necessary for a complete account of the structure and development of intellectual life.112
In her article, she draws a distinction between sentience and the contents of thought, and explores explanations of how sense-data is organized when it is presented to the mind independent of conscious thought processes. She refers to the views of a variety of philosophers and psychologists: Plato, Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Brentano, Mill, Reid, Lotze, Spencer, Bradley, James, Stout, Bosanquet, Sidgwick, and Binet. Through this, she attempts to show that in the subconscious there must be a conceptual structure with which we can organize and relate sensory images that are “the merely felt,” “the inexpressible,” but which are not yet so organized. This process is related to that of the implicit, unexpressed at the moment, not yet separately felt sensory images that are already organized within the structure of judgment. Prior thought activity provides the linguistic structure for organization at both the subconscious and implicit levels.113
The question of level of consciousness of sensory imagery is also addressed in Bodkin’s article “The Relevance of Psycho-Analysis to Art Criticism,”114 a paper originally presented to the aesthetics section of the British Psychological Society. In it she argues that psychoanalysis should be relevant to art criticism. The art critic can utilize psychoana-lytic theory to understand crucial components of the aesthetic experience. First, psychoanalytic theory can inform a critic’s understanding of the relationship of observers’ subconscious, imaginative and emotional response, as well as their aesthetic sense to the work of art. Second, Bodkin argues, psychoanalytic theory can inform a critic’s understanding of the relationship of the artist’s subconscious, imaginative and emotional response, as well as the artist's aesthetic sense to the conscious development and implementation of the artist’s technique and style.
In addition to the foregoing articles, a book review by A. M. Bodkin appears in 1926 in Mind. She reviews John M. Thorburn’s Art and
the Unconscious, subtitled: “A psychological approach to a problem of philosophy.” There is then a gap of fifteen years between this publica-tion, and the next we have identified, which appears under the name of “Maud Bodkin.” The gap leads me to be wary of considering the authors to be one and the same, however, I am at this point more influenced by the close relationship in subject matter of the publications and am tentatively willing to consider the authors one and the same.
“Maud Bodkin” is known as the author of three full length works which came to my attention as this volume was going to press, and which I have not seen. Those works are: The Quest for Salvation in an Ancient and Modem Play (1941),115 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of the Imagination (1948)116 and Studies of Type - Images in Poetry, Religion and Philosophy (1951).117 If in fact, these works are by the same author, then we can offer the following description of Maud Bodkin’s interests in philosophy: Following an early interest in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology particularly in the workings of the subconscious on sensory images, Bodkin developed an interest in psychoanalytic theory and its potential for illuminating aesthetic experience in art and literature. Her works in this area spanned the first half of the twentieth century.
10. Evelyn Underhill: 1875-1941
Evelyn Underhill was born December 6, 1875 in Wolverhampton, England. She was the only daughter of a distinguished and agnostic family.118 Underhill was educated at King’s College in London and was multilingual. In 1922, she became the first woman lecturer to be listed at Oxford University, and later became the first woman to become a Fellow of King’s College. Underhill received her Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Aberdeen in 1938.119 In her later writings, Underhill admits to her own mystical experience. Her spiritual life centered around worship; it is ironic therefore, that she died within a place of worship: in the Octave of Corpus Christi church.
Underhill possessed what F. W. H. Myers called intellectual virtues of the mind, “Curiosity, Candor and Care.”120 In 1907 Underhill took a retreat at a convent in Rome. While there she underwent a religious conversion which convinced her that the Catholic religion was true. She was at that time engaged to her childhood friend Hubert Stuart Moore and although she contemplated ending the engagement and entering the convent, she decided against it.121 According to Menzies,122 Underhill was
an authority on Anglican theology, a poet, a spiritual leader and philosopher of mysticism especially the neoplatonic mystical writers. This discussion will focus on her more philosophical writings. However, it is relevant to include in the Bibliography to this volume those of her works that may be considered devotional in nature.
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Underhill’s writings focused on two main subjects, God and the Soul. In her writings about God, Underhill emphasized the reality, the supremacy and accessibility of God. She never anthropomorphized God by blurring the distinction between divine and human nature. To Underhill, God was real, an eternal self-substantiating, self-sufficient being. She emphasized both God’s transcendence and immanence in mystical experience. She defined mysticism as a practice of the art of union with the ultimate reality of God.123 Many of Underhill’s poems, including “His Immanence” and “Veni Creator,” reflect her account of knowledge of the truth of God’s immanence.
Underhill’s first great work is titled simply Mysticism.11* It first appeared in 1911, was reprinted ten times, revised for the twelfth edition and again repeatedly reprinted. The original edition was very positively reviewed by Alfred E. Taylor.125 It remains one of the fundamental philosophical analyses of mysticism. Mysticism has two parts, the first and most philosophical analyzes several epistemological and metaphysical issues. For example, she addresses the relationship of mystical experience to the search for ultimate truths, the nature of the self, the nature of sensory perception and the unreality of the sensory illusion, the distinction between emotional and spiritual experience and the knowledge claims of both, the limits of naturalism, vitalism, idealism, and the failure of philosophical systems to provide an adequate account of the mystical aspects of suffering, beauty and their relationship to religious certainty. In her discussion of vitalism, she explores the contributions of Bergson and others to the analysis of the spiritual, physical and psychological characteristics of vitalism. In particular, she examines Bergson’s theory of the nature of the intellect and of perception and explores the relationship of his theory to mysticism. She inquires also into the nature of reality, of intuitive knowledge, of transcendence and divine immanence. In a chapter on mysticism and psychology she examines the nature of emotion, of intellect and the demand of the intellect and will for absolute truth. She takes care to distinguish mysticism from hysteria and from genius. The role and purpose of mystical experience is to experience direct communion with transcendent reality. She cites the work of Julian of Norwich,126 Mechthild of Magdeburg,127 Philo,
Augustine and others and addresses the role that love of the divine plays in mystic contemplation.
In The Mystic Why,128 (1914) Underhill analyzed mysticism and its relationship to the modernist view of the Gospels which Liberal Protestantism had made popular. The Essentials of Mysticism129 written in 1920 is an attempt to strip the concept of mysticism of all accidental and cultural attributes and reveal its essential characteristic. The “central fact” of the mystical experience is an overpowering experience of the presence of the divine who is communicating directly with the mystic’s soul. The mystic is conscious of apprehending some essential truth. The experience is one of a feeling of receiving divine love and a sense that the mystic has only experienced a portion of what ultimately could be experienced. The experience of this love creates the desire to return the love by loving the divine. There is a sense of a process, steps that must be taken to achieve the full experience. First, the mind or soul must learn to purify itself so that it is prepared for the promised illumination. Second, illumination or enlightenment must occur. Finally, there is a sense of physical, mental and spiritual union with God.
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Following a conversion to Catholicism, Underhill wrote The Life of the Spirit and The Life of Today130 (1922), and The Mystics of the Church131 (1925). In the latter work, Underhill functions as a historian of religious mystical philosophy and describes the mystical experiences and writings of many church mystics, including several women who are discussed in Volume 2 of this series: Hildegard von Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila.
In the last four years of her life, Underhill participated in a series of talk shows, which were titled “The Spiritual Life.” In these broadcasts, Underhill outlined the main structure of the human soul.132
Underhill’s life and works are clearly focused on analyzing and explaining what for her was the reality, supremacy and accessibility of God through human consciousness. Although many of her writings are devotional133 even these are analytical. Underhill must be understood as a philosopher of religion, whose primary interests were in religious epistemology and metaphysics: the knowledge of God, the achievement of truth and certainty through the physical and spiritual experience of and communion with the deity. Through spiritual consciousness, Underhill believes we can know God for what He is, and live in the manner in which He created us to live. Although she claims not to be a philosopher, many of her writings are clearly philosophical in nature and amply
demonstrate her knowledge and understanding of ancient and medieval philosophers of religion.
11. Helen Knight: fl. 1877
Helen Knight of Newnham College, Cambridge, published two articles on aesthetics in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in 1902/03.134 For reasons I have not been able to determine, she was inactive with respect to publishing in philosophy for the next twenty-five years. Helen Knight was elected a member of the Aristotelian Society in 1922. Thereafter, she was an occasional contributor of papers on aesthetics to the Aristotelian Society in 1931, 1932 and again in 1938. From what I have been able to determine, she wrote at least two book reviews for Mind. Among these is a review of Delacroix’ Psychologie de VArtns and Odebrecht’s Grundlegung einer aestetischen Werttheorie Band 7.136
According to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Knight pre-sented “Sensation in Pictorial Art” to the Aristotelian Society in March, 1931,137 was a discussant of E. M. Whetnall’s “Formation of Concepts and Metaphysical Analysis” (with Stebbing and others) on March 7, 1932. Judging from the caliber of co-presenters, discussants and corn- mentors at Knight’s papers, her work was admired and taken seriously. For example, she presented with Reid and Joad at a Symposium “The Limits of Psychology in Aesthetic Theory.”138 Among the discussants of her presentation was Stace. In 1936 she published an article on “Philosophy in Germany” which appeared in Philosophy P9 In 1938 at a joint meeting with the Mind Association, Knight was one of three symposiasts (Oakeley and Acton were the others) on the topic “Is Ethical Relativity Necessary.”140 Commentors included Ross, Duncan Jones, Stebbing and Ewing.
Helen Knight served the Aristotelian Society well for a number of years acting as a member of its Executive Committee for four successive terms (from 1932 through 1936). Her name drops from the Aristotelian Society membership list after 1942, to be reelected in 1945, this time with an address indicating the Women’s Graduate Club at Cambridge.141 According to Alice Ambrose142 Knight was a friend of John Wisdom, and is believed to have died in Melbourne, Australia during the 1980s.
12. Grace Mead Andrus De Laguna: 1878-1978
Grace Mead Andrus De Laguna was professor of Philosophy and prolific publisher of works in philosophy for more than eighty years. She died just seven months short of her 100th birthday. De Laguna was nearly twenty-five before she completed her undergraduate education in 1903 at Cornell University in New York. A Ph.D. from the same university followed in 1906,143 the year of the birth of her first child, Frederica (who acquired her mother’s interest in anthropology and spent her professional life studying native peoples of the Arctic). The birth of her son Wallace (who became a nuclear scientist studying water contamination at nuclear reactor sites) followed in 1910, coinciding with the publication of Dogmatism and Evolution, a work written with her husband Theodore De Laguna.144 When Wallace was two years old, De Laguna accepted a an Assistant Professorship of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr. Four years later, in 1916 she was promoted to Associate Professor, a rank that she held until her promotion to full Professor in 1928. De Laguna was cofounder (with husband Theodore) of the Fullerton Philosophy Club in 1925.
De Laguna’s primary philosophical interests were in philosophical psychology, particularly as it relates to metaphysical,145 phenomenological146 and epistemological147 issues. Thus, her earlier writings are on sensation, perception, emotion, mental states, mental phenomena and the nature of reality. Her interests later involve issues in philosophy of language,148 and communication149 and led to her own book on a theory of speech.150 Throughout her career, she maintained an interest in philosophy of social sciences, often criticizing either the methodologies or fundamental concepts of psychology, anthropology151 and sociology.152 For example, in the two-part article “Sensation and Perception” (1916)153 she challenges traditional assumptions that psychologists’ analyses of infantile sensory development as somehow “genetic” are misguided. Sensations develop meaning for infants as babies engage in the process of differentiation and integration. Sensations themselves lack a direct relationship to behavior. Rather, it is the perception of the objects of sensation, and the analysis of that perception that leads to behavior. No particular behavioral response is implied by the color of an object, by its temperature, taste, etc.
In September, 1918 she criticizes theories of psycho-physical paral-lelism, claiming that:
... the mental and bodily phenomena whose empirical correlation sets us our problem are not phenomena belonging to two distinct orders of nature, but phenomena which actually are, and only can be, indi-viduated and classified by common principles. Both the bodily correlates of mental processes, and the mental processes themselves, are individuated as phenomena only on the basis of their function in adjusting the individual to his environment.154
Two months later, in “Dualism in Animal Psychology,”155 she offers a scathing criticism of philosopher-psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn’s The Animal Mind.156 Washburn defended herself and De Laguna issued a rejoinder.157 De Laguna can best be described as a behaviorist who understood emotion and perception to be correlated, but denied that it can be proven that sensory perception is the sole causal factor in generating emotional response. Rather, complex discriminating and integrating processes contribute to the response.158 Metaphysical interests also absorbed De Laguna. In a discussion of two of pragmatism’s competing doctrines on the nature of reality, instrumentalism and imme- diatism (a form of empiricism), De Laguna sides with the former claiming that both Hegelian idealism and immediatism have failed
... to recognize that a general definition of reality can be given only in functional terms.... [RJeality means just that content which is regarded as unchanged by the process [of knowing].159
For the better part of a century, Grace De Laguna taught philosophy to young women and herself inquired into the nature of reality and the potential for philosophy to contribute to the development of the theo-retical foundations of the social sciences.
13. Nima Hirschensohn Alderblum: circa 1882-1974
Nima Hirschensohn Alderblum lived in New York City and is believed to have been a graduate of Columbia University in Philosophy. From the two publications we have located, it appears that she presented and later published a single work “A Reinterpretation of Jewish Philosophy.” The paper was read before the Conference of Former Students of the Division of Philosophy, Columbia University, April 18, 1916 and sub-sequently published in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods.160 She also published a book review of an edited translation
of a work by a thirteenth century Jewish philosopher Berachya Hanakdan. The edited translation was by Hermann Gollancz, published by Oxford University Press in 1920. Alderblum’s review was published in the Journal of Philosophy.161 Nothing further is known of this early twentieth century American Jewish philosopher.
14. Beatrice Edgell: fl. 1875
“Miss Beatrice Edgell, M.A., Ph.D.,” as she is uniformly referred to, was elected to membership in the Aristotelian Society 1910. I have been unable to determine any facts about her personal life or her education. From her book reviews and her writings it is evident that she knew at least German and French in addition to English, and had an early and sustained interest in psychology, as evidenced by the publication of “On Time Judgment” in the American Journal of Psychology.162 She was an active participant in the Aristotelian Society from 1910 onwards. Her primary interests in philosophy were in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, and it is on these subjects that most of her writings focus.
The year following Edgell’s admission to the Society she presented “Imagery and Memory,”163 in which she inquired what factors must be present if memory is to be considered a cognitive conscious state. After distinguishing memory from retention, she explores Bergson’s exploration of “knowing by heart” as a form of memory, that is, as “habit interpreted by memory.” The example she uses is that of “the skillful use of the needle” in which “there is no conscious reference to the occasions whereon that use has been practised”.164 After mentioning that memory is sometimes nothing more than recognition, she turns her attention to forms of memory in which imagery is a necessary psychological feature: persistence,165 reminiscence, suggested recall and recollection.166 In recognition, she says, “the reference back, the act of remembering, seems hardly distinguishable, and there is no conscious-ness of imagery.”167
The imagery, then, created by the act of remembering is but the form through which, and in which, consciousness responds to a given situation - a form which is theoretically distinguishable from the act of knowing on the one side and from what is known or the “meaning” on the other. It is that which Professor Stout terms “Presentation” - “a more or less specific modification of the individual conscious-
ness, which defines and determines the direction of thought to this or that special object.”168
Edgell’s goal is to determine whether it is possible to distinguish, for the different kinds of memory, the act of remembering, from the image, from that which is remembered. Recognition lacks consciousness of imagery of that which is recognized. “Persistence” by which she appears to mean “a persistent image” seems to be the act of remembering the image and nothing else. “Reminiscence” on the other hand, appears to be a persistent image with reference to a time scheme in which “the act of referring back is clearly recognisable.”169 However, she notes that in recollection and suggested recall there is rarely any imagery present at all.
I leave my room, and when the same question is put to me, “Did you put the gas out?” I am conscious of nothing but reference back and the knowledge, “Yes, I put the gas out.” No imagery of any sort arises. I just remember. Suppose the questioner is sceptical, and goes on, “Are you sure?” The referring back may become more conscious, but still there is nothing recognisable as imagery. If upon my answering, “I remember doing it,” there should come the further question, “How do you remember that you did it?” I should be reduced to silence - and probably also to going to verify the memory which I could not make explicit by imagery, even though I felt its force. Failure to detect imagery does not, in my opinion, constitute a proof that there is no presentation. Imagery is often of the barest description, a vague sense of bodily position which would seem upon analysis to be images of motor sensations.170
In 1916 Edgell was a symposiast along with Bartlett, Moore and Carr171 in a discussion of the problems of recognition implicit in Russell’s views of sensation and sense-datum. In that article she argued that Russell’s theory of knowledge as expressed in a series of Monist articles fails. Russell, she argues, attempts to analyze the simplest cognitive experience dualistically: as a mental act and as a physical experience. As a consequence of his dualism, his theory of knowledge fails to account for what we know about human psychology: that definite memories can be distinguished from recognitions. If Russell’s theory of knowledge is to be consistent, he must claim that the experience we call “recognition” is illusory because it does not count as a intentional “fact.” That
is, on Russell’s theory of knowledge “recognition” cannot exist, and therefore the objects of recognition are not objects of knowledge. Edgell refers172 to Russell’s example of a “cinematograph.” According to that argument sense-data are like frames on a film: separate and distinct. Each picture is distinct and carries with it no historical data: it doesn’t for example say “you’ve seen this image before.” Edgell asks if sense data are like frames on a filmstrip how can there be recognition? On Russell’s account, Edgell says, there is no room for recognition. Logically, this may not be difficult to account for. Epistemologically, however, we must be able to account for experience and everyone, even Russell, experiences recognition. The mind has the power Edgell refers to as “retentiveness”: the ability to retain knowledge. Psychologically, retentiveness is a different power than perception, and a theory of knowledge that accounts for the perception of sense data must likewise account for the capacity to retain memories.
Beatrice Edgell edited a collection entitled Psychological Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Bedford College173 that apparently was published circa 1916 and was reviewed by Valentine.1741 have not been able to locate a copy of that work. That same year she, along with Lizzie Susan Stebbing and Nathalie Duddington was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society, a position she maintained through 1919. The following year Edgell and a “Miss Shields” (probably F. Rosamond Shields) are listed as discussants of Bartlett’s “Valuation and Existence” at a February meeting of the Society. The year 1918 had seen the publication of her paper “The Implications of Recognition”175 in which Edgell criticized Moore’s defense of Russell’s view against Edgell’s criticisms of Russell. During this period of the late nineteen-teens, and early nineteen-twenties, Edgell wrote a number of book reviews for Mind,176 becoming a member of the Mind Association in 1922. Soon afterwards she wrote Theories of Memory117 which was positively reviewed by Carre.178 Unfortunately, I have been unable to obtain copies of any of Edgell’s published books.
