Gertrude Stein and the Early Philosophy of Franklin Jones

The Problem of Separation

Gertrude Stein’s Search for the Self-Contained Real

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Part I

hat is striking in Franklin Jones’ (Adi Da Samraj) Master’s Thesis at Stanford, An Interpretation and Critique of Certain Aesthetic Motives of Gertrude Stein, particularly in the section entitled “Stein’s Theory for a Necessary Literature,” as presented in Lectures in America, is not merely the interpretation of Gertrude Stein, but the degree to which the young Franklin Jones already reveals the philosophical and spiritual architecture that would later define his own work. Even in 1966, the concern is not simply literary criticism in the ordinary academic sense. The thesis moves quickly beyond aesthetics into questions of ontology, consciousness, duality, and the possibility of a mode of perception beyond representation itself.

Jones identifies Stein’s central motive as the search for what he repeatedly calls the “thing in itself.” What fascinates him is not her style as eccentric experimentation, but her attempt to overcome separation—between perceiver and perceived, word and object, consciousness and reality. He reads Stein not as a literary innovator alone, but as someone pursuing a quasi-metaphysical discipline through language.

The passage pivots around Stein’s growing dissatisfaction with description. At first she praises the glory of English literature as “simple concentrated description.” But later, as Jones observes, she comes to see description itself as a form of duality. Description implies distance: the word stands apart from the thing it names. Language refers to something other than itself. Thus meaning becomes inseparable from memory, association, and representation.

Jones sees Stein recognizing that if one truly seeks the “thing in itself,” then even language must be purified of reference. This is the radical turn. He writes:

“She uses the language without association, without reference of any kind. The ‘meaning’ is not hidden. It is not included. She is attempting a kind of non-meaning text.”

This distinction between “meaninglessness” and “non-meaning” is crucial for him. Stein is not writing nonsense. She is attempting to free language from its representational burden. In Jones’s reading, this is a conscious spiritual reduction—a stripping away of the mechanisms that create dualistic consciousness itself.

What becomes especially interesting is how directly he frames this in relation to Eastern spirituality, particularly Zen Buddhism. The comparison is not casual. He explicitly describes Stein’s method as analogous to “the spiritual way of Zen Buddhism,” contrasting it with both Western literary convention and surrealist immersion in subconscious imagery.

This is an extraordinary move for a Stanford graduate thesis in 1966. Jones is essentially arguing that Stein’s literary project belongs to the same family of activity as spiritual renunciation. Her abandonment of narrative, subject, memory, description, and reference mirrors the Eastern mystics abandonment of attachment to form, distinction, and opposites.

And here one can already see themes that would later dominate Adi Da’s own language:

duality as the root problem,
ordinary perception as a structure of separation,
reduction or “abandonment” as a spiritual process,
critique of conventional Western consciousness,
fascination with immediacy or the “actual present,”
suspicion toward representation and conceptuality,
and the search for a condition prior to subject-object division.

In other words, this is not merely literary criticism. It is a philosophical self-portrait in embryonic form.

What is also notable is the fairness of the analysis. Jones does not merely celebrate Stein. He repeatedly insists that literature as a social art requires duality. Language must ordinarily mean something shared. Description, memory, narrative continuity, resemblance—these are necessary for human communication and communal experience. He recognizes that Stein’s project pushes beyond literature into something else entirely.

That tension gives the thesis much of its seriousness. He is not saying Stein “improved” literature. He is saying she attempted to transcend its foundational conditions.

This line especially reveals the larger philosophical frame:

“The literary goal must be to produce literature itself… a successful realization of a dualistic performance.”

That is a remarkable formulation. Literature itself is defined as dualistic performance. Once one seeks unity beyond duality, literature in the conventional sense begins to dissolve.

From a broader historical perspective, the thesis also belongs deeply to the intellectual atmosphere of the 1960s—when modernism, Zen, phenomenology, comparative religion, psychology, and critiques of Western rationalism were increasingly crossing into one another. One can almost feel the same atmosphere that shaped interest in figures like Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, Marshall McLuhan, and the emerging countercultural critique of ordinary consciousness.

But Jones’ treatment is more systematic than much of the popular spiritual writing of that era. He is attempting to define the structural mechanics of duality itself as they appear in language and art.

There is also something important in his contrast between the “Western man” and the “Eastern saint.” Today, readers may find the East/West polarity overstated or essentialized. Yet the contrast reveals the intellectual lens through which many mid-20th-century American thinkers approached Asian traditions. For Jones, the West is fundamentally committed to dialectic, distinction, morality, beauty, narrative, and relational life, whereas the Eastern saint seeks liberation from opposites altogether.

Whether or not one accepts that characterization, it explains why Stein fascinated him. She appeared to enact, within literature, a kind of contemplative dismantling of representation itself.

In that sense, this thesis is valuable not only as a reading of Stein, but as an early intellectual document showing the formation of Franklin Jones’ own worldview before he became known as Adi Da Samraj.

Part II

In an earlier section Franklin Jones makes the architecture of the entire thesis even clearer. What he is uncovering in Gertrude Stein is not merely an aesthetic technique, but a spiritual psychology of creation. The repeated words — “bother,” “trouble,” “doubt,” “fear,” “annoyance” — become, in his interpretation, signals of an underlying metaphysical dissatisfaction with duality itself.

The key insight is that Stein does not experience artistic problems as technical deficiencies. She experiences them as existential irritants. Representation itself bothers her.

Jones notices that every genuine creative movement in Stein begins not from inspiration in the romantic sense, but from disturbance:

“The motive of her art, then, is the solution of the problem, the dissolving of the bother, the fear, and the doubt.”

That sentence is extraordinarily important because it quietly transforms aesthetics into soteriology — art as a path of release or liberation.

What Stein cannot tolerate, in Jones’s reading, is the gap between things. The gap between painting and object. Between emotion and perception. Between language and reality. Between subject and object. Between time and immediacy. The “bother” is separation itself.

And notice how deeply he universalizes this:

“it is only those who have an active need to be completely completed who have all this as a bother.”

Jones seizes on this phrase because it gives him the doorway into a much larger interpretation. Stein’s aesthetic struggle becomes the expression of a drive toward completion, wholeness, self-containment — a condition in which nothing stands outside anything else.

This is where his language becomes almost overtly metaphysical:

“The composition she required was to be self-contained…”

and then:

“We must designate her system as a kind of ‘metaphysical aesthetics.’”

This is no longer literary criticism in the ordinary academic sense. He is constructing a philosophical account of consciousness through Stein’s work.

One can also see how strongly the influence of modern existential and phenomenological concerns is present here, even if indirectly. The “problem” is not simply artistic form but the structure of experience itself. Stein’s dissatisfaction with ordinary literary form mirrors dissatisfaction with mediated consciousness altogether.

The most revealing passage may be this:

“the object of her creativity is not literature or concrete statement but knowledge, freedom and liberation”

That is a stunning claim for a graduate thesis on literature. Jones is essentially arguing that Stein’s writing is a discipline of transformation rather than communication. Literature becomes a method, a path, an exercise aimed at altering the condition of the creator herself.

And then comes the final move:

“the ‘fiction’ itself is only the method or path to a certain realization”

This is almost spiritual vocabulary disguised as aesthetics. The artwork is not the end. The artwork is a vehicle toward realization. The true event occurs in consciousness.

Again, from the vantage point of later years, it is difficult not to read this as autobiographical in an intellectual sense. The themes are unmistakably continuous with what would later emerge in Adi Da’s mature language:

the search for “completion,”
liberation from separation,
critique of representational consciousness,
the insufficiency of ordinary language,
the notion that practice or form is only a “means” toward realization,
and the idea that the ultimate condition is self-contained and prior to duality.

Even his phrasing anticipates later spiritual language. “Knowledge, freedom and liberation” are not terms one ordinarily expects to find as the culmination of a Stanford literature thesis unless something much larger is already at work internally.

What also fascinates me is how carefully he distinguishes Stein from mere obscurity or literary experimentation for its own sake. He insists her process is disciplined, conscious, and purposeful. She is not indulging chaos. She is reducing form toward immediacy.

In this sense, Jones reads Stein almost like an ascetic. Each abandoned literary convention — description, narrative continuity, reference, temporal sequence — becomes analogous to a renunciation. A stripping away of mediation.

And perhaps most interesting of all is his concluding claim that the final realization is not actually in the work itself:

“ultimately contained only in the creator herself.”

This is crucial. The text is not the realization. The creator’s transformed condition is the realization. The work merely reflects or symbolizes that condition.

That idea places Stein, in Jones’s interpretation, very close to certain contemplative traditions where scripture, mantra, koan, icon, or practice are not ends in themselves but catalysts toward a transformed state of consciousness.

So beneath the literary terminology, what this thesis is really exploring is a question that would remain central to Franklin Jones/Adi Da for the rest of his life:

Can there be a mode of awareness free of the divisions built into ordinary consciousness, language, perception, and time?

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