It’s It. What Is It?

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy No Comments

And we oughtn’t to be contrasting the imaginative, dreamy outlook of children with the realism and objectivity of adults. It is children who are the true realists: they never proceed from generalities. The adult recognizes the general form in a particular example, a representative of the species, dismisses everything else and states: that’s lilac, there’s an ash tree, an apple tree. The child perceives individuals, personalities. He sees the unique form, and doesn’t mask it with a common name or function. When you walk with children, they enable you to see the fabulous beasts in tree foliage, to smell the sweetness of blossoms. It isn’t a triumph of the imagination, but an unprejudiced, total realism. And Nature becomes instantly poetic. These outings are the absolute reign of childhood: You lose its charm in growing up, because you end by acquiring ideas and certainties about everything, and no longer want to know more of things than their objective representation (sadly called their ‘truth’).

— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

In his 1951 essay “The Negative Way,” Alan Watts also wrote about trees — specifically, the difference between our conceptual and linguistic ideas about them, and their immediate, mysterious reality:

Yet this world, this reality that we experience at every moment is Brahman. For example, I point to a tree and say, ”This is a tree.” Obviously this and tree are not actually the same thing. Tree is a word, a noise. It is not this experienced reality to which I am pointing. To be accurate, I should have said, “This (pointing to a tree) is symbolized by the noise tree.”

If, then, the real tree is not the word or the idea tree, what is it? If I say that it is an impression on my senses, a vegetable structure, or a complex of electrons, I am merely putting new sets of words and symbols in place of the original noise tree. I have not said what it is at all. I have also raised other questions: “What are my senses?” “What is a structure?” “What are electrons?” We can never say what these things are. We can symbolize them by sundry noises and patterns of thought. We can in turn, symbolize these noises by other noises — “Tree is a word,” or “A pattern of thought is an idea” — but this does not really explain anything. We still do not know what a tree, a word, a noise or an idea actually is. And yet we have experienced mysterious “somethings” which we have arbitrarily paired off with each other — the sight of the tree with the noise tree, the process of thinking with the noise idea, and the noises tree and idea with the noise words.

Human beings are very much bewitched by words and ideas. They forget that they are mere symbols. They tend to confuse them seriously with the real world that they only represent. The reason for this confusion is that the world of words and ideas seems to be relatively fixed and rational, whereas the real world is not fixed at all. Thus the world of words and ideas seems to be so much safer, so much more comprehensible than the real world. The word and idea tree has remained fixed currency for many centuries, but real trees have behaved in a very odd way. I can try to describe their behavior by saying that they have appeared and disappeared, that they have been in a constant state of change and that they flow in and out of their surroundings. But this does not really say what they have done, because disappear, change, flow, and surroundings are still noises representing something utterly mysterious.

Many rigorous thinkers would impatiently brush this off as pointless mysticism. Yes, yes, it’s all very strange, but humans are a tool-using animal, language and concepts are our most effective tools, and they don’t have to be perfect in order to be effective, they might harrumph. It doesn’t matter what it ultimately is, what matters is what we can do with it. And true enough, it’s impractical to try to inhabit this outlook for more than a few minutes at a time. But during those few minutes, I’ll be attentive toward this red-bellied woodpecker at my feeder. Like Stephen Pentz’s robin, I’ll reflect on this woodpecker as an individual, not a representative of a species. Like Brad Warner’s crow, I’ll contemplate how the same intelligence that looks out at the world through my eyes also looks back at me through the eyes of this woodpecker. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” may be the oldest philosophical question of all. “How wonderful that this, whatever it is, should be happening right now,” is only a slightly younger relative, I think. Watts sometimes called this, in a lighthearted manner, “the which than which there is no whicher.” Whatever it is, words would be the wrong tool for this job.

Walk On, Walk On

By in books, walking No Comments

When you walk, news becomes unimportant. Soon you have lost all knowledge of the world and its gymnastics, the most recent own goal, the latest scandal. You no longer await the surprise development, or want to hear how it really all began or what happened in the end. Heard the latest? When you are walking, all that ceases to matter. Being in the presence of what absolutely endures detaches us from that ephemeral news for which we are usually agog. After walking far and long, you can even come to wonder in surprise how you could ever have been interested in it. The slow respiration of things makes everyday huffing and puffing appear vain, unhealthy agitation.

…That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in what is called — laughably no doubt — the ‘news’, one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains eternally new. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What’s new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.

— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

The Lady of the House listens to Kara Swisher’s podcast — de gustibus non est disputandum and all that — and “generously” informed me about a recent episode, where Swisher’s shallow, obnoxious co-host was trying to convince her to spend some time talking about the conclusion to Game of Thrones. Swisher responded that if people spent as much time thinking about their country as they do about the writers of GoT, it would be a better country (as the kids like to say these days, “citation needed”). She would prefer to focus on “our crazy president,” which, as we all know, is a sorely neglected topic among the chattering class. One literal minute of this was all I could take. I hate the agitated, hyperactive style of “conversation” almost as much as I hate the appalling philistine ideas about civic engagement.

Gros speaks the truth here, but I don’t think that walking is unique in this regard. Any activity, of leisure or labor, can have the same absorbing affect, making current events seem irrelevant and irritating. If I’m honest, I have to admit that if it weren’t for writing as a hobby, I wouldn’t care to spend anywhere near as much time online. Unfortunately, I don’t have the talent or depth to write with nothing but my inner resources for inspiration, so I have to rely heavily on “conversational” prompts, which is one of the strengths of blogging. It’s an uneasy compromise, though. There are many times when, having been occupied with other things for several days, I sit down at the computer to browse and feel a slight sense of…what, exactly? Negative anticipation? Grim duty? Whatever it is, there’s a jarring sensation, like entering a section of interstate under renovation, as my mind shifts back into Internet-time. For now, at least, I consider the tension to be a productive one overall, but I do wonder if and when that might change.

A Philosophy of Walking

By in books, walking No Comments

Books by authors imprisoned in their studies, grafted to their chairs, are heavy and indigestible. They are born of a compilation of the other books on the table. They are like fattened geese; crammed with citations, stuffed with references, weighed down with annotations. They are weighty, obese, boring, and are read slowly, with difficulty. Books made from other books, by comparing lines with other lines, by repeating what others have said of what still others have thoroughly explained. They verify, specify, rectify; a phrase becomes a paragraph, a whole chapter. A book becomes the commentary of a hundred books on a single sentence from another book.

An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgment, decision. It is thought born of a movement; an impulse. In it we can feel the body’s elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising — vertiginously — above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought.

— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

One of my readers told me about this book five years ago. She was trolling me. You see, “books about walking” had become one of my miniature themes here. I was amazed at how many books there seemed to be about the topic; you might think there would be very little of substance to say about it. I was also annoyed by how often the examples I encountered quickly devolved into shallow romanticism and signaling status. At the time, I saw “books about walking” as symbolic of the unfortunate intellectual tendency to feign profundity while stroking one’s ego. I rolled my eyes, and the years rolled on.

Recently, I came across a copy which I intended to sell. While flipping through it to judge its condition, I saw enough passages to pique my interest, so I set it aside to look through more carefully. I’m glad I did. I really enjoyed it. Like the ideal he praises in this excerpt, the short chapters are suggestive rather than declarative, poetic rather than pedantic. Again, there are only so many ways you can talk about the simple act of walking, so, like a good walk, the subject tends to meander into nearby associations — walking as it relates to artists and philosophers like Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rousseau, and Thoreau, for example. These sidetracks are usually brief and interesting, although — speaking of light, rising thoughts — the impressionistic free-association can sometimes seem, well, a bit gaseous. As in, Hegelian. As in, after a couple paragraphs, saying to oneself, “Did any of that mean anything?” But I choose to be charitable and brush those instances off as “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Sometimes you have to wade through some rhetorical weeds to discover an oblique insight, and there are quite a few of those in this short book.

It occurred to me while reading that this book is of a type that I hadn’t really conceptualized before: books that are useful for my own writing. Of course, with everything I read, I’m always on the lookout for ideas or passages that I can use as a springboard for my own thoughts here. But many books, while interesting, don’t leave me with anything to add. They have said all that needs to be said. I realize now that I value books which suggest, or even provoke, unexpected thoughts, and it seems that this isn’t a quality which can be easily predicted or harnessed. If I were to produce a list of books that meet my subjective criteria, I don’t think there would be any obvious common threads of genre, style, or subject. I would love to read more like this, but how would I find them? I suppose I can’t do anything other than what I’m already doing — put one foot in front of another, as it were, without hoping for any algorithmic shortcuts, keep my eyes and mind open, and be prepared for pleasant surprises.

A Mooring Beyond Ourselves

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne No Comments

I do not think that in the common relations of life it makes much difference whether one moral system or another is adopted. The feelings toward each other of husbands and wives, parents and children, relations, friends, neighbors, members of the same profession, business connections, members of the same nation, and so forth, grow up by themselves. Moral systems have to account for and more or less to regulate them, but human life forms the starting point of all systems worth having.

— James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

I remember being pleasantly surprised, and a little amused, to encounter this passage in Stephen’s book. Most Western conservatives tend to be pessimistic about the possibility of a sturdy morality independent of Christian dogma and practices. But according to Saul Frampton, Montaigne was similarly sanguine:

The answer he gives is a moral rather than a tactical one, however: that rebuilding morality involves restoring the proxemic beholdenness of men. At the heart of Montaigne’s morality is something that the ‘great and tedious debates about the best form of society’ and the ideal polities ‘feigned by art’ invariably tend to ignore:

“…that the society of men will hold and bind itself together, at whatsoever cost. In whatever position they are placed, they pile up and arrange themselves by moving and shuffling about, just as a group of objects thrown into a bag find their own way to join and fit together, often better than they could have been arranged deliberately.”

A certain ‘necessity reconciles and brings men together’. We are more beholden to each other than we know. Our language and our theories may seek to escape this, in attempting to find a mooring beyond ourselves, but we risk losing hold of what lies in front of us.

Currently, it’s fashionable in certain circles to criticize “moralistic therapeutic deism” for being “metaphysically thin.” (Some of us would say all metaphysics is thin by definition.) These are mostly the same people anticipating the imminent end of liberalism (it’s not always clear whether in eagerness or trepidation). I tend to think that intellectual theorizing, of both the revolutionary and reactionary variety, is myopic and full of manure. It’s nice to occasionally find myself in such august company.

All of Your Struggles Beneath Your Disguise

By in extraordinary popular delusions, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit No Comments

A cause-creating drive is powerful within him; someone must be to blame for his feeling vile. His “righteous indignation” itself already does him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding – it gives him a little of the intoxication of power. Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege. “If I am canaille, you ought to be so, too”: on the basis of this logic, one makes revolutions. Complaining is never of any use, it comes from weakness. Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself – the socialist does the former, the Christian for example does the latter – makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers – in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Brad Warner:

The Buddha said, “All life is suffering.” This doesn’t mean that your entire life is always spent in pain. Obviously not. We all have times in our lives when we’re happy. Our entire lives are not constant misery.

No. What the Buddha meant was that all of us are suffering. Every single person you see is having a tough time just getting through life. No matter how rich they are or how much supposed “privilege” they have. The Buddha was a wealthy man from one of the most privileged races and classes of his time. He gave up his wealth and privilege because it didn’t do anything to relieve his suffering.

There is a poisonous notion gripping much of the United States these days that there are people in our midst who never suffer. Holding such ideas is a way of dehumanizing others; it’s a way of allowing ourselves an excuse for hate and providing an easy target to take out our frustrations on. It’s a bad idea. And the saddest thing of all is to see so many Buddhist centers in our country embracing this awful idea and promoting it.

We are all suffering. There is no measurement for suffering. There are no ranks for suffering. It affects every single one of us.

…Women suffer. Men suffer. The poor suffer. The rich suffer. This disabled suffer. The able-bodied suffer. Gay people suffer. Trans people suffer. Straight cis-gendered people suffer. Homeless people suffer. People in beautiful homes suffer. Black people suffer. Latinos suffer. Middle Eastern people, Native Americans, and Asians suffer. White people suffer.

We are all lonely and sad and confused and frustrated. We are all afraid to die. No one is exempt.

The idea that some suffer while others don’t is false and damaging. The idea that some forms of suffering are important while other forms of suffering don’t really matter is ugly and wrong. It gives those in the supposedly “privileged” classes the notion that they are not suffering — which is at odds with their real, lived experience. It often makes the supposedly “privileged” more likely to cause suffering. And it gives others the notion that if only they had the supposed privileges accorded to those other people that they too would no longer suffer. It makes for needless jealousy and envy and greed. It’s a rotten idea that stands in the way of getting at the real root of suffering. It is a lie.

This is probably the best articulation one could ask for in response to the incessant, pernicious cant about “privilege” we’ve been hearing for years. I suppose it’s an idle question to ask why, at this particular point in time, so many people have become possessed by the idea that there is such a thing as a life free of suffering, that it’s being unfairly hoarded by this or that group of people, and that we deserve to take it from them by means fair if possible, or foul if necessary. As Warner said in the previous post, the Buddha called such things “questions tending not to edification.” Regardless of the particular origin, the response is always the same. Envy has spontaneously combusted throughout history and always will; the point is to see it for the lie it is and to stop indulging in the behavior. The simplest things are often incredibly difficult.

Taste Is the Key Driver

By in animals, herbivory No Comments

Chris Ip:

We’re in a new era of food tech: ahi tuna sashimi made from tomatoes, lab-grown foie gras. Greggs, the UK everyman’s bakery, has made a wildly hyped vegan sausage roll, and in 2013 Dutch scientist Mark Post showed off a $325,000 cell-based burger paid for by Google’s Sergey Brin. Nestle, McDonald’s and Tyson, the US’ largest meat processor, are all set to debut alternative proteins.

These products don’t aim to resemble the ascetic formlessness of health foods that trade taste for moral rectitude. But neither are they the soulless nutrition-delivery systems of Soylent and RX bars that trade it for efficiency. The problem with most future-of-food plays is how hard it is to feel any emotion about them. No matter how optimized they are, they’re insipid on a sensory level: As Topic wrote about energy bars, “consuming them doesn’t satisfy hunger so much as deaden it.” These new meat facsimiles aspire to be good enough on flavor, health, price and ethics, proposing the outcome we seldom get in life: Why choose?

…”Ethical consumerism is a failure and doesn’t really accomplish what we want it to accomplish,” said Michael Selden, CEO and founder of Finless Foods, a cell-based seafood startup. “What you need to do is create things that are ethical and moral as a baseline but make them compete on metrics of taste, price and convenience, which is what people actually buy food on, and Impossible has really embodied that.”

There’s a comparison to sustainable energy here: We all need it and we’re barely willing to curtail our electricity demands, but if there’s a price-competitive, clean alternative, then sure. With food, it’s an acknowledgement that — solely for the guaranteed sensory enjoyment that those who are food secure might enjoy each day — taste is the key driver to change our habits.

It’s an in-depth, fascinating article that also looks at the large roles that economic and cultural incentives will play in the coming arguments over the ethics of meat-eating. As a long-time mostly-vegetarian, I’m personally looking forward to the opportunity to try an Impossible Burger, but we also have cattle-ranching relatives out west, and we’ve been thinking about this issue for months, wondering how to go about broaching the topic to them. Having experienced the disruption of the newspaper industry firsthand, I don’t envy how they’re going to have to adjust and adapt once a cheap, tasty, convenient, and ethical alternative to meat exists on a competitive scale. It’s also interesting to think how this issue might make bedfellows out of the anti-GMO types and the “real meat as a way of life” subculture that will eventually consolidate from the upheaval. I dread the idea of diet becoming even more politicized in the near-future, but I don’t see any way for this to not become another front in the endless culture wars.

The Lights All Around Me Glow and Music Takes Me

By in music 2 Comments

Will Lloyd:

This scene – a young person bored, with attention and time to spare, looking for music beyond the obvious and finding that music quite unexpectedly, then devouring it alone and in an almost embarrassingly profound way disappearing into that music and into the vision of the artist who created it – this scene no longer really exists.

…Spotify’s exponential growth and powerful machine-learning algorithms have changed the way music is consumed. Playlists, rather than albums are king; music is tailored to mood: chill, romance, focus; or to activity: party, workout, sleep. Pelly argues that this change has made music less diverse, less interesting and more like elevator muzak. Listening to music is not an aesthetic experience in itself (think Morrissey listening to Horses back in 1975) but something pre-programmed, inoffensive, ambient; an accompaniment to other activities. Streaming services have made entertainment feel like another form of work, another task, like answering emails, to be completed on a laptop or a smartphone.

Blockbuster movies, TV shows, and now music — I fear that before long, Mr. Lloyd will run out of predictable targets for his curmudgeonly rants. Judging by this trajectory, we can expect that by the time summer arrives, our critic will produce a column noting the signs of cultural decline in whatever fashions the kids are wearing these days.

DJ Nobody’s newest record was released last Friday. I downloaded it early that morning and took it with me on a 500-mile road trip. When I got home, I wrote to a music-loving friend and tipped her to listen to it. “Very nice, very sleepy,” she said. “How on earth did you stay awake while listening to this and driving?” True, it is a very mellow record, but nonetheless, it seems that any music that interests me acts as a stimulant on my brain. Even subdued, languid melodies can capture my attention and allow me to expatiate at length. I do most of my best thinking and writing while “high” on a new song. When I was probably three or four years old, my favorite song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Cecilia.” I remember hearing it one day in the car and demanding that my mom play it again, as she tried to explain to me that she couldn’t make a radio station do that. Apparently I was already well-acquainted with the magic of rewinding cassette tapes to hear songs again. Once digital music brought the “repeat” option into existence, we had reached the pinnacle of technological achievement as far as I was concerned. I’ve been known to spend hours entranced by a song, sometimes discovering, to my surprise, that I listened to it more than a hundred times in a row without tiring of it. I understand some people snort Ritalin or Adderall to achieve that type of intense concentration and absorption; I seem to only need the right combination of melody and rhythm.

Anyway, I’ve been a fan of DJ Nobody for over a decade now. How did I discover him? By going to Last.fm one day and doing a search for artists similar to the Chemical Brothers. His song “Spin the Bright Sun Rose” came up and I was instantly enthralled. His collaboration with Niki Randa on Blank Blue: Western Water Music Vol. II was, amazingly, even better. I’m not sure, beyond some superficial similarities, how much his music resembles that of the Chemical Brothers, but I’m still grateful to whichever algorithm pointed me in that direction. Why would my love of his albums be more “real” if I had first heard a song on the radio instead of a streaming service? What is more “authentic” about picking up an album because of the cover art, as opposed to a “similar artist” recommendation? What does it even mean to say that this artist is “like” that one? What Procrustean violence there is in that common word! How many Janus-faced ambiguities there are in trying to meaningfully compare one “similar” song with another! How reductive, how insulting to imagine that there could ever be an algorithmic padlock so perfectly designed as to imprison us in our solipsism forever! Like a children’s game of Telephone, even a search for simple terms like “psychedelic indie rock” or “big beat electronica” can produce some unexpected results. What kind of, dare I say, narcissist thinks that his generation was the last one with the interiority or the technological means to truly appreciate music?

Descartes infamously thought that animals, lacking souls, could not feel pain or emotion, and dismissed their whimpers and cries as equivalent to the sproings and clangs of faulty machinery (his student, Malebranche, put theory into action by kicking a pregnant dog as a demonstration). I feel pity for these modern Cartesians who coldly dissect mere “popular” music into its constituent parts, finding no “soul” among its studio wizardry and formulaic songcraft. Well, ’twas ever thus, Sturgeon’s Law. There have always been hack performers and unsophisticated groundlings. Devoted listeners, like devoted readers, have always been a tiny minority. Fortunately, despite the failings of both artists and audiences, there is still an unquantifiable space where the magic effect of music is produced by some strange alchemy. The sense of certainty in being a doomsayer is comforting in its own perverse way, I suppose, but I prefer to make the effort to keep my ears open and be ready for surprises.

Noteworthies (47)

By in noteworthies No Comments

Just a miniature edition of Noteworthies this time. I’m still recovering/getting caught up after a busy week of work and travel. However, I did want to recommend a couple of interesting interviews. First, a Five Books interview with Melissa Mohr on swearing, and then an interview with Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter on the fifteen-year anniversary of the publication of their book The Rebel Sell (published in the U.S. as Nation of Rebels.)

With Hope In Your Heart

By in world football No Comments


David Lynch:

Jurgen Klopp said before this game that if Liverpool had to fail, then they should at the very least “fail beautifully”. This was the footballing equivalent of having your cake and eating it: winning beautifully, doggedly, and when nobody gave them a chance.

Few would have thought this possible at full-time in Spain, even fewer when Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino were ruled out of the second leg. But Klopp did, and he is quite a persuasive character – as his players proved in, somehow, beating Barcelona 4-0 here. Doing so not only guaranteed them a Champions League final berth, but also a place in Anfield history. They are men behind its greatest ever European night.

Nights like this are why I love this sport, this club, and this manager. My God, what a game.

Deus Ex Machina

By in bread and circuses, religion No Comments

Ross Douthat:

I was less churlish after finishing Endgame’s immediate predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, which had a rare weight among Marvel movies because alone among them it let its caped and armored heroes fail, and even saw many of them die. But that failure, the failure to stop the semi-genocidal Thanos (Josh Brolin, but purple) from wiping out half the population of the universe, was always destined to be temporary, and here we are back again for an Endgame in which the remaining superheroes will inevitably find a way to reverse the villain’s victory.

I agree. Guarantees of inevitable victory and miraculous resurrection only cheapen the experience. Pathos dwells in the particular, the irreplaceable, the dissolution of individual perspective within the flow of time. Wait, are we talking about movies, or…?

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