Not to be overly romantic, but I do think it’s true that spending lots of time stargazing or studying planetary climates or searching for habitable exoplanets will change anybody. Your view of nature and your place within it changes. Looking out at the night sky, you might feel small and insignificant, but then looking back from our present moment through the eons of life’s evolution here on Earth, you might justifiably feel you’re a part of the most meaningful thing in the known universe, something that could be the source of significance for countless past and future events.
foolosophy
Our Whole Lives are Experiments; Let Us Also Want to be Them!
When he began writing the manuscript that became the Zibaldone, the nineteen-year-old poet had little idea what he had embarked upon. His first entry is a piece of scene-setting reminiscent of Thoreau’s journals: “Palazzo Bello. Dog in the night from the farmhouse, as the wayfarer goes by.” From this point on, however, he rarely records scenes of daily life, preferring instead to chart the progress of his thought. He writes a penna corrente, quickly, as the pen flows and as inspiration dictates. The searching, questioning nature of the diary, never resting in easy solutions, derives from Leopardi’s dissatisfaction with the received wisdom of his day, and his determination to think everything through again for himself, starting at the beginning, which is to say, with the ancient Greeks. He was trying to teach himself how to live. And not only how, but why. For Leopardi, life in itself, mere biological existence, is of no importance. What matters is living well and happily, or at least not living badly and unhappily. Philosophers, academics and other experts “should teach people first how to make life happy, and then how to prolong it.”
I Go Out to Meet the Man Who Contradicts Me and Corrects Me
We’ve stored a huge chunk of what we “know” in people around us for eons. But we rarely recognize this because, well, we prefer our false self-image as isolated, Cartesian brains. Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially. We’re dumber and less cognitively nimble if we’re not around other people—and, now, other machines.
In short, we argue in pursuit of truth. The epistemic conception is concerned with rationally engaging others. It is, after all, through such engagement that we come to see more fully what reasons and evidence there are, and thus we come to occupy a better vantage point from which to evaluate our options, including the beliefs we already hold. In this way, the epistemic conception sees argument as a critical activity aimed at the evaluation of views. But note that argument then is equally a self-critical activity, a process by which we can criticize our own views. The thought is that by engaging together in pursuit of truth, we can help each other to refine our ideas, even in the face of persistent disagreement.
The epistemic view accordingly proposes its own conception of respect. The rhetorical theory takes respect to consist in the willingness to reason from another’s premises. The epistemic conception locates respect in seeing others as partners in the common pursuit of believing what’s right by believing what the best available reasons and evidence favor. The rhetorical view has it that I respect you when I take you as you are — with the beliefs you already have — and attempt to rationally compel you to move in my direction. The epistemic view holds that I respect you when I regard you as a companion in a common struggle for truth, and thus a fellow source of reasons, ideas, evidence, and objections.
Without conversation and challenge, philosophy very quickly lapses in to the dead dogma that Mill feared. But that does not mean that every viewpoint is equally valuable, or that we should accept that each person finds their own truth. Every great philosopher has been driven by an attempt to get beyond appearances and to say something important about how things really are. Philosophy is a subject that weighs positions, not just airs them. Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):
The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’
Bisy Backson
There’s a scene in the film Beyond the Clouds where an archaeologist hires some tribesmen to lead him to an site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time the tribesmen stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he cajoled the tribesmen would not go any further. Then all of a sudden the tribesmen changed their attitude. They picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist asked why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, the tribesmen answered, “We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up.”
That’s the kind of living the cult of busy promotes. The kind of living in which we move so fast our souls have no time to catch up, on purpose: so we don’t have to face them.
I’ve been a lot busier than I like lately, but there’s nothing romantic about barely making ends meet, so I’ll grin and bear it. Plus, I’ve also been making more time for swimming, playing computerized chess, working out, and catching up on my dead-tree reading. Unfortunately, writing suffers as a result, but, in an attempt to accentuate the positive, I’m using the downtime to reconsider my own writing, both in content and style. Maybe there are better sites out there I could be using for inspiration, along the excellent lines of 3 Quarks Daily, the Browser, or Bookforum’s Omnivore. Perhaps I should aim to post less frequently in order to improve the quality-to-quantity ratio. There are a lot of people who will make snide remarks about the mindless entertainment habits of the average Myrrhkin, only to indulge in the equally mindless pursuit of reading the same blogs every day writing the same posts about the same predictable topics. There but for the grace of nonexistent gods go I.
Fill Your Heroes
Lady, people aren’t chocolates. D’you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.
Falling in love with a book is a unique and sometimes strange experience; it’s not hard to make the leap from adoring a novel to adoring its creator. The writer Justin Cronin compares it to a celebrity crush: “When you read a book, you spend hours in intimate contact with the mind of another person — it’s an intense, but one-sided relationship. If any reader knew who we really were, it’s guaranteed they’d find us disappointing. The experience of a book is so much better than the experience of a person.” The author Elizabeth Gilbert agreed. “When I meet readers, I feel a responsibility not to disappoint them. But how do you not disappoint someone who’s invented you?”
…But some writers enjoy discovering the darker sides of their favorite authors. “I’m always comforted when writers and artists I admire have terrible problems in their lives, as I did,” the novelist Kate Christensen told me. “I like reading about their struggles and misbehavior.” The poet and memoirist Mary Karr is also forgiving of flaws. “Tolstoy I’m sure was an incredible jackass, but I still love him. I still love Stevens, I still love Pound. If we didn’t read people who were bastards, we’d never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”
If I had to credit any particular text with being a formative influence on my intellectual and psychological development, well — I’m afraid I’ll have to reveal my utterly mainstream, lowbrow roots and name RIP magazine. For those who don’t know, it was a hard rock/heavy metal magazine, produced by Larry Flynt’s media empire, that existed for about a decade in the ’80s and ’90s. The first issue I got had Lars Ulrich on the cover with a long interview inside, and with that bait, I was soon hooked on what I thought was the best rock journalism around (there may have been better for all I know, but this was pre-Internet, and I was limited to what I could find in the mall bookstores). Lonn Friend, the editor during the magazine’s heyday, has, on a couple occasions that I’ve seen, summarized a large part of RIP’s guiding philosophy:
Because one of the edicts was that we weren’t going to prostitute these artists over their bad behavior. If it fell into the story, we would discuss the party and then whatever else. But if it was to damage or hurt the image of an artist rather than the heroic image of the artist because that’s what RIP was all about — heroes — then I chose not to.
RIP definitely erred on the side of generosity in its articles. A lot of magazines — especially British ones, I noticed — specialized in reporting the seediest gossip and exulted in sneering mean-spiritedness toward their subjects, but RIP, even though half its lifespan was spent covering the most decadent, trashy Sunset Strip glam-metal, never went that route. Bands were always presented in the best possible light, and the music was always described in terms of its highest potential, rather than its (frequently) humdrum reality. Even the most generic hair bands were treated as capable of moments of transcendent artistry.
It was largely through years of reading RIP while dreaming of a career as a musician that I formed my weltanschauung (there, perhaps that ten-dollar word will redeem my intellectual pretensions!), my ideal of a life lived in accordance with low-key, bohemian foolosophy values. I had an idealized image of the rock/metal world as being something like an itinerant tribe of minstrels, poets and plainspoken philosophers who devoted their lives to pondering the meaning of it all in between ritual musical performances. An insight here, a perspective there — I clothed my burgeoning sense of self in a patchwork quilt painstakingly stitched together from the scraps of interviews with creative people. I assembled an idealized personality that would take years to fully grow into. And of course, the flawed mortals behind those pull quotes and aperçus were bound to disappoint upon closer examination, as they often did. But the ideal they all contributed to is no less powerful for all that.
How Much Reverence Has a Noble Man for His Enemies!
I read Pascal Bruckner’s essay last week, but the one line that really stuck with me, despite being somewhat tangential to the broader theme, was this one:
There are useful enemies that make you fertile and sterile enemies that wear you out.
I like that formulation. I like the way it limns the subtle concept of an intellectual sparring partner who brings out the best in you through integral opposition while keeping you from slipping into the easy tendency toward moralistic tunnel vision, where winning the argument and trouncing the enemy at any cost becomes the goal. Maybe that’s not so remarkable an attitude among scientists, say, but I find it to be rare in general culture. There are a handful of people I describe as favorites “to think with” — they manage to enlighten even as they provoke; they pull off the difficult trick of balancing stunningly original insight with clear, almost obvious, expression.
Useful enemies don’t have to be individuals, of course; they might be general concepts or themes. One theme I’ve been circling around for the past year or so is the superficial progressive obsession with achieving racial/sexual demographic parity in artsy fields. Well-meaning folks, I’m sure. Nothing more than guilt-ridden honkies looking for a simple, clearly visible metric to reassure themselves that they aren’t accidentally contributing to someone’s oppression. Their vapid “activism” is the sociopolitical equivalent of feng shui — rearranging society’s demographic furniture in order to, like, free up the inequitable energy flow and create good vibes of social justice. But though I mock them, I’m glad for the time I spent taking their arguments seriously and engaging with what they said instead of dismissing them after a cursory glance. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s rules, they were the stones against which I sharpened my own thoughts: why would I resent them for that?
That theme could easily become a sterile enemy, though, if I let it. It could just be something I routinely return to in order to reenact the same old drama, with nothing new to say, both of us going through the predictable motions in a dysfunctional relationship. Especially on the social web, I feel, there’s a phenomenon where one has to perform one’s dislike, even when there’s no point to it. It’s not enough to quietly ignore people or websites that waste my time; I have to announce my ignoring in a passive-aggressive stage whisper to someone else. I see people in forums and on Twitter doing that all the time: seeking attention in a symbiotic relationship with someone they profess to be bored or sickened by. It’s like watching kids who think they’re cleverly disguising their flirting by punching each other and calling names, only it’s pathetic instead of cute. I’ve noted this unhealthy dynamic a couple times recently, and it motivates me to pay closer attention, to be sensitive to when it’s time to add a period and turn the page.
Mind-Monkey in the Middle
I describe myself as speaking for the majority in the middle: People between the atheists on the one hand and the fundamentalists on the other—people who value individual freedom when it comes to what we believe and how we live, yet reject the traditional views of God, scripture, the creeds, and all that. But I’m not convinced that individuals are the be-all and end-all, either, or that transcendence plays no role in life, as the atheists insist.
I think what we’re trying to do, what I’m trying to do, is speak for that group of people—not just Unitarian Universalists, but people from all points along the religious/non-religious spectrum who are trying to figure out how to balance what is rightly individual in our lives and in our culture with what is necessarily a communal undertaking. I think both ends of the spectrum err in one way or the other: the atheists by being radically individualist and spiritually isolationist; the fundamentalists by being radically collective and leaving no real room for individual belief. It’s a hard balance to find.
In the not-too-distant past, I might have made a predictable snarky remark along the lines of the classic XKCD panel. But honestly, I don’t even care all that much about the ostensible subjects here of religion vs. atheism, individuality vs. collectivism. Now, when I read things like this, I’m interested in the cognitive bias which seems far more fundamental of an issue — namely, the Goldilocks tendency to place oneself directly in the reasonable, moderate center of an issue, beset by extremists on either side. I’d be willing to bet most atheists and fundamentalists would fail to recognize themselves in this characterization. They all likely see themselves as maintaining a healthy balance between self and community, with perfectly logical reasons for drawing the lines where they do. It’s only those crazy people over there who have it all wrong, obviously. Name any issue, and you’ll find the same dynamics.
One of the first things we heard in philosophy class was Socrates’ assertion that people are incapable of choosing what they truly believe to be the wrong choice. Ferzample, even if you perform horrible, depraved actions with a gun to your head, it’s because you feel that the greater good of preserving your life at any cost takes precedence over violating ethical standards you would otherwise uphold. Along those lines, I wonder if it’s possible for most people to view themselves as societal outliers, as exceptions to the norm, without suffering either depression or delusions of grandeur as a result. Psychologically, we seem to need to envision ourselves at the median of whichever social context we find ourselves in.
Occam’s Restaurant
With an increasing number of options in almost every aspect of life, we presume that our results in each of those areas should be getting better and better, because with each new possibility it becomes more likely that one of them suits us perfectly. Our expectations for perfection and total satisfaction are too high.
As freedom of choice grows, the perfect career, the perfect partner, the perfect schedule or the perfect salad dressing seem more likely to happen. Perhaps they are, but psychologically we’re less likely to be pleased with whatever we do choose, because our satisfaction with what we have shrinks as the number of things we don’t have — or could have — grows.
…The options at mealtime are a microcosm of the lifestyle options available to the ordinary, free Western citizen. We have never been freer to live how we want to live, which is wonderful and empowering but simultaneously taxing and intimidating. I want to take advantage of the freedoms provided by the incredible time we live in without getting paralyzed by too many options and endless unmade decisions.
Speaking of food, it was in his kitchen that Mark Sandman devised the minimalist aesthetic he later made famous in Morphine’s music:
These were simple, common-sense ideas. And Mark liked simple. He once told me that if people really wanted to know about his musical aesthetic, they’d be better off asking him about his cooking techniques. “I’ve applied a lot of that to my music. For example, for years I made myself a red sauce for pasta with oregano, some thyme, some basil, black pepper, salt, some of this, some of that. I thought that’s how you were supposed to make it. Then one day I didn’t put anything in. I just forgot. And it was the best sauce I ever made. That moment right there taught me a lot.”
I agree philosophically, but that’s probably because I’m congenitally disposed toward simplicity anyway. My mental switchboard gets overloaded too quickly for me to indulge in endless customization.
Do or Do Not. There is No “Should”
Bunny Lebowski: Uli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.
The Dude: Ah, that must be exhausting.
Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism. Counter to the upbeat progressivist evangelical atheism of the last decade, Gray provides a powerful argument in favor of human wickedness that’s still consistent with Darwinian naturalism. It leads to passive nihilism: an extremely tempting worldview, even if I think the temptation must ultimately be refused.
The passive nihilist looks at the world with a highly cultivated detachment and finds it meaningless. Rather than trying to act in the world, which is pointless, the passive nihilist withdraws to a safe contemplative distance and cultivates his acute aesthetic sensibility by pursuing the pleasures of poetry, peregrine-watching, or perhaps botany, as was the case with the aged Rousseau (“Botany is the ideal study for the idle, unoccupied solitary,” Jean-Jacques said). Lest it be forgotten, John Stuart Mill also ended up a botanist.
In a world that is rushing to destroy itself through capitalist exploitation or military crusades — two arms of the same Homo rapiens — the passive nihilist resigns himself to a small island where the mystery of existence can be seen for what it is without distilling it into a meaning. The passive nihilist learns to see, to strip away the deadening horror of habitual, human life and inhale the void that lies behind our words.
No, no, no. Acting in the world is not “pointless”. You can’t help but act. Just because an action doesn’t have inherent meaning, or ultimate meaning, doesn’t mean it has absolutely no meaning. As I keep saying, nihilism is the flip side of universalism, an inverted attempt to keep believing in one rule that is true at all times for all people everywhere.
Put it this way: the question is not “Should I act?” or “Should I not act?” The question is, what do you mean by “should”?
Far From the Madding Crowd’s Ignoble Strife
Zuckerman, however, is not a knee-jerk naysayer about all things digital. The director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and cofounder of the international bloggers’ website Global Voices, he is extremely enthusiastic about the potential of using technology to connect people across cultures. He wants the Internet to be an empathy machine. The difference between him and the full-throated apostles of cyber-utopianism is that he does not believe that the online world is foreordained to fulfill this purpose, nor does he naively assume that the outcomes of cross-cultural connections will always be desirable.
Everything depends in the end on whether we can find direct, causal evidence: we need to show that exposure to literature itself makes some sort of positive difference to the people we end up being. That will take a lot of careful and insightful psychological research (try designing an experiment to test the effects of reading “War and Peace,” for example). Meanwhile, most of us will probably soldier on with a positive view of the improving effects of literature, supported by nothing more than an airy bed of sentiment.
The archetypal image of the sage is one of serenity and an almost-otherworldly lack of concern for the mundane obsessions of everyday life. In other words, the accumulation of knowledge and experience, rather than simply being a super-sum of positive integers, tends to produce a state of being that would seem very much at odds with the sort of simplistic, progressive partisan vision of “better” or “nicer” citizens. Knowledge is a double-edged blade that can be used for the same values and desires people have always had; increasingly complex experience isn’t likely to express itself in platitudes.
One Who Glimpsed It and Fled
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble. Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it’s going to come in handy all the time.
Somehow, until I saw Maria Popova’s link, there had been a Watterson-commencement-speech-shaped hole in my experience of which I had been unaware. Glad that’s fixed now.
And Stop Calling Me Shirley
Speaking of nonexistent connexions once again: as a non-academic, an autodidact, and a Bear of Very Average Brain besides, I’m always on the lookout for the givens in an argument, the unfounded and unquestioned assumptions from which the rest of the assertions flow. Like we learned in geometry class, it doesn’t matter how many elaborate steps follow in a proof if your given is flawed. On that note, I can appreciate the usefulness of Daniel Dennett’s little heuristic:
Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!
The Bowel of Minerva
I have no pretensions to any special knowledge, let alone anything like wisdom; I am just some guy, a PERSON IN WORLD looking around and noticing things and saying what I think. If what I say doesn’t reflect your own experience, it’s possible that it isn’t about you. It’s also possible that something that’s not About You might still be of some interest or use. There is even some remote possibility that I am oversimplifying, missing something obvious, or just speaking ex rectum.
I’ve lately been rereading Montaigne, generally considered the first essayist, inspired by Sarah Bakewell’s literary biography “How to Live.” Ms. Bakewell singles out the end of one passage in which Montaigne suggests that being self-aware of your own silliness and vanity at least puts you one up on those who aren’t, then shrugs, “But I don’t know.” It’s that implicit I don’t know at the heart of Montaigne’s essays — his frankness about being a foolish, flawed and biased human being — that she thinks has endeared him to centuries of readers and exasperated more plodding, systematic philosophers.
My least favorite parts of my own writing, the ones that make me cringe to reread, are the parts where I catch myself trying to smush the unwieldy mess of real life into some neatly-shaped conclusion, the sort of thesis statement you were obliged to tack on to essays in high school or the Joycean epiphanies that are de rigueur in apprentice fiction — whenever, in other words, I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about.
A raised glass to both Kreider and my old pal Montaigne. Too many smart people, especially online, are more concerned with winning arguments than actually saying anything insightful or interesting. Punditry, both professional and amateur, has become intolerably boring for me.
I Do Many Things. I Span the Genres.
You can think of Wizpert as an IT help desk for life. The company recruits knowledgeable bloggers, which it calls “Wizperts,” across topics like exercise, health/wellness, and parenting. Advice seekers can connect to Wizperts via their blogs or the service’s website, and most importantly, they can begin a conservation within seconds…Wizpert is a win-win for experts and advice-seekers alike. Bloggers will be able to monetize by offering advice in their free time (Wizpert takes a 25 percent cut), and consumers will be able to instantly get the help they need from approved experts.
Well, I’m not sure about knowledgeable, because they actually sent me an invitation to join. I declined, of course — it wrenches my conscience enough as it is to inflict my thoughts on you all for free; I can’t imagine charging anyone money for the privilege. My girlfriend said this could be the big break I need toward my dream of becoming a cult leader, but I guess I have to face up to the fact that I just don’t have enough ambition for that after all.
Dream Dream, Filling Up an Idle Hour
A few weeks ago, as I was turning on the dishwasher before we left my place, she said something like, “Dishwashers are what’s wrong with the world.” Something about that sounded right. I asked her to explain.
“Life is composed of primarily mundane moments,” she says. “If we don’t learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along.”
We used to have to spend a lot more time and attention maintaining our basic possessions. Dishes had to be washed by hand, stoves had to be stoked, clothes had to be mended, and meals had to be prepared from scratch.
Little was automated or outsourced. All of these routine labors demanded our time, and also our presence and attention. It was normal to have to zoom in and slow down for much of our waking day. We had no choice but to respect that certain daily tasks could not be done without a willing, real-time investment of attention.
There’s some truth in that. Much of life is insignificant mundanity. I certainly prefer a life of relaxed, calm focus to one of frantic busy-ness. But still, I say — and not just because last month’s experience is still fresh in my mind — this strikes me as someone trying too hard. If you were inclined to be uncharitable, you could say it sounds a bit like spiritual one-upsmanship: “I appreciate housework on a deeper level than you do.” It sounds like what Alan Watts described, a hyper-conscious attempt to scrutinize every moment so as not to miss…some vague transcendant something-or-other.
In fact, I say that because I used to be the exact same way. I never had a dishwasher until I moved into this house several years ago. Back in my days of renting a house in the country, I stood at the sink thousands of times with my hands soaking in soap suds and my brain soaking in ideas from books about Buddhism and voluntary simplicity, taking quiet pride in how “mindful” I was being. Watching over my own shoulder, essentially, as if something profound would be revealed in how I scrubbed hardened pasta off a plate.
Like any activity performed deliberately and attentively, it could have a grounding, calming effect, sure. But that could apply to eating a bag of potato chips or picking your nose, too; there’s nothing sacred about chores, unless you’re still harboring the cobwebs of a Protestant work ethic in the corners of your psyche. And it could be argued that the most profound effect washing the dishes had on me was to fulfill my slightly control-freakish need to assert myself as master of my domain and put things in clean, efficient order, thus contributing to further alienation from the natural, messy, chaotic flow of life.
Humans seek out meta-levels of reality. It’s what we do. Perhaps it’s the definition of what it means to be human, to treat every action, every object, as a symbol of something else, as a link in an endless chain of contingent meaning. Seeking “deeper” meaning is an expression of that. Imagining a ceaseless state of love and acceptance which can be attained by concentrating one’s focus and will like a laser to burn through the veil of maya and perceive the pure truth behind is another expression of that. But there’s nothing more true or authentic about washing mass-produced utensils and plates in a sink with store-bought detergent and running water, as opposed to loading them up in the dishwasher, or lugging them down to the creek in a hand-built cart to scrub them with pine needles.
It may have particular benefits. It may contribute to you being a kinder, more thoughtful person. It may help you calm down after a stressful day. But if it doesn’t, you’re not necessarily doing it wrong, either. I don’t doubt that there are many people who feel most alive and perform at their optimal level in a frenetic environment and feel irritation and frustration when forced to move ponderously. I don’t relate to them, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of them, but I wouldn’t imply that they’re lacking some integral part of human nature, either. The contemplative sage is just one of many possible human permutations, by no means the ne plus ultra.
And daydreaming is just as integral a part of what it means to be human as anything else.
If I Quit My Hobby, Then What Would I Do?
What is our work on this earth? Is it a career, profession, busyness pursued for gain, idleness pursued for leisure? Is anyone obliged to pursue anything more than the work of the soul in discovering itself, in harmonizing itself (to God, to Nature, to the universe, to the planet)? Whatever form of work one has, that work must always be the work of enlightenment, or, to use a more modern diction, that of consciousness. What we do to buy food and pay rent is not work but social necessity. That which we do to enrich the soul is our work. Let us pursue it diligently.
Yes, let’s. This reminds me of Bruce Ellis Benson’s excellent book Pious Nietzsche, from which I’ll present one of many equally worthy paragraphs:
To affirm the music of life —to practice music — is to cultivate one’s creative vitality (which Nietzsche often calls the “will to power”). This rather broad conception of “practicing music” may seem strange to us (since we today define “music” in a relatively narrow sense), but it would have been perfectly sensible to Nietzsche, who would have had the ancient Greek sense of mousikê in mind. Practicing music for the ancient Greeks was much more than “playing” or “listening” to music. Indeed, as we will see, it also included any art that developed oneself or cultivated one’s soul.
Listening to music isn’t just entertainment for me; it’s a way of harmonizing myself, as mentioned above. It’s a way of tuning jangled thoughts and turbulent emotions, gaining inspiration, and facilitating restoration. Same goes for writing. What I do here is more like what Buddhists call their “practice”, or what Benson in his book calls askêsis, a spiritual discipline. I’m not persuading anybody or expressing anything important. The goal is merely to become incrementally better at turning vivid perception into clear expression, possibly becoming a mousikos one day.