In the 1960s, two major shifts transformed the right to happiness into the duty of happiness. The first was a shift in the nature of capitalism, which had long revolved around production and the deferral of gratification, but now focused on making us all good consumers. Working no longer sufficed; buying was also necessary for the industrial machine to run at full capacity. To make this shift possible, an ingenious invention had appeared not long before, first in America in the 1930s and then in Europe in the 1950s: credit. In an earlier time, anyone who wanted to buy a car, some furniture, or a house followed a rule that now seems almost unknown: he waited, setting aside his nickels and dimes. But credit changed everything; frustration became intolerable and satisfaction normal; to do without seemed absurd. We would live well in the present and pay back later. Today, we’re all aware of the excesses that resulted from this system, since the financial meltdown in the United States was the direct consequence of too many people living on credit, to the point of borrowing hundreds of times the real value of their possessions.The second shift was the rise of individualism. Since nothing opposed our fulfillment any longer—neither church nor party nor social class—we became solely responsible for what happened to us. It proved an awesome burden: if I don’t feel happy, I can blame no one but myself. So it was no surprise that a vast number of fulfillment industries arose, ranging from cosmetic surgery to diet pills to innumerable styles of therapy, all promising reconciliation with ourselves and full realization of our potential. “Become your own best friend, learn self-esteem, think positive, dare to live in harmony,” we were told by so many self-help books, though their very number suggested that these were not such easy tasks. The idea of fulfillment, though the successor to a more demanding ethic, became a demand itself. The dominant order no longer condemns us to privation; it offers us paths to self-realization with a kind of maternal solicitude.
foolosophy
And I’m Smiling ‘Cause I Know for Me No Bell Could Ever Toll
For all its openness to profundity and creative insight, maybe precisely because of that, idleness is deemed objectionable. Creative insight is so often an implicit questioning of the rationales of the status quo. Idleness wills nothing, espouses no agenda of progress; it proposes the sufficiency of what is. And our aforementioned guardians find this intolerable, a defiant vote against their idea of what should be.…I was delighted recently to open Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and hear him announcing, “In Rome I lived in the grand manner of writers. I basically did nothing all day.” But Dyer seems an exception to me, a survival from another era. We are few of us in Rome, and fewer up for the “grand manner.” Who still idles? Sieving with the mind’s own Google I pull up a few names: the late W. G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson in her reverie-paced scenemaking, Nicholson Baker in The Anthologist…But finally there are few exemplars. Most contemporary prose, I find, agitates; it creates a caffeinated vibration that is all about competing stimuli and the many ways that the world overruns us. Idleness needs atmospheres of indolence to survive. It is an endangered condition that asks for a whole different climate of reading, one that is not about information, or self-betterment, or keeping up with the latest book-club flavor, but exists just for itself, idyllic, intransitive.
Sitting Alone with a Book on My Own
In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.
Hey. HEY. HEY. Some of us don’t want to be seen as normal. Some of us don’t see solitude as akin to power naps, something to make our worker-drone lives even more productive. Some of us would like to preserve solitude as the domain of the eccentric, the socially anxious, and the slightly mad outcasts to keep it from becoming trendy and overrun by day-trippers and weekend warriors looking for an ultra-compact “40 days in the desert” experience that doesn’t require turning off their cellphone. At any rate, this mountaintop is taken. Fuck off.
We Might Never Have Met
There are a number of stories that include Coyote being killed, then jumping over his own corpse three times and rising again. This morning I imagined the coyote on Route 62 waiting impatiently for the traffic to subside so that he could do so without anyone watching. I know better. I’m an empirical materialist and I find immense solace in it. No meaning, no morals, the mere existence of unlikely consciousness in a physical universe a phenomenal stroke of luck that should awe each of us every moment for every moment of our participation in it. I don’t need pretend mythical Coyotes inhabiting my cerebellum. I know they don’t exist and I have chosen to populate my version of the world with them despite that fact.
Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise.But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said that life is like going out on a boat that heads off into the sea and then begins to sink. Yet somehow he managed to find a kind of joy and beauty in that. In fact, it is the precariousness of life that makes beauty and joy possible.
There are times, like last week, when it would possibly be consoling for me to believe in comforting stories about souls, teleology, benevolent destiny, and the like. Loss is much more crushing when you really allow it to be loss without seeking to cushion it with semantics. But by the same token, joys are that much more intense when you realize how precarious they are, how fortunate you are to have experienced them at all. I wouldn’t trade this perspective for anything.
Oh, why not; let me quote from Sam Hamill’s poem A Rose for Solitude again:
And if, as I pass,
I should look you in the eye,
do not be afraid: I want
only to glimpse the emptiness
at the center of your heart,
I want to reach for you
because I know,
as you do,
we might never have met.
Flatliners
Assistant professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale, Lofton sees religious preaching methods in the way Oprah hosts her show, as well as a formulaic, sermon-like approach to every topic — whether it’s healing the wounds of sexual abuse or what new exfoliating cream you should buy. Oh Oprah, who art on television, tell us how to live a good life.…There’s a great book about Oprah by Eva Illouz, “Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,” and Illouz points out something that I dig into, and that is the strange way in which the extremity of human despair — not merely estranged spouses, we’re talking stories of people coming home and seeing that their spouse has murdered all their kids and then themselves — are being dealt with in the same way as these topics that are seemingly shallow. Good glasses for a spring party, best new strategies for boyfriend wear. This exposure of human need at 4 p.m. on a weekday afternoon made me think, “What is this thing?”
When social conservatives talk about restoring the link between sex, monogamy and marriage, they often have these kinds of realities in mind. The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity. Rather, it’s that a high sexual ideal can shape how quickly and casually people pair off, even when they aren’t living up to its exacting demands. The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness — by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.
If people know anything at all of Nietzsche, they probably know that he’s the guy who said God is dead. Often, they read that statement as sounding a jubilant tone, but he was actually expressing trepidation. Are you fully aware of what you’ve lost? Do you recognize what a vacuum you’ve created, and do you have any idea how you’re going to fill it?
Reading the above articles, the theme that caught my attention was something along those lines. What does it mean that our most wrenching grief and most personal problems have become public entertainment, presented on the same level as advertisements for deodorant and cell phone plans? What does it mean that sexuality is largely seen as just another lifestyle accoutrement of no great significance, as opposed to an exclusive symbol of deeper commitment and intimacy? How do we distinguish between the sublime and the mundane now?
I’m not interested in the particulars of either argument, especially in Douthat’s case, disingenuous sumbitch that he often is. No, the takeaway for me is: What does it mean when things that used to be shared only with those closest to you, things that used to define a hierarchy of importance and meaning, are now in the public domain and ubiquitous? What changed? Have we lost anything, and if so, what did we replace it with?
Let It Shatter Your Heart and Then Move On, Move On
Profound losses leave us paralyzed and mute, unable really to comprehend them, still less to speak coherently about them. Yet, eventually, we do speak — we breathe, we sleep, we eat, we go for walks in the sun, we find ourselves laughing with our friends — we marry again (as I have), to our astonishment — as we lose the white-hot flame of the most intransigent grief, and pass into another, less desperate sort of being.
Intellectually, I know it’s true, but it takes so long to feel true. And sometimes, in the worst episodes of grieving, I find myself wishing for that white-hot flame to just completely incinerate me, because nothing else will suffice to express the loss. Surviving certain things seems to make a mockery of them, seems like an insult to their memory.
As Lookers-On Feel Most Delight that Least Perceive a Juggler’s Sleight
Fear has promoted knowledge of men more than love has, for fear wants to divine who the other is, what he can do, what he wants: to deceive oneself in this would be disadvantageous and dangerous. On the other hand, love contains a secret impulse to see as much beauty as possible in the other or to elevate him as high as possible: to deceive oneself here would be a joy and an advantage – and so one does so.
– Nietzsche
I thought of that while reading this from Ed Yong:
Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.She showed that even though people know that they occasionally behave dishonestly, they don’t know that they can convincingly lie to themselves to gloss over these misdeeds. Their scam is so convincing that they don’t know that they’re doing it. As she writes, “Our findings show that people not only fail to judge themselves harshly for unethical behaviour, but can even use the positive results of such behaviour to see themselves as better than ever.”
I like to think of myself as a mostly honest person, to the extent that I would often rather face unpleasant situations than weave a tangled web of deceit to avoid them. But that’s just it; it has just as much to do with the fact that I really prefer my life to be as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible as it does any noble idealism. If I didn’t feel overwhelmed and scattered by having too much to focus on, perhaps I’d get a kick out of lying just to amuse myself with my own cleverness. Of course I’ve lied my ass off in various circumstances, and will probably do so again. But it just so happens that I find it too taxing to have to keep various falsehoods straight in my own head, so I generally prefer to just be up front and deal with whatever results.
In the same way, then, the most efficient and effective liars will be the ones who can mostly convince themselves of their story, enough to not get tripped up by a nervous conscience.
As biological beings who mainly need to feast and fuck (and possibly fight) above all else, it really doesn’t matter if we know ourselves. Plenty of unreflective people do just fine in life when it comes to food and sex and driving off enemies. In fact, you could argue that the examined life, while a goal I personally endorse, can be an onerous burden to impose on oneself for what can often appear to be a negligible payoff. What really matters with regards to advantageousness is how others perceive us, how well we can manipulate them to get what we want and need from them. And sometimes, it might be much more to our advantage to be misleading here, especially if we’re so smooth about it we don’t even consciously notice it anymore.
The Art of Happiness
And the truth about happiness, as Bruckner sees it, is that it’s rarely very effectively pursued. Happiness is really about luck and grace; you can be thankful for happiness, but you can’t manufacture it. In fact, thinking of being happy as the sole aim of life makes happiness less meaningful. “Now that it has become the only horizon of our democratic societies,” Bruckner writes, happiness, “being connected with work, will, and effort… is necessarily a source of anguish.” We work at being happy – and, in working at it, rob ourselves of everything spontaneous and really joyful about happiness.…In fact, many unhappy people lead very valuable lives, and assiduously cultivated happiness is sometimes not particularly valuable. Bruckner’s argument, like his prose, is necessarily over the top, because it has to swim upstream against the unceasing current of books and articles about how we can and must be happier. It boils down, though, to a simple and valuable idea. Suffering is a natural part of life; it counts as living, too.
Nietzsche fan that I am, I of course have an appreciation for the power and importance of the irrational, frightening and unpleasant aspects of existence. You don’t have to romanticize sadness and suffering, though, in order to recognize that we do tend to have an unhealthy fixation on the idea that life should be a linear path of endless improvement. There must be some ebb for there to be any flow. (I think that was Lao Tzu. Or maybe The Sphinx.)
Anyway. There’s a certain type of happiness that comes from comfort and predictability; maybe we can call that contentedness. But there’s also a type that depends on novelty, a fresh feeling of surprise that invigorates us and makes everything old seem new again. Sometimes a novel experience can deepen into a contented one, but sometimes people can become addicted to the high of novelty, fixating on the object that initially provides it, only to cast it aside when the thrill wears off. The line between yearning and regretting is so ultra-thin, it seems; we’re either slightly unhappy because we don’t have something we think we want, or we’re slightly disappointed because it didn’t turn out to be as potent or lasting as we hoped it would. I don’t know if it’s even possible to perfectly balance on that line.
A perceptive friend once noted to me that so often, we become attached to objects, people, and experiences, forgetting that we don’t necessarily want them, we want the way they make (or made) us feel. In our complacency, we expect happiness to come from them, but much of our happiness is in what we bring to them.
One of the functions of art is to take aspects of life that we ordinarily overlook or dismiss and delineate them in such a way as to draw out their beauty and significance. If we can train ourselves to become artists in our own lives, to approach our everyday existence with an eye for finding beauty and joy in the most routine settings, we might find that the effort itself uncovers a lot of happiness we never even knew was there.
In this Ghost Town You Never Know What You’ll See When the Sun Goes Down
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Meditations and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, which is why they work. In good spirits, some love themselves and some love others and some love work and some love God: any of these passions can furnish that vital sense of purpose that is the opposite of depression.…It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems while you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness as you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand to the floor. “We find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we had anticipated,” Schopenhauer wrote. “We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”
Is That Grass Just Greener ‘Cause It’s Fake?
So you can scoff and snicker all you like at the shaggy, hangdog 27-year-old next door dressed in a baggy college sweatshirt and cargo shorts, taking empty pizza boxes and beer bottles to the dumpster. He could be a loser just trying to extend his adolescence indefinitely—or he might just be getting ready to change the world with what he creates in his unkempt guy lair.
Or, or, you know, hear me out here, I know this might sound crazy, he could just be content with living a nondescript life of simple pleasures, having seen plenty of reasons in his 27 years to doubt that marriage, parenting and mortgages are really all that. No, you’re right, that does sound crazy. Let’s just reheat some leftovers from Atlas Shrugged and justify his existence by the tiny fraction of a chance that he might come up with some world-shaking invention.
A Long Time Ago I Never Knew Myself
Grunge set me off on a journey I’m still on. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and their peers used rock stardom as a vehicle for exposing gullible teenagers like me to parts of life that were previously obscured or hidden from mainstream view. Records, movies, books, ideas—all it took was a casual reference to something you’d never heard of an in interview or an album’s liner notes to point you toward another avenue to explore, which then led to more avenues. These bands don’t matter? My God, if you were like me, they gave you the world.This music changed me. It was important to me. I guess it always will be.
I have a very vivid memory of sitting at my high school graduation, staring at all the caps and tassels in front of me, thinking about all my peers and their talk over the previous weeks about their futures. They seemed so sure of themselves, sure of why they were going to college and sure of what they would do with the education they got there. What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I have that sort of self-assurance, or at the very least, why couldn’t I fake it?
There was one small kernel of an idea in my head that alleviated the worst of the anxiety, though. I was already starting to tell people that I wanted to be a musician.
Just a couple years earlier, though, I didn’t even have that. I was an average student, one of those blessed/cursed with so much “potential”, if only I would “apply myself”. Those Bs and Cs could so easily turn into As and Bs if only I would put in that little extra effort. But I wasn’t terribly interested in most of what was being taught, and as I got into the high school years, those Bs and Cs started occasionally turning into Ds and Fs, mostly when it came to post-algebra math.
It became a ritual almost every nine weeks, the “family meeting”, which essentially meant a lecture from my dad about the latest report card while my mom tried to stake out some meaningless middle ground, pleasing no one. He was well-educated and successful in two different lines of work, and impressed repeatedly upon me the need to start thinking seriously about my future and the need to start preparing for it immediately. Get those grades up. Get involved in some extracurricular activities; colleges like to see someone who looks “well-rounded”. You’re isolated from your peers. You’re isolated from your teammates. You don’t want to end up with no money and no options when you’re older, do you? Do you have any ideas of what you want to do with your life? Once, when I was maybe about fifteen or sixteen, I remember staring at a spot on the table in front of me and saying in a small voice that all I really knew that I loved doing was listening to music. His response was to start talking about the sort of work you can do within the record industry. Office-related work, which had nothing to do with what I was saying at all. At one point, he talked about sending me to military school with the idea that the stricter regimen might keep my mind from wandering. For a kid who found ordinary school brutal enough, this was the closest thing to hell I could imagine. I remember going up to my room, digging out the saddest song I knew at that point to listen to repeatedly, and crying myself to sleep.
I thought about suicide a lot those days.
So sick of not fitting in, so sick of wondering why I couldn’t fit in, so sick of just living in constant fear of everything. I had shoplifted a bottle of sleeping pills at one point, which I kept hidden in my room. Just knowing it was there was a strange comfort, knowing I had a clear way out if things ever got too bad, and luckily, I never reached the limits of my endurance.
It almost seems quaint now, thinking back to how easy it was to feel so isolated in those pre-Internet days. Adolescents have always felt that way and still do, of course, but I think there was a slightly heavier burden to bear when, for many of us, there was really no way to find out about other people, other ways of thinking and acting. We didn’t even have cable TV at the time. If you didn’t fit in with the people around you, that was your problem. You knew the kids you went to school with, and that was pretty much it. And I didn’t care to know many of them. On graduation night, I got my diploma, walked back into the school to return my cap and gown, stood around for a minute in the cafeteria watching them all cheer and slap each other on the back, and thought to myself, Why am I still standing here? I don’t give a fuck about any of these people. I walked on out and went home. I’ve never seen most of them since.
I listened to a lot of heavy metal at the time, and Metallica was a particularly valuable lifeline for me. I had started letting my hair grow and getting tattoos. I was playing drums at the time, and corralling a couple friends to play other instruments. But the year after I left school, there was a video on TV from a band called Nirvana.
I’m not going to try to outline everything significant about that fact; Hyden has spent ten installments going over the same topic and still had to leave a ton of stuff out. For me, the important thing was I finally had a template for a new way to live in what the media would begin referring to as grunge. Here, in magazines and on MTV, were people who looked like me while embodying a passion that I never allowed myself to acknowledge, let alone express. Here were people who talked about literature and poetry in interviews and made it sound fascinating. Here were people who made an example of how to live in a way that didn’t embrace the mindless hedonism of typical L.A. rock music, or the empty, acquisitive values of society in general. How to live — the question I had been trying to answer for myself without even knowing how to ask it. I read William Burroughs because Kurt Cobain talked about him. I read Charles Bukowski because the Red Hot Chili Peppers mentioned him in a song. I heard Henry Rollins talk about reinventing himself from a scared, weak little kid into a hardcore punk legend with the help of some philosopher named Nietzsche. I had a brief handwritten-letter correspondence with Otis from Animal Bag. I could go on for hours. Like Hyden said, it only took the mildest of references to send me off on another ravenous search for more knowledge and experience to add to my expanding worldview, and the search itself was intoxicating.
One day, I came down the stairs softly and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen, unaware of my presence. My dad was telling my mom about this regrettable path I had taken, saying that as far as he could see, I had doomed myself to a subpar life of subsistence wages. No decent woman would ever be interested in me, given the way I looked. He felt that he had done all he could, and was resigned to having to wash his hands of whatever I became. My mom was agreeable as always. I stood there for a moment thinking, and then continued on my way out the door. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own from then on.
I spent the next ten years or so focused on writing and recording music, until developing RA. By then, I had given up on the idea of making a living at music anyway, but I didn’t need that fantasy anymore. I had made a life out of it. I gave it my heart, it gave me the world. I’ll always be grateful.
Poking at the Giant Eyes of Ancient Gods
But up to now the moral law has been supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not want to actually impose this law upon oneself, one wanted to take it from somewhere or discover it somewhere or have it commanded to one from somewhere.– Nietzsche
In conversation with Shanna the other day, the topic of Carl Jung’s work came up. I casually mentioned that I wasn’t much of a fan of his (or of his follower Joseph Campbell). Impudent as always, she wanted to know what exactly I didn’t like about him. Grumbling and grousing at having my authoritative pronouncements questioned, I named a few things. But while looking for a remembered citation on Wikipedia, I saw a brief paragraph that largely encapsulated my answer for me:
Jung’s work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly. Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our well-being.
Achoo! *Sniff* Sorry, Plato’s overpowering cologne always makes me sneeze.
I had an elderly neighbor once who constantly urged me to read Campbell, and when I did, I realized why she was always giving me a hard time for supposedly failing to fulfill my talent as a writer or musician. To her, I was being a petulant acorn. The Little Engine That Wouldn’t. I had been given this gift, didn’t I see, and I was being dishonest to myself and depriving the universal spirit of my contribution to the whole by refusing to see how much I could maximize my potential. I knew she meant well, but it was hard not to be offended by what struck me as a slightly arrogant position. Who exactly was she to tell me what I should be doing with my life? Just because she thought it was a “waste” to live a nondescript life in a small town with my girlfriend and her kid, it was now a universal edict? Did I get any say in what I wanted to make of my life and how I wanted to arrange the various components in order of importance? I didn’t want to be a Hero; I just wanted to be a cipher, to live unseen and enjoy my ordinary life.
This is what I don’t like about Jung, or Plato, or anybody who cares more about generalizations over particulars, composites over individuals. I don’t understand this idea that the greatest thing, the ultimate achievement, is to submerge your identity in some oceanic whole. It makes me think I’m listening to moths rhapsodizing about the flame. I know that this limited perspective that we call our individual identity has no permanent, underlying essence to it, but I love it all the same.
And I don’t understand this urge to shrug off the yoke of responsibility for what we do with our lives and seek to fall into some preordained pattern, some preexisting script, where we just have to show up and let destiny take care of the rest. Well, actually, I suppose I understand it, but I don’t respect it. You’re not in sole control of your life, of course, but you are in charge of deciding what constitutes living well, and doing your best to embody it.
There is no moral imperative here. Your life is yours to fulfill or waste as you see fit. Sometimes I think we act like we’re driving cars with no brakes; we only ever stop mindlessly accelerating when we hit something. But not every dream is obligated to become a goal. Not every talent is destined to lead to riches and recognition. And abstention can be just as much evidence of wisdom and self-mastery as failure of nerve.
Eyes of Confusion Looking for a String
The moral of these philosophical biographies is therefore neither simple nor uniformly edifying. For anyone hoping for happiness, or political wisdom, or salvation, philosophical self-examination seems in practice to have led to self-doubt as often as self-trust, to misery as often as joy, to reckless public acts as often as prudent political conduct, and to moments of self-inflicted torment as often as moments of saving grace.
I found myself thinking, as I read his book, about this gap between theory and practice and wondering if maybe the problem is in the folly of ever thinking that the raging floodwaters of life can be tamed and neatly channeled by rational principles in the first place. Socrates/Plato was wrong about many things; what if the idea of intellectual consistency being a prize virtue is another? What if the attempt to define people by unbending logical principles is just as misguided and doomed to failure as the search for some mysterious essence called the soul to define them by? What if the True, the Good, and the Beautiful do not necessarily harmonically converge?
Imagine my chagrin, a few paragraphs later, to find Rousseau, one of my least favorite philosophers, forcing me to grudgingly tip my hat to him:
When Montaigne tried, and failed, to emulate the stoic composure of Seneca, and chose instead to describe himself as he really was in his Essays, he was finally able to step outside the tradition of moral perfectionism that had linked the philosophical ideals of Socrates and Plato to those articulated by Seneca and Augustine. And when Rousseau subsequently, and even more spectacularly, proved unable to live up consistently to his own daunting standard of virtuous conduct, he was unafraid to draw one possible conclusion: “You want people always to be consistent”—the classical idea of rational unity. “I doubt that is possible for man; but what is possible for him is always to be true: that is what I mean to try to be.”
In Your Eyes
For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
– Rilke
I’ve never found Descartes terribly interesting, but I read something last night that I liked: in a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, he mentioned having begun trying to live his life under the motto, “To live well, you must live unseen.” Of course, having seen the persecution of Galileo and the burning at the stake of more than a few philosophers and heretics, he could have very well meant that to live at all, you must avoid the wrathful attention of the Church. But still, my thought was wow, how very Taoist of him!
The people of the world excitedly run about as if they were going to miss the yearly, royal, sacrificial feast, or as if they were going to be the last one to climb a high tower on a beautiful spring day.
I alone remain quiet and indifferent.
I anchor my being to that which existed before Heaven and Earth were formed.
I alone am innocent and unknowing, like a newborn babe.
Unoccupied by worldly cares, I move forward to nowhere.
The people of the world have more than enough.
I alone appear to have nothing.
The people of the world appear shrewd and wise.
I alone look foolish.
I like to be forgotten by the world and left alone.
It also occurred to me that his motto was a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to get at in this post. Being “seen” can be a description of the ways in which our identities are fixed and reinforced in the sight of others. For people who think of philosophy not as scholarly hair-splitting over the ultimate nature of things, but as the search for how to live well, how to best pursue truth and integrity, the weight and pressure of other people’s attention can be a hindrance, trapping us in egotistic responses to their expectations.
Animae Magnae Prodigus
In his book Examined Lives, James Miller closed his chapter on Socrates with a quotation from Nietzsche I don’t recall ever seeing before:
I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible.
It reminded me of a passage from Five Faces of Modernity, by Matei Calinescu:
Even enthusiastic defenders of utopia like Ernst Bloch speak of the “melancholy of fulfillment” and stress the importance of the “not-yet” in the vision of the future. But to what extent is a consistent philosophy of the “not-yet” possible nowadays? Unfortunately, the modern utopist cannot afford to follow Lessing, who in his famous apologue imagined himself choosing, at God’s invitation, between all Truth and just the active search for Truth (with the condition of never finding it). It was not too difficult for Lessing to make up his mind, and without hesitating, take the active, though endless, search—for “absolute truth belongs to Thee alone,” he told God. Lessing’s way of putting the problem would hardly make sense in a world where God—even as an abstraction or working hypothesis—is dead and everybody knows it. The heroic optimism of infinite search justified by the sheer greatness of a transcendent goal has been lost by modernity. The goals of the modern utopist are supposedly immanent and within reach, and to postpone attaining them would be irresponsible, despite the “melancholy of fulfillment.”
But what if the search leads you to the realization that there is no singular, absolute Truth good for all people at all times, only a multiplicity of truths, recurring in different guises in a cycle of forgetting and rediscovery? What if our misguided notions of final resolutions in time are what cause the melancholy of fulfillment? What if our valuing of “consistency” is just another manifestation of our strange yearning for essence, for permanent, fixed identity?
The Whole Goddamn World Is Riding on Words for Thousands of Years
We get closer, therefore, to the true wickedness of Melville’s book, when we see this reversal. What Ahab hates most thoroughly is the idea that the universe might be inscrutable to the last; that ultimately there might be “naught beyond.” He therefore holds desperately and passionately to the idea that there is an ultimate, final, and universal truth about how things are; that there is, in other words, a traditional kind of monotheistic God. This misguided passion for monotheism, the book reveals, is the most dangerous and deadly kind there is. Melville’s genuine wickedness, in other words, consists in his portrayal of Ahab’s monomaniacal monotheism as itself the incarnation of what the universe most abhors.
…Since Karl Jaspers’s 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History, historians and sociologists have emphasized a cross-cultural turn in the first millennium BC that Jaspers called the Axial Revolution. This revolution introduced the idea— through Plato’s metaphysical philosophy, the Buddha’s conception of Nirvana, and various religious notions of Eternal Life—that there is a good beyond what we can find in the everyday conception of human flourishing; that there is a transcendent good that is the nature of the Divine. As Charles Taylor explains it:The Axial Revolution tended to place the Divine on the side of the ultimate good; while at the same time redefining this as something which goes beyond what is understood as ordinary human flourishing: Nirvana, Eternal Life.
It is precisely this conception of “going beyond” that Melville’s faceless whale encourages us to resist. Rather than searching for some reasoning things behind the mask as Ahab insists on doing, Ishmael thinks we should nurture the moods of everyday existence—the mood of the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, and any others we can learn about or discover—for the meanings they already offer.
I’ve never read Moby Dick, but Dreyfus and Kelly’s book makes me want to.
What they’re saying is simple: our lives are full of meaning, just as they are. But to echo Alfred North Whitehead (“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”) and Nietzsche (“Christianity is Platonism for “the people”), we’ve been trained by two thousand years of history to see everything around us as inherently meaningless; only things that last forever without changing have any true substance or meaning. And since nothing actually does that…
The thing that really staggers me is thinking about how we really have no idea what we even mean by desiring that the things we love should last forever. I mean it quite literally: we’re not even capable of wrapping our minds around the concept of such an existence, yet we ruin our lives worrying about the possibility of not attaining it. What would it even mean to exist as human beings unbound by time? What need would there ever be to act? If you could get what you think you want, to have eternal life in something like your individual form, don’t you realize that the lack of temporal constraints would render your “life” utterly meaningless? You could take a twenty-trillion year nap in heaven, wake up, and still have the exact same neverendingness stretching out before you. As Alan Watts said, having “all the time you want” is one thing; having, literally, “time without end” is another. The latter would actually be much more like what we call hell, a nihilistic prison that would drive us mad. We couldn’t possibly exist in such a state with our identities as we understand them. We need the boundaries of time, loss and death to give our lives meaning. With no possibility of change, nothing flowing to break up the stagnation, life would lose everything worthwhile about it.
Earlier in the book, they talk about Dante’s Divine Comedy, where his impoverished vision of paradise is where you spend eternity “contemplating the radiance of God”, a radiance that obliterates your identity and former, earthly passions like so many moths in a giant flame. Again, this sounds like pure hell. If people weren’t so utterly ignorant about what they’re asking for, you’d have to conclude they’re utterly insane for wanting it. And for this, people have spent centuries denigrating the very things that make life worth living. What a tragedy.