The Road Not Taken

One of my favorite thinkers of the 20th century, Terence McKenna, said that the world is similar to a novel, and that problem most people have in navigating their life is that they think the point of life is to become the main character of the novel. McKenna says that this is the incorrect attitude to have towards life, and that one must become the author of the novel of their life, not a main character. I think this is a good analogy to make sense of Sartre’s ‘Bad Faith.’ 

If one lives as if they are a character in a script, they are playing a role that is prescribed  for them, and they are pretending that they don’t have the freedom to create a new script. If, on the other hand, one lives as if they are the author of the script of life, you are free to create your life as you see fit, rather than imagine that you have to play some role drawn out by someone else. 

This analogy is easy to understand from Sartre’s example of the waiter. In his example, the waiter is performing the role of the waiter as if it something other than himself, like an automaton that has been programmed to act in a certain way. In this sense, he is playing a character that he believes has already been prescribed and that he must play the part of. He believes he has no choice. However, as Sartre pointed out, his decision to accept the prescribed role of the waiter is a choice that he is making freely. It is entirely within his power at every single moment to play a different role, and author a new script for himself. His rigid display of the waiter’s behavior, alludes to the fact that the waiter is subtly aware of this distinction, and that he is denying his ability to freely make the choice that he really desires to make. Or, as McKenna might have put it, the waiter is denying his freedom to create his own story by choosing to accept a story written by someone else. 

I recently read an article written by a nurse that specializes in palliative care. In the article she expounded on five common things dying people had regrets about. One of most common regrets was that the dying wished they had lived the life they wanted to live, rather than the one someone else wanted them to live. I think this is important, and supports both Sartre’s and McKenna’s idea that we must take more responsibility in the direction of our lives, and resist the temptation to take an easier path that has already been laid out by someone else. It is quite telling that many people regret not asserting their ‘dasein’ upon the world, and timidly accepting a life that their parents, friends, lover or society feels that they should have lived. 

Anecdotally, I have had similar experiences. As I’ve lived out my 31 years on this planet, I’ve been most happy when I’ve been doing the things I wanted to do, rather than doing the things that my parents felt I should be doing, or the things that society has told me is important in leading a good life. This wisdom is found throughout others thoughts and writings, as in Robert Frosts’ ‘The Road not Taken’:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Therefore, in order to avoid one of the common regrets people have at their deathbed, it is important for us to examine our paths in life, and choose the one less traveled, rather than the one that everyone else has been following blindly because that is what everyone else is doing. All you are doing in that case is following the path of least resistance, and all of us already know where those paths lead. We must forge new paths in order to discover something new about ourselves and the world we inhabit. 

Sartre on Emotions

This week we discussed Sartre and I wanted to focus mainly on his fox and the grapes story taken from Aesop’s fables. In the story, the fox comes across some grapes that he initially desires, but upon finding that they are out of his reach, decides that they are too sour anyway. Sartre uses this fable to explain his theory on emotions, and says that the fox is making an excuse to avoid action and responsibility because it is not the grape’s chemistry that has changed; the flavor of the grape didn’t change between the time the fox decided he wanted the grape and after he realized they were out of reach. The only thing that changed is the Fox’s attitude toward the grape.

The problem I have with Sartre’s analysis isn’t that the Fox’s attitude is what has changed, that I am in full agreement with, however I cannot agree that our emotions are a way for us to flee from freedom. The fox might have been deluding himself about the real reason he wasn’t devouring the grapes, but to say that he has fled from freedom or responsibility is a bit of a stretch. Had he assumed from then on that all grapes were sour because of his one bad experience with them, then perhaps you could say he was fleeing from freedom and/or responsibility. He would have been taking an extremely lazy route by doing that, basing his reality of the world on narrow ranges of experience and perception, instead of seeking out for himself whether or not his experience was really true. He would have become content with his conception of himself and reality (and his relationship to that reality). The Rabbi Menacham Mendel said of contentment with being:

"Just as it is the way of an ape to imitate humans, so too, a person, when he has become old, imitates himself, and does what was his manner previously. In other words, most of us, at some point in life, either consciously or not, become satisfied with who we are and what we've become. As such, we cease to strive toward attaining greater spiritual heights. We are content to live out our remaining days as a mere imitation of ourselves!”

When I injured my elbow because I was pushing the envelope while lifting heavy weights I said-- oh well, it’s probably not good for me anyway. And 3 and a half years later it is largely true. I’ve done only calisthenics since and I’m a lot lighter, leaner and my joints don’t ache. So while the initial response would have been seen as making an excuse by Sartre, sometimes excuses turn out to be something good later on as life unfolds. Had I refused to accept defeat and continued on, I would have likely caused serious injury to my elbow, and one that required major surgery, a cost I cannot afford. An excuse is just a response to a situation, same as any other, and it is neither good or bad. In this specific instance, the excuse was the appropriate response.

I think it is less important to place emphasis on excuses and more important to place emphasis on moralizing, especially in regards to other people. Where we really get into trouble in this culture is when any of us starts comparing ourself too much other people, which is a problem because that is the basic premise of our culture. This kind of competitive narrative we’ve framed for ourselves has led to whole lot of damn moralizing. And excuses. And that is when excuses reallllyyy become a problem, when used in conjunction with moralizing. For instance whenever an overly religious person blames the problems of the world on atheists, gays and baby killers, they are making excuses while simultaneously moralizing. This combination of the two is what leads people to oppress each other, which leads to immense amounts of suffering. I don’t think any of us want to be oppressed or to suffer needlessly.

(Semi-quick side note: While I realize that saying that weights weren’t good for me could be seen as moralizing, in this case it’s not moralizing because it really does lessen quality of life more than it adds to it. Maybe a similar comparison might be smoking tobacco vs not smoking. If looked at over a long enough span of time, it’s pretty easy to argue that tobacco is bad for you considering you can similar stress relief benefits from other activities, without all health risks. I’d be moralizing if I tried to create laws banning people from lifting heavy weights. I can share my experience and hope that it might lead a person to a better decision, but ultimately I can only be responsible for my own decision.)

I think similarly to Sartre when he said that man ought to ask himself the following, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?" Similarly, I believe that we must consider each and every one of our decisions from the perspective of the other. We must try to imagine how the actions of our decisions would affect me/I if the roles were reversed and the other was on the delivering end of the decision and me/I was on the receiving. And not just a singular other, an other of our particular liking, because that is just more moralizing. Everyone must be allowed.

Heidegger, death and our renewal

My apologies for the late post.

This week we covered Heidegger, especially his views on death. I have decided to take some time discussing a few things I think our society struggles with when it comes to death, and why it leads to problems. 

Immortality has been something that has fascinated westerners for hundreds of years. One of Columbus’ hopes was to find the infamous fountain of youth that promised eternal life. Through immortality, empires like Spain could ensure that their leaders could go on leading the ignorant masses forever. Imagine the feats great men could achieve if only they were given more time! Or so we think.

Though we no longer believe in mythical fountains of youth, we have kept the dream of immortality alive through ideas like cyber-technology, advances in medicine and even storing our consciousness, so that it might be transferred to another body or maybe even a machine. (Of course we’d have to find the neural correlates of consciousness in order for the last one to work.) 

Though I have no longing for death, I have always felt that our obsession with immortality and our cultural refusal to accept the cyclicality of the world, and the absolute necessity of death. Even stars die! What makes us think that we are meant to go on and on forever? What would that even mean? To go on and on without end? Think about it. Reallllllyyyy think about it. I think if anyone spends enough time thinking about immortality, it will lose a good deal of its luster. Because it is only through death that we get renewal. Life becomes stagnant, rooted in its old ways of doing things. Death shakes things up, and allows for novelty to arise, something new and interesting, a fresh take on the world. If death were eliminated, evolution would be impossible. And so would life.

And yet we ignore death, pretend that it isn’t there, except when tragedy strikes. When grandma or grandpa are dying, we like to tell them that they aren’t, and that things will be okay and they’ll get to go home soon. You’ll see! Soon they’ll be on the porch reading their favorite newspaper, with their morning cup of coffee and all this horrible hospital and sickness business will be behind us. And so we never come to terms with our death. We pretend that life is a static image, something like polaroid, and if we hold onto that image hard enough, it will remain burned into space. But it isn’t so. Life is in constant motion, and so is death. Neither is a permanent state of things, they are each dependent upon the other. They are like two sides of the same coin, which are dependent upon the other to form the coin. 

I think that this whole relationship we have with death is one of the bigger problems plaguing our society. We worship youth and shun the elderly, who are virtual outcasts. Once they reach an age we no longer wish to be exposed to or deal with, we shove them off onto someone else by putting them into assisted living facilities. And so they’re insecure, and suspicious of society. They are the ultimate outsiders, no longer of any use to society. Which is why you see the elderly move to places like Sun City, and fight tax codes that make them pay for schools. The way they see it, since society no longer wants anything to do with them, why should they have to continue supporting it. It’s a bad argument, since they benefited from free schooling and other public services, however it’s not difficult to see where they are coming from. 

Therefore I think it is important that we come to grips with death and do a better job incorporating it into our culture. It does us no good to continue pretending that life is good and death is bad; and that life is something we should focus on prolonging indefinitely, and death is something to be avoided at all costs. This attitude is, in my opinion, decidedly anti-life because it is only through acceptance of a finality of your life and this experience that it has any kind of meaning (which is what you make of it). If this life went on indefinitely, what would you do with it? How would you really live if you KNEW you could not die? Sayings like carpe diem would go entirely out the window. 

So let us accept death as a necessity of life, and perhaps through our acceptance of death we can begin anew, creating a world full of love for life, because we finally understand how beautiful and sacred it really is.

Nietzsche and Darwin

This week we discussed Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, with a heavy emphasis on his master and slave morality and his Will to Power. I unfortunately missed the discussion on eternal recurrence. My apologies to the second group! 

My biggest issue with Nietzsche's master and slave morality is that it is an incredibly simple way of trying to explain an incredibly complex issue, human nature. Almost all of our understanding of human behavior (both from a micro and macro perspective) has come since Nietzsche's death. Therefore it makes little sense to take his master and slave morality very seriously in the modern world. While I do agree that these world views he introduces have manifested within humans throughout history, especially in the Western world (which is the direction of his criticism), however to say that this struggle is inherent in all humans couldn't be a bigger distortion of reality. This idea is what psychologists call essentialism, and it has been shown to be without evidence. There is nothing in the human personality that is essential, all behavior (and morality) manifests from a complex interaction of nature and nurture (and continues through life until death). We don't carry within us a master or slave morality, these simply manifest in certain kinds of societies; this dualistic moral code Nietzsche proposes usually only manifests itself when you have distinctly hierarchical societies, with the haves and the have nots (or bourgeois and proletariat). 

As Nietzsche recognized, in hierarchical societies, those in power have more say over what goes and what doesn't. And as he also recognized, those that are restricted from accessing or acquiring the ideals put forth by those in power have to create a new set of ideals for themselves. Humans are social creatures, and there is nothing we fear more (perhaps even more than death) than social exclusion. Put a prisoner in an isolated cell, away from all the other criminals and he goes crazy. He demands to be released back into society (the prison) because he cannot stand to feel ostracized, to feel like he doesn't belong. In this case it isn't the general population that is ostracizing him, but the power structures put in place, however it makes little difference to the person in isolation. 

I think this is a good point to stop and talk about Will to Power, so I can support my argument that it is anti-darwinian in nature. According to Darwin, a species goal is survival and according to Nietzsche it is power. These are very obviously different goals. To say that Nietzsche shared Darwin’s view of how evolution occurred would be to completely ignore Nietzsche’s idea of Will to Power, which is a core tenant in his philosophy. One cannot have both goals of survival and will to power, because there are instants where asserting your will might lead to your death. Nietzsche’s belief that the main point of life isn’t a will to live but a will to power is, at its core, anti-Darwinian. I find Nietzsche’s Will to Power argument a bit lacking. It explains some human behavior, if rather narrowly, however it doesn’t really apply to the rest of the universe. There are many things nature that give away their power in order to gain survival advantages. Some things work in concert together and others against each other. My gut flora isn’t trying to dominate me, or assert its will, it is working in unison with my digestive tract in order that it may survive and have an environment in which it might thrive. And if, as Nietzsche says, there are many truths and thus no singular truth, then I see life itself as the point (life being open-ended, power ascribing some kind of purpose; aka moralizing - hence my statement that it is a contradiction of his philosophy on truth) and I’ll have to side with Darwin.

I did want to share something I found online. It is from a later work of Nietzsche, found in one of his notebooks. It is from notes within a section for a book titled The Way to Wisdom--Hints for an Overcoming of Morality. 

"The first stage. To honor (and obey and learn) better than anyone. To gather all that is honorable in oneself, and let it conflict with oneself. To bear all that is heavy. Asceticism of the spirit--bravery, time of community.

The second stage. To break the adoring heart (when one is captivated most). The free spirit. Independence. Time of the desert. Criticism of all that is honored (idealization of the non-honored), attempt at inverted valuations.

The third stage.  Great decision, whether one is capable of a positive attitude, of affirmation. No longer any God, any man above me! The instinct of the creator who knows what he is creating. The great responsibility and the innocence. In order to enjoy a single thing, one has to affirm everything. Give oneself the right to act." 

Nietzsche associates the first stage with overcoming little evil inclinations, the second stage with overcoming the good inclinations as well, and the third stage with being beyond good and evil. He adds that the third stage is for the very few; most people perish in the second stage. 

This is comparable to Zen, though Zen would say it is pointless to try to be better than anyone at anything since Zen embraces the interdependence of everything in the world. In this light, self implies other. So how can you be better than yourself? The progression does seem to coincide very well with the eastern idea of non-duality (which being beyond good and evil implies). 

Nietzsche on Truth

Once again, I'd like to start my post off with an excerpt from an Alan Watts lecture. I hope some of you are finding his insights as powerful as I have.

It has been an interesting experience for me delving into Nietzsche. While I had read a little of Nietzsche previous to taking this class, my exposure to him was rather limited. I purchased a book over the summer that was about his basic philosophical ideas, but haven’t gotten around to reading it.

What I find most interesting about Nietzsche is that his conclusions are essentially a mirror of Taoist or Zen philosophy about life: especially Nietzsche’s conclusions that the world is just there (and life as well) and that it doesn’t make any sense to moralize and try to create an image of it that fits your desires. It is best to just leave it as it is and enjoy it. I think this is important because even though we may be free to move about and make decisions in the world, our power over it is fairly limited from the perspective of an individual, which we imagine ourselves to be. We have control over many of our urges and desires, and very little else. To spend all of our time trying to make the world into something it is not, simply to appease a notion we have about some transcendent experience that life is moving towards, is a complete waste of time. As Nietzsche points out, there is no such thing as absolute spirituality or pure reason, so it makes little sense to make your life a pursuit of it. Lao-Tzu put it as so:

“When the great Tao is abandoned, 

charity and righteousness appear. 

When intellectualism arises, 

hypocrisy is close behind.”

By attempting to make any way superior to another, you automatically have to deal with its opposite. Taoists have understood this concept for a millennia, and it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, that Westerners really started to understand what this really means. You cannot understand the world through reason, because reason is ultimately self-referential. It cannot conceive a reality outside of the one it perceives. However in order to understand a transcendent reality (where reason ultimately originates), conceiving of this transcendent reality is exactly what one must do. And this is no different than what our culture has decided is important in pursuing something like capital accumulation. We are told from a young age that in order to be happy and find our place in the world, we must go out and make our mark upon it. We must work very hard, go to college and make lots of money. We must compete with our fellow man because our competing with each other is going to bring happiness to everyone. Of course this has been a dreadful hoax, because it's all wretch and no vomit, it never gets there. Happiness is always a relative and transitory experience and there is no great ladder that one must climb to reach the “highest point” of happiness. It isn’t like a game of pingpong, where we are to rack up the highest score. Life just is. Adding anything else to life is simply moralizing, creating something imaginary. You are creating a myth. 

Now of course there is nothing inherently wrong in myth creation, as long as one is honest about what is actually occurring. If you are going around making up all kinds of myths about the world, but have convinced yourself that it is truth, and perhaps are attempting to convert everyone to your truth, and that it is the real and only truth, then we have a problem. I think that is one of the bigger issues in the metaphysical debate today; all sides seem to know that they are true. And as Nietzsche said, convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. 

So let us not be so serious in our convictions, and bask in our collective ignorance about the nature of the world. Each of us shares this and if we would but accept it, I truly believe the world would change overnight; wars, famines and oppression would virtually disappear. Wouldn’t that be a nice experience.

Kierkegaard and Zen

While Kierkegaard wasn’t a Daoist or a Buddhist, his Philosophy shares many similarities to them. At the beginning of the section, “On Becoming a Christian” in our book on page 24 Kierkegaard says, “What now is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal world has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born, has grown up, and so forth, has come into being just like any other individual human being, quite distinguishable from other human beings....” and about halfway down the page, “The almost probable: that he can almost know, or as good as know, to a greater degree and exceedingly almost know--but believe it, that is impossible, for the absurd is precisely the object of faith, and only that can be believed.” 

This view of god, of reality, is precisely the same kind of view Taoist or Zen Buddhists hold. Consider the first lines of the Tao Te Ching (English and Feng translation), “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”

How similar they are! According Kierkegaard, the idea that God can be known, can be qualified as a kind of being similar to man, as absolutely ridiculous. The moment you try to pick apart what God is, it stops being God. It requires wholeness and the only way to achieve that is through faith. Contrasted with the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, this idea is indistinguishable from it; from the absurdity of knowing God, to the fruitlessness in trying to come up with terms to define God (you will end up with ten thousand things). 

However, Kierkegaard falls victim to silly things like giving god a sex (he calls God a he), and spends far too much time referring to God as a being separate from us, . This is completely contrary to how Taoist and Zen Buddhists view the nameless source from which we all come. A Taoist would never ascribe a sex or anything remotely relating to a form for the Tao. It is indescribable, and utterly pointless to try to describe. I think Kierkegaard did his Philosophy a major disservice by attempting this. 

The other interesting idea of Kierkegaard’s was his idea of possibility. Kierkegaard said that anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and that “only this anxiety through faith absolutely educative, laying bare as it does all finite ends and discovering all their deceptions.” To Kierkegaard, being educated by possibility is of utmost importance. To the Taoist, only the present moment matters, because the future is an illusion. Possibility is an illusion. To stand in the moment, to detach yourself from all anxiety about the future or regrets about the past, is the only way to be one with the Tao. You must be like water, formless, accepting of all things. To resist, to try to force the world to your will, will end poorly. You must give up any notions of changing the world, and accept it as it is. Only then will you be moving in harmony with the Tao.

Of course, Kierkegaard wasn’t a Taoist, and his Philosophy isn’t a Taoist philosophy, so one cannot fault him for viewing things differently. However I much prefer the Taoist explanations of the nameless source of energy from which all things in the Universe spring forth from. Perhaps had Kierkegaard spent some time reading Taoist or Zen texts, his Philosophy would have been a little more concise and well defined. As it is, I think is rather lacking when attempting to describe the indescribable. 

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

(For those not in my philosophy class, we read a portion of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and the entirety of The Fall.)

Being someone that is rather introspective, suicide is something I have thought of often; indeed I’ve been wrestling with it for most of my adult life. Of course this really isn’t much of a surprise, since if one ponders life long enough, thinking of suicide is impossible to avoid. This isn’t to say that I've constantly held a gun to my temple, daring myself to pull the trigger. But rather, I have constantly turned it over in my mind, examining it, exploring its every crevice. It has been absolutely necessary to my development and my understanding of my place in the world.

But why you might ask.

Because it has been through my struggle with the idea suicide, that I have been able to make any sense of life. While I don’t think I’ve come to any realizations that will shake the foundations of the world (shaking my own foundations has been enough), I have decided that the ultimate point of life is life itself. While life seems incredibly absurd, the fact that it is so only makes it more apparent that it is necessary. If it wasn’t necessary, why all the fuss? Here I turn to Goethe:

"Finished. A silly word. Why finished, I'd like to know. Finished and sheer nothingness all one and the same. What use is this interminable creating, this dragging creation into uncreation again? Finished. What does it point to? It might as well never have been at all. And yet it goes its round as if it was something. Give me eternal emptiness every time."

This is exactly the idea I speak of. If life has no purpose, then why go on at all? 

However this doesn’t mean we are capable of determining any meaning. It is obvious that the world has rules that we must abide. We cannot put our arm through a concrete wall without breaking it, or jump off a cliff and expect to continue on. There are very clear rules we must follow. It follows that our reasoning should have its own set of limitations (though it may have a spectrum within this limitation). 

I would like to put forth an idea for you to toy with: that if we were able to determine some ultimate meaning, it would ultimately make life meaningless. What I mean is that if there were some absolute meaning, why would there be any variety or diversity, why so many different experiences? It is only through leaving things open-ended that we get the kind of diverse and wonderful universe that we came out of. (Another fun thing to think about is that we didn’t come into this world, we came out of it, like a wave comes out of the ocean. Just as a wave is something that whole ocean is doing, you are something that whole universe is doing.)

So why commit suicide? I don't think I'd attempt to argue that suicide is never necessary, however it seems like it should only be used as a last resort. Too many kill themselves because of some unhappiness with an experience that is transitory. If they had had but a little a more patience, they (likely) would have witnessed the passing of their tragedy and life would have become enjoyable again. 

Life is always in flux, it is a constant ebb and flow. There is nothing static. Hell, even some scientists think that the physical constants of the universe might not actually be constants, just precise approximations that fluctuate ever so slightly.

So what do we do? I say we live. Fully, ecstatically. We must drink from the marrow of life and stop looking forward or backward. We must let go of what we imagine the world to be, and accept it for it is. All over the world people value freedom; what freedom is greater than letting go?

I'd like to share some words from a wise man named Albert Einstein:

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

If we truly are part of the whole, then you do not end with your death, only this experience does. And if suicide is meant to be an escape from this interminable creating, this dragging creation into uncreation again, and it doesn’t achieve that goal, you’ve accomplished nothing.

So unless your suffering has no conceivable end in sight, why bother?