Seven Ways of Life

The following is the meat of a Substack post by our friend Vlastimil Vohanka.  He is the man in the middle. To his left is Lukas Novak, and to his right an American philosopher whose name I have forgotten. I took the picture in  a tea house in Prague in June of 2018.  Since then V’s views seem to have changed considerably.  I don’t know the whole story; he can add whatever details he likes.   He strikes me as in the grip of a midlife crisis.  If so, that may help explain the dark jag he is now on.  He converted to Catholicism around the time I met him, if I rightly recall, but has since, as it seems to me, performed a sort of theological epoché  with respect to the teachings of Rome.

To anyone in a midlife crisis my advice is to hunker down and ride it out. A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis adds some details and tells my story.  When you come out on the other end you may ask yourself as I asked myself after a crisis that took about eight years fully to recover from: What was that all about?

Here is what V has to say in the post in question. Feel free to comment.

Claim: ordinary life is (a) okayish but (b) not worth living. Even Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on (b). So do many religious people. The strategies vary but go in several and at times compatible types: (1) martyr yourself or do something else heroic (the way of optimistic hazards of saints, missionaries, Don Quijote, Nietzsche, Juenger, Camus, conquerors, explorers, revolutionaries, guerrilas, adrenaline sportsmen, and psychopaths), (2) kill yourself (the way of desperates), (3) wait for death and have hope beyond it (the way of believers; most common, often most tame and inconspicuous, recall Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith), (4) stop thinking (the way of Schopenhauer and some Eastern people), (5) think real deep (the way of Socrates and Einstein), (6) go intense raw hedonic (the way of rock stars and addicts), (7) go intense subtle hedonic (the way of dedicated artists, psychonauts, occultists, and some Eastern people). I respect most some variations on the 1st way.

I can relate to this. V and I agree that the unexamined life of the ordinary schlep is not worth living.  And yes, Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on this point despite their differences.  V and I both seek Something More than what is envisaged from the vantage point of bourgeois mediocrity.  We are both existentialists in a sense I won’t pause to define except to say that philosophy, the real thing, is not an arcane academic game from which  some manage to fill their bellies, but the  pursuit and appropriation of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.

As a young man, it was for me either suicide, mediocrity, or striving. And so I gave up electrical engineering and an assured path for the risks of the philosophical quest.  It was the ’60s, a time of great ferment socially, politically, religiously.  The Vietnam war had become a quagmire. Who was I to believe about it? I didn’t want to end up in the military-industrial complex working for Raytheon, say, designing  guidance systems for missiles.  I needed Perspective, the Big Picture, and you can’t get that from material science, fluid mechanics, or by struggling to solve ‘diffy q’s.’ (differential equations).

V  wants to live heroically, epically; he wants a great life.  Of the three people he mentions under (1) above,  my impression is that he is most attracted by the life-path of  Ernst Jünger.  V can tell us whether he has read Jünger’s recently translated and released Approaches: Drugs and Altered States (Telos Press, 2022).

(2) is out for both of us. Nothing is stupider than to kill yourself when life itself will perform that service soon enough.  Your girl friend dumped you? Give it six months and you will wonder what you ever saw in her in the first place.  I have elsewhere expressed my lack of sympathy for that gastro-tourist Anthony Bourdain who hanged himself. (By the way, this pedant reminds you that a man is hanged; his coat is hung.) You will call me ‘insensitive’ re: Bourdain, but I grant that suicide make sense and is forgivable  and even morally justifiable in some cases, extreme clinical depression being one of them.  A contemporary locus classicus on this topic is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.  I was mercifully spared clinical depression. My depressions were amenable to my own self-brewed logotherapy.  The worst year of my life was my 21st when I experienced what I called my Existential Malaise Crisis. Good old Emersonian self-reliance pulled me through. If you really need help that you cannot self-provide, however, don’t be afraid to ask for it!

And if you are tempted by suicide, are you quite sure what’s on The Other Side?  The link will take you to a book  by a well-known theological ‘quantity’ in the ’60s, Bishop James A. Pike, about his son who killed himself, and supposedly reports back.

The raw hedonism of (6) is out for me.  The search for the Real in intensity of experience was trademark ’60s  and many of us were beguiled by it to the point of dying from it. I dabbled with it and came close but pulled back in time.

I was never tempted by the subtle hedonism of (7).  An early familiarity with Kierkegaard and his Stages on Life’s Way (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious)  anesthetized me to  aestheticism. But it wouldn’t have had that effect had I not been antecedently predisposed, by my training in pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, to take seriously the moral and the related religious points of view.  That training and teaching fell, not on stones, but on fertile soil that was there innately.

I suppose the difference between me and Vlastimil is that, while he is drawn to some of the life-styles of (1), I am drawn to an amalgam of (3), (4), and (5) in that I hope beyond this life in the conviction that, if this is it, the game ain’t worth the candle; that the ability to silence at will the discursive mind (“stop thinking” as V puts it) is an ability that one ought to cultivate and practice; that the rational mind must be celebrated within its limits and taken as deep as one can take it.