Category: Art of Life

Social Distance and Good Relations

Social distance aids in the preservation of good relations with people. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, disrespect. In the famiglia, especially. Conventional usages, phony and formulaic as they often are, have their uses. They allow for civil interaction while preserving distance. "Good morning." "After you, sir." We all want respect even while aware of how little we deserve it and how insincere are those who show it.

A figure from Schopenhauer comes to mind. We are like porcupines on a cold night. They come together to stay warm but then prick one another and move apart. Trial and error leads to the optimal spatial adjustment.

The art of life, with its trials and errors, is learned by living, and learned best by living long. 

Consolations of Late Adulthood

Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us?  In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.

One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But grow tall and strong, brisk of stride and stern of visage, and you project a secular analog of Christ's noli me tangere,  don't touch me. (Cf. John 20:17.)
  
The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. One develops a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.

In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But happiness does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.

So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.

A Life Goal

Full self-integration, maximal self-individuation.

Aim high. You won't be able to achieve the goal in this life. So believe beyond the sublunary. Live as if your life does not end at death. What harm could it do? No harm at all, and indeed the opposite. We live better here and now when we believe that life has a meaning that transcends the petty and particular, the vain and the transient; when we believe that we are not just dust in the wind.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

Read the rest at Substack.

Rely on Conscience

In matters moral, reason is weak, easily suborned by the passions, given to rationalization, and easily entangled in the threads of its own dialectic. Reason is not  to be despised but not quite reliable. In matters moral, it is better to rely on conscience.

This advice rests on two presuppositions. One is that conscience is a source of moral knowledge, which itself presupposes that there is moral knowledge. The other is that one's conscience has been well formed. Both presuppositions need examination. But don't make the reliance on conscience contingent on the completion of their examination.

The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.

The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that  "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)

The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.

Nietzsche abyss

How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

Here is a possible attitude for examination.

Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.

But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry  — call him Skepsis — has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.  

But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?

But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations,  309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  That would be like copulating your way to chastity.  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

Hard and Soft

You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not a given.