Questers and Other Oddballs – Page 3

More on Meditation: Worldling and Quester

The New Zealander to whom I replied in Impediments to Meditation responds:

. . . you rightly sense that there was a certain selfish ambition in my turning to meditation. Though following your post Meditation: What and Why, my stated ambition was to achieve what you called "tranquility". To use your terminology from the article, I grew quite tired of suffering from a chaotic mind (depression seems to have a fondness for assaulting me with un-invited negative emotional impulses). So I thought it only necessary to turn to meditation as a means of re-gaining sovereign self discipline.

A few questions arise. Being fairly new to this, I don't expect to have a very thorough understanding of the underlying philosophy, so please correct me where I go wrong. Specifically, you say that the ego is necessary for worldly life. So it seems that to let go of the ego is also to let go of worldly life?

Assuming I've got that right, two further questions arise. Firstly, what do you mean by "worldly life?" and secondly, what does it mean to "let go of it?" I take it after all, that one feature of the Doctrine of Creation, is a commitment to the great goodness of creation. I have some anxieties about about saying that only the spiritual is worthwhile; that creation is merely expendable.

Within a Christian framework it is certainly true that whatever God creates is good. I use 'creature' to refer to anything that is a product of divine creative activity, whether animate, inanimate, concrete, or abstract. So creatures are good. If we use 'world' to refer to the sum-total of creatures, then the world is good. But 'world' has perhaps a dozen different meanings. I am using it in a different sense.

So let me introduce 'worldly person' or 'worldling' as the opposite of a spiritual seeker. The worldling lives for this passing world alone. But he doesn't appreciate its transient and ontologically substandard nature. Or if he does, he is not moved to seek the truly real. For the worldling, the passing scene it is as real as it gets, and as good as it gets, and he thinks its ephemeral goods have the power to make him happy. It's not that he thinks about this in any depth, or formulates to himself anything like what I have just written; being a world-immersed fellow, it it s not an issue for him. So he pursues money, power, sex, recognition and all the rest as if they are ends in themselves. He loves creatures, but not as creatures, for he does not relate them back to their Source. He loves them idolatrously.

He is a Cave man if you will; he doesn't appreciate that our predicament is classically and profoundly depicted in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He lives for his ego, to advance himself and distinguish himself in an ultimately futile project to become somebody when he knows deep down that his ego and all its adjuncts will soon be annihilated by death. But he avoids the thought of death and cultivates the illusion that he will live forever. He loses himself in the diaspora of sense objects and social suggestions. To answer my reader's first question, this is what I mean by a worldly life. It is an attitude according to which this passing world is ultimate both in being and in value. Someone with that attitude is a worldling.

His opposite number, the seeker or quester, appreciates the vanity or emptiness of the worldling's life and the worldling's world. He senses that there has to be Something More. He is aware that things are not as they ought to be, and that he is not as he ought to be. He is oppressed by the ignorance, misery, strife, and senselessness all around him. He experiences life as a predicament, and seeks a way out. What's more, he doesn't believe that man, individually or collectively, can bring about his redemption by his own efforts. This distinguishes him from the 'progressive.' He thinks that

. . .there is for man some sort of highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this danger . . . (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, Scribners, 1912, p. 12)

Meditation is one among several spiritual practices the seeker cultivates in his quest to transcend the worldly attitude. This involves letting go of the worldly life. The quester may remain in the world, but he will not be of the world, to invoke something like the NT sense of 'world.' The quester needn't flee the world and join a monastic order. But if he remains in the world he will find it very difficult not to be swamped and thrown off course by worldly suggestions.

I will end by saying that to pursue meditation fruitfully one has to reform one's way of life. A certain amount of moral ascesis is sine qua non. If you intend to spend your early mornings thinking and trancing, you cannot spend your late evenings drinking and dancing. Re-collection is incompatible with dissipation. But this is a large topic. More later, perhaps.

The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre

Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list. The Orgasm book did not. Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my library.

Even Misfits Find Their ‘Fit’

I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put their own inimitable stamp on themselves. The creatively maladjusted and marginal who do duty as warnings more often than as exemplars.

Joe Gould, Greenwich Village bohemian, is an example. His story has been told by that master of prose, Joseph Mitchell.

Gould found his fit and 'made it' as a bum. He was a 'successful' bum. Some aren't cut out for the bum life: they can't 'cut it.' These are the bums manqué. Gould stuck with it till he died of it. He found his own peculiar adjustment to life, his purpose and place, albeit one based on deceiving himself and others about his "Oral History of Our Time," the magnum opus that never existed.

Gould got through life in his own way. If success is living life in your own way, then Gould was a success.

You say he never amounted to anything? Then why am I writing about him now? Why did Joseph Mitchell devote two long pieces to him? Why was a movie made about him?

You really should read Joseph Mitchell. As someone who knows what good writing is, I can tell you that he is a master of American English. Get yourself a copy of Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, Vintage 1993, and enjoy. Why read the contemporary stuff in The New Yorker when you can read Mitchell?

Two George Molnars

Here:

Meet George Molnar. Not the witty cartoonist, but the other one: a thwarted philosopher whose wild life finally found some meaning after his death.

Did you think there was only one George Molnar – the witty and urbane Hungarian whose cartoons graced the pages of the Herald for many years? Well, think again. To many Sydneysiders, the truly famous George Molnar, famous to the point of notoriety, was someone else altogether. He was George Molnar, libertarian philosopher, left-wing radical and one of the sharpest minds the city's intellectual circles had known.

Klavan on Experience

I am now on p. 118 of Andrew Klavan's memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2016, 269 pp. As I reported a few days ago when I was on p. 18,

If you are a tough-minded American Boomer like me on a religious/spiritual quest you will probably be able to 'relate' very well to this book. A fortiori, if you are Jewish.

The book gets better and better especially for those of us who are (i) 'true' Boomers and (ii) were influenced by the Zeitgeist of the '60s. I divide the Boomer cohort (1946-1964) into the 'true' Boomers and the 'shadow' Boomers. You are one of the former if and only if you remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. Otherwise you are a 'shadow' boomer. Klavan, born in 1954, is a 'true' Boomer.

Mike Gilleland, who is my age and few years older than Klavan, told me some years back that the '60s passed him by. I would put it this way: many of those who came of age in the '60s were not of the '60s. It is like a Christian's being in the world but not of it. My point is that if you a 'true' Boomer of and not merely in the '60s, then Klavan's book is one you will want to read.

We were experience-hungry. We were in quest of the Real and thought that it could be found by a close grappling with the seedier and seamier sides of life. We took drugs, consorted with dead-end women, got drunk in flophouses with bums, worked dirty and dangerous jobs, left on 1200 mile trips with five dollars in the pocket returning with ten. This is what got a lot of us into a lot of trouble. Klavan:

Experience! That's what made a writer great, I thought. Harsh, brutal, savage Experience — I would have done anything to get my hands on some. But where? There were nothing but lawns and homes and normal families around me as far as the eye could see.

I didn't want to go to war. Those in the know had declared the Vietnam conflict corrupt and evil. [. . .]

Instead I took jobs whenever I could — not jobs that would teach me something or contribute to my future or career. No, I took jobs that I hoped would get me nearer to the grit of things: Experience. I was a gas jockey, a warehouseman, a truck driver, a construction worker, a delivery boy to some of the dodgier areas of New York City. After seventeen years in grassy peace and comfort, I was hungry for anything that looked like cruel reality.

What I wanted most, though, was to wander. Not to travel — to drift. [. . .] My romantic fantasies often involved a girl in some other town, not this town. A brief affair. A tearful goodbye. Then, babe, I've got to travel down that lonesome, dusty road. (116-117)

At this point Klavan might have referenced Dylan's Don't Think Twice with its talk of long, lonesome roads and the lines:

So long honey babe
Where I'm bound, I cain't [sic] tell
But goodbye is too good a word, babe
So I'll just say fare thee well.

Robert Zimmerman, too, the middle-class Jewish son of a Hibbing, Minnesota appliance salesman. recoiled from the unreality of suburbia and hit the road, more or less.

Summing this up: reading Klavan's book I am reading about myself.

The Eremitic Option

Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits. The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own. Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible for them to function in modern society. Chris Knight is such a one, who, when asked about Thoreau, replied in one word, "dilettante." That's saying something inasmuch as Henry David was one monkish and solitary dude even when he wasn't hanging out at Walden Pond. Somewhere in his fascinating journal he writes, "I have no walks to throw away on company."

Others of a monkish bent are wholly sane, unlike Knight, so sane in fact that they perceive and reject the less-than-sane hustle of Big City life. Some are motivated religiously, some philosophically, and some share both motivations. I have always held that a sane religiosity has to be deeply philosophical and vice versa. I think most of the Desert Fathers would agree. Athens and Jerusalem need each other for complementation and mutual correction. Some of the monkish are members of monastic religious orders, some attach themselves as oblates to such orders, and some go it alone. Call the latter the Maverick Variation.

And of course there are degrees of withdrawal from society and its illusions. I have been called a recluse, but on most days I engage in a bit of socializing usually early in the morning in the weight room or at the pool or spa where a certain amount of banter & bullshit is de rigueur. I thereby satisfy my exiguous social needs for the rest of the day. Other mornings, sick of such idle talk and the corrrosive effect it can have on one's seriousness and spiritual focus, I head for the hills to traipse alone with my thoughts as company. But I am not as severe as old Henry David: I will share my walk with you and show you some trails if you are serious, fit, and don't talk too much.

I am a Myers-Briggs INTP introvert. Must one be an introvert to be a hermit? No. The most interesting hermit I know is an extrovert who in his younger days was a BMOC, excellent at sports, successful at 'the chase,' who ended up on Wall Street, became very wealthy, indulged his every appetite, but then had a series of profound religious experiences that inspired him to sell all he owned and follow Christ, first into a cenobium, then into a hermitage.

A tip of the hat and a Merry Christmas to Karl White of London for sending me to this Guardian piece which profiles some contemporary monkish specimens.

Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

In April of 2011, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from liberals and leftists and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinter world? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.

Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Millions of eggs were broken, though, and no omelet materialized.

Buddha, too, was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, the extinguishing of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt. Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who went to the electric chair as atomic spies. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side, although there we won't need it, seeing having replaced believing.

My Athenian thesis — that the life of the philosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have serious doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.

Philosophy is reason's search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. But reason is not reason unless it strives mightily beyond itself to sources of truth that transcend it. So the true philosopher must be open to divine revelation. If it is the truth the philosopher seeks, then he cannot confine himself to the truth accessible to discursive reason.

The Strange Tale of Chris Knight, the Central Maine Hermit-Thief

A hell of a story. This one goes into the Questers and Other Oddballs file.

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: "dilettante."

Again I am astonished by the wild diversity of human types as between, say, Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart. Who or what is man that he should admit of such wide diversity?

The Quester

What is the quester after? What does he seek? He doesn't quite know, and that is part of his being a romantic. He experiences his present 'reality' as flat, stale, jejune, oppressive, substandard. He feels there must be more to life than work-a-day routines and social objectifications, the piling up of loot, getting ahead, "competitive finite selfhood" in a fine phrase of A. E. Taylor's. He wants intensity of experience, abundance of life, even while being unclear as to what these are. He casts a negative eye on the status quo, the older generation, his parents and family, and their quiet desperation. He scorns security and its living death.

Christopher J. McCandless was a good example, he whose story was skillfully recounted by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. In McCandless' case, the scorn for security, his fleeing a living death, led to a dying death. In an excess of self-reliance he crossed the Teklanika, not realizing it was his Rubicon and that its crossing would deposit him on the Far Shore.

Be bold, muchachos, be bold; be not too bold.

The Strange Saga of the Last True Hermit

Peter Lupu has called me a recluse. I have referred to myself as reposing in Bradleyan reclusivity. But I am a hermit only in an analogous sense. For my hermithood is but partial and participated in comparison to the plenary hermithood of this dude. He approximates unto the Platonic Form thereof. Compared to him, Seldom Seen Slim is a man about town, a veritable social animal. Take a gander at Slim:

Related: The Strange Case of Gene Rossellini and indeed the entire contents of the category Questers and Other Oddballs.

The Seductive Sophistry of Alan Watts

Here. (An entertaining video clip, not too long, that sums up his main doctrine.)

Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things, Alan Watts and his writings. But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him. He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher. Entertaining he was indeed.

I heard him speak in the last year of his life on 17 January 1973. He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control. Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia) What follows is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973.

………………..

I attended a lecture by Alan Watts last night at El Camino Junior College. Extremely provocative and entertaining. A good comparing and contrasting of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese views.

At random: One must give up the desire to be secure, the desire to control. Ego as totally illusory entity which is really nothing but a composite of one's image of oneself and certain muscular tensions which arise with attempts to achieve, grasp, and hold on. The self as opposed to the ego is God, God who forgot who he was. The world (cosmos) as God's dream. Thus the self-same Godhead reposes in each individual. There is no spiritual individuality. And therefore, it seems, no possibility of relation.

Consider the I-Thou relation. It presupposes two distinct but relatable entities. If there is only one homogeneous substance, how can there be relation? But perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Wattsian-Hindu view by thinking of the Hindu deity as substance rather than as function, process. Watts himself denies the existence of substance. Last night he made the well-known point as to the linguistic origin of the notion of substance. [This is of course not a "well-known point."]

Denial of the ego — i.e. its relegation to the sphere of illusion — would seem to go hand in hand with denial of substance. [Good point, young man!] Watts seems very close to as pseudo-scientific metaphysics. He posits a continuum of vibrations with the frequency of the vibrations determining tangible, physical qualities. Yet he also says that "We will always find smaller particles"; that "We're doing it"; that the fundamental reality science suppsedly uncovwers is a mental, a theoretical construct.

Thus, simultaneously, a reliance on a scientific pseudo-metaphysics AND the discrediting of the scientific view of reality.

Jim Ryan’s Story and Mine

Let me start off by recommending Jim Ryan's infrequently updated but very old (since 2002!) Philosoblog, the archives of which contain excellent material worthy of the coveted MavPhil STOA (stamp of approval). The following entry (originally posted February 2005 at my first blog) is in response to my query as to why Ryan left university teaching.

JR: Well, here's my story, thanks for asking: I've always taken learning to be almost sacred, scholarship to be transcendent, books sublime. Given this disposition, I was unable to stomach teaching that 20% of my students who were there to get by by hook or by crook (avoid class, avoid the book, succumb to cheating, etc.). I realized at 37 that I would become a bitter old man if I taught for another 30 years. I liked the other 80% of my students, and I liked my research, but these weren't enough to get me through the bitter part. So, having a reasonable math and science background I boned up on chemistry during my last year of teaching and hustled a job in the Chem department at U. of Virginia. That was two years ago, almost. It's been fun, but now I'm thinking of moving into the business world, so that I can make more money and have more time with my kids.

What about your story, Bill? How'd you come to quit?

BV: Learning sacred, scholarship transcendent, books sublime. I can see we have something in common, a commonality that is also part of the reason why I gave up teaching. The average run of students would dismiss your sentiments and mine as bullshit, as some kind of empty self-serving rhetoric that could only be spouted by some weirdo who fills his belly by spouting it. Most people have no intellectual eros, could not care less about scholarship, and place no value whatsoever on good books.

Proof of the latter point can be found by scouring the used bookstores in a locale like Boston-Cambridge. Take a book off the shelf that was assigned in a course, note the underlining or 'magic marker mark-up' and how it extends maybe three or four pages and then stops — great for me, of course, who gets a relatively pristine copy for pennies, but indicative of the pointlessness of reading assignments.

Most teaching is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Pointless. Of course, I had some great students and some great classes. But not enough of either to justify the enterprise.

Then there is the problem of stimulating colleagues. It is easy to end up in a department without any, in which case you are on your own, and you may as well be an independent scholar. Isolation? Not any more. Not with the WWW and the blogosphere in particular.

But the main reason I quit was to be able to do philosophy full time and live a more focused existence. It had been something I had been thinking about for a long time. I see philosophy as a spiritual quest, not an academic game. I had tenure, and I had enjoyed it for seven years. I had enjoyed a two-year visiting associate professorship, and I could have returned to my tenured position, but I was ready to take the next step in my life. The catalyst was my wife's being offered a great job in a beautiful place. Being a Westerner, I had served enough time in the effete and epicene East and was ready to get back to where mountains are mountains and hikers and climbers are damn glad of it.

Into the Wild Update: Hunter Who Found McCandless’ Body Shot by Cops

Story here.

Some of my McCandless posts accessible from this page.

The Lonesome Death of Chris McCandless

Jon Krakauer's latest on the McCandless saga.

Companion post: I am Reminded of Christopher McCandless

56 Years Ago Today: Gilbert Millstein’s Review of Kerouac’s On the Road

Here. Millstein's NYT review brought Kerouac fame, but fame contributed to an early death at age 47 just a bit more than 12 years after the review. Fame brought death, but no fortune, leastways not for Jack. Last I checked, his heirs were battling over his estate.

By the way, the Telegraph article to which I have just linked gives the year of Keroauc's death incorrectly as 1968. Kerouac died in his beloved October, in 1969. I remember the day he died and my annotation in my journal.

Neal Cassady, Keroauc's hero and friend, the Dean Moriarty of On the Road, died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty concotion of pulque and Seconals, on the railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)

Be mad, muchachos, be mad. Be not too mad.