when meaninglessness matters

I was skimming my old blog posts and ended up re-reading this old article about Tolstoy going through a sort of midlife crisis. Given the way our friend Nath died, this quote in particular felt poignant:

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired…

Reading through the whole thing I thought Thomas Nagel’s The Absurd is probably a good response to it or at least a place from which to see the types of mistakes he’s making. Tolstoy was in a really bad mood. A long mood for sure but a mood and that was his fundamental problem which led to all this rationalistic churn he couldn't seem to find his way out of rationally.

And that oddly enough brought me back to this Camus quote from the Myth of Sysiphus which hits on the problem nicely:

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.

The thing is, when you’re feeling good, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningless. And if you’re feeling bad, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningful. What matters is how you feel and you'll take that feeling into your rationalizing (as our Scottish friend likes to say, "reason is the slave of the passions").

And I've rarely had rationalizing get me out of a mood. To get out of my long mood I needed art (flow) and I needed a lot of it. I needed a change of practice.

(If only there was a balm, we could call it mood-be-gone. This is why my psychotherapist aunt is always trying to get people to take drugs.)

death in the family

A philosophical friend of ours passed away in 2019.  I only learned of it in February of this year.  He was one of the most influential people in my life.  It wasn't that we spent so much time together or were very close in the last decade or so but during college we struggled though a number of issues together and pressure tested some lived philosophy.  In the last message I had from him, a few months before his death, he was reminiscing on those times fondly.  My emails from there on out went unanswered and I didn't know why.  He wasn't the most consistent communicator over the years so I didn't think too much about it.  He had expressed the desire to meet up next time I was in town so when I didn't hear from him I searched the internet and found his obituary. It was an odd way to learn of a death.  And it's odd to mourn, years late.

Here's one of the last images I sent him (never received).  He always loved the Tetons. Rest in peace, friend.  I wish we could have one more meeting of minds, it might have made a difference.

why is there something rather than nothing?

I’ve been thinking on and off about the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” before falling asleep for the past few months. Not much has come from thinking about it. I’m considering actually reading a philosophy book on it, I heard there’s a recent good one about the question but you know, that’s cheating.

Anyway, all I really have gotten to is that in some ways I do think the question is confused but even there I don’t think I really escape it by examining it. So then I started thinking about why I find the question so fascinating and I think it’s because I ask “why” and then look for intent. I mean I don’t feel like when I ask it i’m looking for a causal story. And that’s about it, I don’t think I can get to a place from which to see an explanation and I can’t think of a satisfying one and answers seem to beg the same question again in alternate form.

The biggest way I think it’s confused is that, you know, we don’t experience ‘nothing’ so it seems like a false comparison. Or if you rephrase it to ‘why does the universe exist at all’ or whatever then well, maybe if we could see some non-existing universes then we could compare and understand the difference.

But like I said, I take the “intent” turn when I think of it more and I guess the best answer I come up with is derived from a dream I had some time ago. In the dream I’m talking with God and we’re present in space together observing the universe more clearly than the clearest starry night you’ve ever seen and we’re conversing (non-audibly, why would that be necessary?) with each other. He knows I have these questions and want to know the secrets of the universe. But what he tells me is this — the universe is essentially information and if I knew the answer the universe would implode upon itself. So this particular not-knowing is a necessary condition. If I’d persist he’d communicate something like, “there’s no cause for concern” and then he passed along some sort of infinite peace.

I assume the God I ran into in my dream was the God of the Skeptics because who else returns unending inquiry with peace?

against narrativity, part deux

Well, not sure what part it is but it's the current part, the part the I that is now is reading. Thanks Galen.

 'We live beyond any tale that we happen to enact'

Here's Strawson's earlier piece from 2004 which I encountered a couple years ago.

the Don Juan of knowledge

The Don Juan of knowledge: he has yet to be discovered by any philosopher or poet.  He is lacking in love for the things he comes to know, but he has intellect, titillation, and pleasure in the hunt and intrigues involved in coming to know--all the way up to the highest and most distant planets of knowledge--until finally nothing remains for him to hunt down other than what is absolutely painful in knowledge, like the drunkard who ends up drinking absinthe and acqua fortis.  Thus he ends up lusting for hell--it is the last knowledge that seduces him.  Perhaps, like everything he has come to know, it will disillusion him as well!  And then he would have to stand still for all of eternity, nailed on the spot to disillusionment, and himself having become the stone guest longing for an evening meal of knowledge that he never again will receive!--For the entire world of things no longer has a single morsel to offer this hungry man.

Nietzsche Dawn §327

A Nietzschean warning for the philosopher as traveler but I don't think it's a real threat (I mean beyond the pursuit of painful knowledge (and the pain involved in the pursuit of knowledge), illusion being so much more comforting and all that). Just as Don Juan would have a hell of a time trying to conquer every woman on the planet, so too does the Don Juan of knowledge quickly encounter a nearly infinite set. The knowledge of abiding in hell would require some commitment but then in some sense he'd be abiding also in his true love, the chase.

I don't think I'm totally understanding this aphorism.  Maybe I shouldn't take the metaphor so far.

making plans

Making plans is often the occupation of an opulent and boastful mind, which thus obtains the reputation of creative genius by demanding what it cannot itself supply, by censuring what it cannot improve, and by proposing what it knows not where to find.

Immanuel Kant - Prolegomena (1783)

If you fail to plan you plan to fail^H wait, I mean you fail to make yourself subject to Kant's criticism of planners.

brave little thinker

I've been greeting the office folk with a little thinker Nietzsche and presenting the results at bravelittlethinker.com.  Yeah, it's not real blogging but it'll have to do for the moment, it'll keep me sane when I need to work long hours.  

Old words for a new context --

Work and boredom.--Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

Nietzsche The Gay Science §42

new comments on old posts

It's been a while since I answered email related to my blogger account and I was happy to see a couple legitimate comments come by within the sea of spam.

Someone gave some followup advice on how to read Borges and another left this alternate interpretation of Nietzsche's Mask --

Allan Innes said...

This is really late, but here is my impression - sad that all of these are merely our impressions, although I think this may be part of what Nietzsche was saying:

To wear the mask is deliberate for someone who has discovered something profound, who is on a dark path to greatness - a place where no one else dares to go - that very few will ever understand. Isolation, resulting from one's own rigorous thought experiments (genealogy - discovering truth and uprooting "truths"), from one's actual living of these experiments, is central to Nietzsche.

The mask is that which allows the profound individual to walk in public. It allows him / her to remain sane while standing within the herd. One must journey there masked if one is profound.

The mask also serves as a filter for the proper audience to greatness. When one masks their greatness (i.e., great thoughts, concepts, discoveries), one weeds out the stupid (to put it bluntly) - those literally undeserving of profundity.

Good that many should confuse your greatness with something horrible. Good that they should mistake it for something else entirely. For they are not your audience, they are not your equals. Insofar as your thought is akin to something utterly beautiful, there are some (in fact, there are many) who deserve only what is proper for their rank: mediocrity.

 

personalizing Sextus

[W]e say the aim of the Skeptic Mike is tranquility understanding in matters of opinion and moderation of feeling in matters forced upon us. For Skeptics Mike began to do philosophy in order to decide among appearances and to apprehend which are true and which false, so as to become tranquil understand; but they he came upon equipollent dispute, and being unable to decide this they he suspended judgement. And when they he suspended judgement, tranquility in matters of opinion generally followed. fortuitously.

Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Skepticism Mike

the virtue of non-contention

One who excels as a warrior does not appear formidable;
One who excels in fighting is never roused in anger;
One who excels in defeating his enemy does not join issue;
One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them.

This is known as the virtue of non-contention;
This is known as making use of the efforts of others;
This is known as matching the sublimity of heaven.

from the Tao te ching

philosophy.stackexchange

Not sure how cool the stackoverflow approach to philosophy will be but it made it out of beta.

visual aid for Democritus

"[O]ne should set one's mind on what is possible and be content with what one has, taking little account of those who are admired and envied, and not dwelling on them in thought, but one should consider the lives of those who are in distress, thinking of their grievous sufferings, so that what one has and possesses will seem great and enviable, and one will cease to suffer in one's soul through the desire for more." -Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC)

essential things

Interesting letter from Einstein:

Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior ... I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

The Unix Philosophy

It's been a while since I've posted. We moved across the country, from Newport to DC, and I start in a new position tomorrow. Maybe I'll get some time to read/write, maybe not.

The most noteworthy book I read recently was The Unix Philosophy by Mike Gancarz (looks like this is an updated version, I read the one with the 1995 copyright date). It's a great read, especially for philosopher-programmer types. If you prefer the tldr approach, wikipedia's short summary pulled from the first chapter and the second answer in this thread, taken from Classic Shell Scripting, a great example of the Unix philosophy at work.

lacking words

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking. -From a moral code for deaf-mutes and other philosophers.

Nietzsche Expeditions of an Untimely Man §26

help design a new site dedicated to philosophical discussion

If you're familiar with StackOverflow then you likely know how valuable it is for programmers. Its great advantage seems to be how it handles reputation and how that impacts the quality of Q&A.

Anyhow, this is a proposal to create a similar site for philosophy. If you commit to it, it's more likely to happen and you can have some impact on how the community is formed.

what has the cold sublimity of philosophical knowledge, to do with poetry?

“Well and good!” someone interrupted me; “I understand this, but I do not see how this poetic and religious people also comes to be a philosophical people.”

“The fact is,” I answered, “that without poetry they would never have been a philosophical people!”

“What has philosophy,” he answered, “what has the cold sublimity of philosophical knowledge, to do with poetry?”

“Poetry,” I answered, confident of my argument, “is the beginning and the end of philosophical knowledge. Like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, philosophy springs from the poetry of an eternal, divine state of being. And so in philosophy too, the irreconcilable finally converges again in the mysterious spring of poetry.”

“What a man of paradoxes!” cried Diotima; “yet I divine him. But you two digress. We are talking of Athens.”

“The man,” I resumed, “who has not at least once in his life felt full, pure beauty in himself, when the powers of his being merged like the colors in the rainbow, who has never felt the profound harmony that arises among all things only in hours of exaltation--that man will not even be a philosophical skeptic, his mind is not even capable of tearing down, let alone building up. For, believe me, the sceptic finds contradiction and imperfection in all that is thought, because he knows the harmony of perfect beauty, which is never thought. The dry bread that human reason well-meaningly offers him, he disdains only because he is secretly feasting at the table of the gods.”

“I am close upon them,” I said, “The great saying, the [greek phrase] (the one differentiated in itself) of Heraclitus, could be found only by a Greek, for it is the very being of Beauty, and before that was found there was no philosophy.

“Now classification became possible, for the whole was there. The flower had ripened; now it could be dissected.

“The moment of beauty was now well known to men, it was there in life and thought, the infinitely one existed.

“It could be analyzed, taken apart in men’s minds, it could be reconstituted from its components, and so the being of the highest and the best could be increasingly known, and the knowledge of it be set up as the law in all the multifarious realms of the spirit."

from Hölderlin's Hyperion (p. 92,93)

against narrativity

Abstract
I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman).

Galen Strawson, Against Narrativity (pdf)

h/t Rob Sica

more complications

A follow-up to my previous post.

So "the world" plays to our selfish default settings. But religions also often promote values that keep us surrounding ourselves with others who are self-same. The shared alternate values provide a balance of powers that may be a step forward for the individual who is hoping to escape a desire fulfillment prison but to be truly other centered or just to be able to understand and relate to diverse people, you have to spend time with them, and focus your energies on it. And know thyself.

To an extent this is what Jesus did, headed out and spent time with tax collectors, sinners, Samaritan women, loved his enemies, etc. But then we get phrases like “do not be yoked with unbelievers” coupled with (species preserving?) protective thinking which makes Christianity resemble just another in-group. To my mind, a properly Christian view of the world does seek to understand and relate to others but it has its limits. For instance, it lacks the resources to advocate a thorough existential exploration of opposing viewpoints.

Along with spending time with communities with divergent values there’s practicing regress-- assuming the truth of a perspective or belief in order to understand it. For all of us I assume the exercise is a pretense but there’s nothing in the perspective I operate from that would keep me from participating in explorations as thoroughly as possible. The kooky consilience is that these attempts to love and understand one another can coincide with a pursuit of objectivity akin to Nz’s perspectivism.

This synthesis makes sense to me, well, coupled with a willingness to play outside the lines. And a willingness just to be. And Listen. And Epochè. And Silence.

complicated relationship with religion

These thoughts are pretty incomplete but if I wait until I find them satisfying I'll probably never post them. I'll start with a few snippets from that David Foster Wallace article I posted a bit ago:

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

By denying religion I don't thereby embrace the "values of this world". I often find the "values of this world" as annoying as religion's values and I generally think of religion's values as also the values of "the crowd". The values of the crowd need the values of other crowds. Balance of powers and all that.

It used to be that all education was dictated by or associated with the church. Some Oxford dons led me to believe the first separation of Church and state in regard to education came with Henry VIII (something about funding coming directly from the monarchy, they had a lot of positive things to say about ol' Henry). But we're still in danger of homogeny in regard to education. The state is also an agent of homogeny. Homogeny is at odds with freedom (and imagination -- viva Orwell/Huxley).

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I'm a believer in external reinforcers and religions are what exists.

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I'm more of a fan of the imitation of Christ (minus the bloody end) than following Christ. Why does the latter often preclude the former? The fear-driven life?

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We were involved with religion because we are on a growth path and it was part of that path. The path went through religion but I don't deny that religion took us further along that path. If we remained in religion we would stagnate.