Introduction to an ongoing project

Introduction: The Sting and Wisdom of Common Characterizations of Philosophy

            Over the course of the last few months I've been advised to visit with a number of specialists in the fields of dermatology and oncology to rule out a possible brush with a rare form of skin cancer.[1] Since I'm in my twenties the office visit small talk invariably revolves around whether I'm in school, what I'm studying, and so on. Having engaged in this type of ritual over and over within a short period of time, certain patterns begin taking shape when I've mentioned that I've just completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy. These patterns seem to me to be indicative of how the discipline-practice is commonly understood in a society, such as ours, which is crucially career oriented and pragmatic. Mixed with the prospect of death hanging in the air, something that never fails to sober things up, these patterns take on a bit more weight and bite.

            Apart from polite indifference and polite affirmation, one typical response is to imply that the study of philosophy is narrowly impractical for the workforce: "What do you plan on doing with that? Do you want to teach?" Another involves citing the reputation of academic philosophers for careful argumentation and reasoning to the point of irrelevant hair splitting, sophistry, or poor sportsmanship: "I sure don't want to get in an argument with you!" A final pattern  references the sheer intellectual complexity of the contemplative subject, perhaps signaling it's intoxication with and compulsive obsession in intellect: "Man, that's more difficult than med. school..." After running through some variation on these characterizations, the focus is then shifted to the explicit reason for the visit. When I walk away from such encounters, however, I feel the typical sting of being cut down to some extent, and this sting - when it becomes searching - acts to fuel my already present suspicions of a field which is so often, in John Dewey's phrase, a "self-indulgence for the few."[2]

            There is a kind of wisdom of the crowds that such characterizations flow from. In this case it's against, or at least suspicious of, the kind of technicalization and specialized projects which philosophers have taken on since perhaps they moved into the university and took their subject professionally serious. Candidacy for the sort of project I have in mind would be those which require a lot of back story to explain why anyone would undertake them and why they are worth the candle - and yet still seem hard to justify much effort. Perhaps an example would be the problem of Non-Being, sometimes called "Plato's Beard", in Ontology, which seeks to account for the type of being Non-Being has.[3]

            While this wisdom has much purchase there is a sense also that it is superficial - or at least not the whole story. Thus the sting. What I would like to consider here takes a stab at the whole story and lies at the source of the searching component of this sting. Another way to put this is that I would like to give weight to the best aspects of both sides of philosophy, the formal and the informal. I wish to honor both, as they both deserve our honor. Put in the form of a question my concern is, What is the value of philosophy and why should it be engaged in? My feeling is that taking an expansive step back and turning the philosophical gaze back upon itself will serve to give context to philosophy's disparate functions, some of which have gone largely unfulfilled in recent centuries, others of which have been misunderstood both by the layman and the professional. Perhaps too closing in on why philosophy is valuable will serve to keep our philosophical efforts properly motivated when they become stale, cloudy, and ostracized against - as they so often do.

            In any case, since responding to the question of value would be to utilize some vision of what philosophy is, and further, what it's functions are (for society, oneself, etc.), anyone taking on the value question must also take on these descriptive and functional aspects. It's in this way that the value question really breaks into a few parts. With this in mind, it will bear alluding to two stumbling blocks that tend to crop up naturally when talking about "philosophy" as such. These stumbling blocks may be referred to as the tunnel-vision tendency, which seems to arise out of philosophy's vastness and special seriousness, and the arrested-development objection, which seems to arise out of an anachronistic comparison between the "goods" of philosophy and the "goods" of science. After pointing these out I will be in a position to properly take up an analysis of what I think is a full response to the question of value - Bertrand Russell's response as in the last chapter of The Problems of Philosophy. My analysis will reveal that Russell posits three distinct values for philosophy: one springs from it's epistemic and speculative function, one from it's preservative function (of philosophical space), and the final springs from it's transformative potentiality. I will demonstrate that this threefold vision is meaningfully conversant with what I have referred to above as the formal and informal aspects of philosophy. Following insights from Richard Rorty, Richard Shusterman, and Alexander Nehamas, among others, I will show how these aspects refer to the "two basic forms" or poles of philosophy. Baldly, these poles, which can be seen as a spectrum, stretch from the critical-theoretical side of philosophy which tends to be formal and knowledge oriented, and the practical-transformative (or art-of-living) side of philosophy which tends to be less formal and oriented around producing flourishing or transformative insight for individuals and their communities. Final remarks will beef up Russell's account with some suggestions about philosophical lifestyle and the importance of non-intellectual educational mechanisms (which spring from the transformative function of philosophy), both of which Russell fails to say much about. Whereas Philip Kitcher has argued that a renewal of philosophy can be achieved by turning "philosophy inside out" - or by turning to it's fringe areas - I will argue that this renewal has much to do with re-balancing the two sides and bringing the art-of-living out from marginalization.

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[1] Just for full disclosure: this brush with skin cancer has been reasonably ruled out as far as contemporary dermopathology is concerned.

[2] Kitcher, Philip, "Philosophy Inside Out"

[3] see Quine, W.V.O., "On What There is"

"The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of the will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife."

Bertrand Russell, "The Value Of Philosophy", The Problems Of Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 158.

Odran and Evelyn

Odran is wilting

Evelyn is blue

Maybe they’re ill

Maybe just on the lip of evolution

Worn thin from impatience

I wonder if even they know

Perhaps it’s the time

That there 7 billion plus

Pulled this way and that

Filled with inorganic weight

Like spinning plates

With precipice suspicions

Of unaccountable gridlocked sour trick

In chemical dreams

Teeth fall from mouths

And when they wake

Stuffy 4am

They cannot remember where they are

Where their tracks began

What brought them here

Oh, I see their baggy eyes

Sometimes they asks themselves things

The product of liberal room and board

The entrapped enlightenment of the well-adjusted

Clutching for straws

Trying to dig out of that hue

They asks: What am I up to?

Why do I do what I do?

Maybe they can find some higher source

Some higher source to make things sing 

--Evelyn--

Today Evelyn rolls over

Playing some cosmic script

Squints at aqua mirror

Why am I wilting?

She asks her face

Why is it like this?

A sneeze escapes her body

She opens the curtains

Greets a foggy reflection

Looks longingly at warm sheets

Throws herself to the game

Like a ball

Such a put together lady

Eve stretches and showers

Places freshly washed clothes atop a freshly washed body

Makes oatmeal and coffee

Sits herself down at the kitchen table

A firm thing

Ordered, assembled smartly by her lonesome

With a pad of computer paper

Eve bullet points her blueness

Resolves to get underneath the thing

Five points about her childhood

Four about aimlessness

Three about unplumbed phobias

Maybe I need to risk my neck

Live rule-free in the city park

Get out of this suffocation, she thinks

When it is time to go to work,

Evelyn slips on new pair of socks

They feel luxurious on her feet

Makes things sing

At the corner 

She turns left instead of right

--Odran--

After Work

Odran roams the indigo department and drug stores

Stares at fancy packages

Walks down nicely polished floors

The hallmark of thousands of years of civilization

At Navy Drugs he checks the backs of vitamin containers

I’ll eat and dress better, he thinks

Take fish oil and garlic

Practice Zazen

Make goals everyday

A clerks walks by

Black vest over a blue sweatshirt

Does the gentleman need assistance?

How can you tell?

Teenage shrug

Teenage sad smile

Magnesium is two for one, Sir

It’s good for bones and things

Ah structure, says Odran

In his lumpy bed 

Odran thinks and squirms

Too cold

Too warm

Too tired

Too much shit to do

He gets up

Drinks a glass of water

On a pad of paper by the refrigerator

He writes down some things for tomorrow

Office things 

Good son, good brother things

Staring out the window at the street light

Odran tries to remember a saying

When he walks back to bed

A wonderful idea hits him
He smiles like a madman

With new socks on his feet
Odran buys chalk at the grocery store
When he get to the corner
He turns left in stead of right

Soap Box

Yesterday morning

I had a Thought

A damn good one

All warm and soft, vital and clear

The product of good sleep, perhaps

To the city I’d take it

To the wharf where the birds and the people feel grand

Where the sun peaks through the stomach

Where the nice parts of the self can breath

A place where we make our way

When we have nowhere to be, no one to please

Not compelled like the rats we often are

This, this is where I will share my Thought

Amongst the sounds and smells of peace

Of rebirth

I dress in my best

Feeling some extra sobriety

Secure composure                                

Evenness in balanced weight

Atop my body

Clothes I’m reluctant to abuse on the regular day

But this no regular day

With lunch tucked away

In the pack over my shoulder

I ride my old mountain bike through the suburb

And as I ride out through nosier streets

Passing endless shops and homes

Passing schools, warehouses, traffic

I carry myself with stolid dignity

Back straight, slow breathed politeness

As though taking center stage in some ritual

As though I am meeting old mentors

The wharf downtown arrives

As does the mighty noise of crowds and cars

I leave my bike unlocked in the rack

If someone needs it that badly

Then they can surely take it

What meets me shortens my stride

Soap boxes

Soap boxes to every person

Thousands and thousands of soap boxes

Of acidic thought sharers

Talking, screaming, humming into the void

Did I come too late?

Manifesto of the Lifestyle Experimenters

After the given materials of life begin to look themselves rather given and circumstantial, a search ensues: a search for fertile grounds, for a way of life that does not hang itself on the merely local, the merely familiar. With eyes toward this search, our hungry gaze looks out over its own history and it's species history. We earnestly sift through personal traumas and gifts, and scavenge the fruits of the intellectual generations. Here, some of us halt in our tracks, solemn, energized by the breadth of the systematic puzzles or the empirical beauties and tragedies of nature. Vitalized, they'll tell stories which back up their settlement: everything points to the solution of this problem, they say; everything follows laws which can be understood if only we would apply the correctly balanced efforts. For instance, one such settler would appraise themselves thus, "I'm lacking in assertion and my life has become a slavery because of this - and so the way out is to cultivate the powers of self-esteem." Or another would appraise that,  "The world would evolve with the advancement of education, with the eradication of this or that social hang-up." With this, a "battleground" has been facilitated. The search has revealed the fertile grounds we sought, has gone beyond the merely local and fertile.
A great majority at least nod at this approach - in fact, I would wager that all do, at minimum, nod at it. Nevertheless, a minority is not ultimately persuaded. They feel that the "battleground" is just another version of the given, the familiar, the circumstantial. Their suspicion is that the values by which the "battlegrounders" gravitate only goes skin deep: the world does not provide them, only human beings do, and only human beings within circumstantial ruts. From our minorities eyes, all values are experiments in lifestyle, can only be experiments in lifestyle. Building a life on a battle ground is fine, but the added qualification that it is the ground is, for this minority, a kind of shortsightedness or immaturity. They say to the premature settlers: "Look, you have forgotten that always and everywhere we humans are winging-it. We are organic, doing what we do with whatsoever equipment we have access to. Your problems are happenstance, your methods happenstance, and your vision happenstance. There are no ultimate, cosmos signifying obligations that demand to be responsibly met. The world issues no clues which are not first inferred and interpreted by us dying animals. Whatever values you participate in are values you have made up, or else they are values you have followed from the example or compulsion of others. Everything undertaken, however, is guesswork; in guesswork lies all the human possibilities. The approach of you, the battlegrounders, to wholeheartedly get behind some problem you deem central, then, is a strategy, particularly a strategy of coping with life. All there is can be summed up thus, unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing. Our movements, which follow, can only be experimental attempts to deal with the unaccountable."  

On 'Recoursing'

Wasted time is murder of sorts. You sense that in order to not commit this crime you must be able to ‘recourse.’ To recourse is to return to your highest purpose, to get in touch with the warmth and meaning of the endeavors of your circumstances. Such a movement, in order to be an effective tool, must be made available in a variety of habitats and moods. It must be utilized not just in moments of ease and deliberation, but also in moments of crisis, and in moments of near despair and pervasive dissatisfaction. More important still, this most-basic-vocabulary, this grounding project, will need to be sensed when distraction sets in or is about to occur – for movements of distraction and escape are far more prevalent than crisis in an environment of air conditioning, automobiles, Avon, and supermarkets.

So, the most-basic-vocabulary will need to be fleshed out, translated from experiential value to existential project. Trust in the project is essential. Deliberate projects, that is, goals that one makes a resolution to bring about do not often work. Sleep sets in. One forgets the ‘why’ of the project and so the effort to remain resolute loses its justification subjectively.

The problem of how to remain resolute has been with you for sometime – at least since you independently undertook to face your fears socially. Philosophically, you noticed Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and Krishnamurti to be talking about this problem: How to stay awake, they would say. Hyrum Smith in his book on Natural Laws of Success articulated many helpful things in this direction. Yet there is still the problem. There is still the submitting to sleep, the forgetting, the hopeless lost feeling of having no most-basic-vocabulary ‘at-hand’, for you often fall off, give in to pressures, to peers, you often indulge in entertainment and other releases, waking up out of their resultant hallucinations days later. As for meditation, you stopped looking at this direction because of its hurdle of boredom. Perhaps it is essential to get beyond this.

There is, though, the yearning for purity, for clean honesty, for a practice and a walking of the path at a stable speed.

If you blame a lot of this suffering from self-forgetting on environment, and you feel a lot of it is because of the ‘noise of thought’ of the familiar – from expectation and poor ways of living of family and community – then how do you live upright, stably, purely, in this environment until you move up to Arcata in January? How to prevent entanglement?

Discipline is necessary but not sufficient. For you will need to develop trust in the reason for the application of the discipline if you are not to develop resitance to it and so fall into entanglements. The search for Quiet will have to be subservient to the deliberate project. In the past Quiet was sought when it was not in play even if it was in conflict with what the high project necessitated. You have noticed the limitations of this. Quiet is essential. This is true. But it is not an end in itself. Or perhaps it is, perhaps the highest end is Quiet. You notice however, that such an end will not suit your circumstances, circumstances wherein action and decision are demanded. And so you will, for the moment, let the highest end shift and leave the evaluation of its meaning and assumptions for another time. This is where trust must come into play if ‘recourse’ will be a useful tool in times of distraction and crisis.

Outline of Points for Work - from a few months ago

• The Public-Narrative/Expectational-Living is both ungrounded and, as it is, is incapable of being so.
• The Source of all issues may be seen directly in one’s subconscious, can be traced in one’s ‘thought’.
• There can be no flourishing if one can’t will what they are doing.
• Mechanicalness, that is, Expectational-Living, puts one to sleep, brings one into the sleep-forgetfulness-cycle.
• Mechanicalness: doing while one’s intention is foreign to one; doing when one doesn’t know why one is doing what one is doing; when there is a disconnect between will and action.
• All illusions, fears, conflicts, disturbing and destructive movements arise from this disconnect.
• There is no such thing as a morality when one is within Expectational-Living. Morality is impossible when one cannot go against one’s society.
• The institutions of the Public-Narrative once were grounded – that is, connected with the Source – but when the Source is not seen and the story is still passed on, people cannot act from the will, cannot practice the real values which the story arises from. The way then becomes dead, lulling people to sleep.
• Without the Source, there is no possibility of flourishing. Without, in other words, the ability to recognize trajectory in Self-Narrative and the Public-Narrative, there is only mechanical movement.

Stepping Back - Washington 1

For a while I have used writing as a tool. Although I did not get the idea from Anne Frank, the platitude she justifies the starting of her diary with is similar to what it is that is being attempted with a majority of the writing I undertake: 'Paper is more patient than man.' Behind the phrase is a concern I also deeply resonate with - that what is called normal is, in fact, mechanical living - an unconsidered existence in reaction rather than of action. The movement of writing, here, is a technique of self - a way to address felt needs and felt problems. Writing, in this way, is meant to narrow down what conflicts are in play, how it is the case that there is conflict, and how one is to proceed.

Normative life is disorder, it is fragmented, broken up, filled with silent and not so silent dis-ease. Techniques of self are ways of clarification. They are slaps in the face: they bring up the dis-ease within and invite a narrowing down of experience - a tasting of the raw/red hot hurt. But at the crucial point of the raw feeling, at the moment of reactivity, there is a suggestion to use the reactive energy in an alternative way. The suggestion may be at self-examination (what is uncomfortable? why? what is taking place?); the suggestion may be to observe and get in the shoes of, embody the other (to turn the outside into oneself, to examine the trajectories present in the other, to see you the way the other sees you, to be the other).

Whatever the technique that is in play there is a conversion of energy, a manipulation of mechanical reactivity, of momentum and raw feeling. What transpires is a stepping-back. In every technique of self there is a stepping-back so as to observe 'self' as a process. Only when there is a stepping back from the trajectory/momentum, when there is a starting over, a beginner awareness, is there understanding of what it is that is occurring in consciousness: filtering.


Reading: To Have or to Be? - Erich Fromm; On Heidegger - Patricia Altenbernd Johnson.

The Most Basic Vocabulary

The simple reoccurring momentum: what am I to do?

This momentum is noticeable when a break in ‘responsibility’ occurs, such as when there is a completion of a required task, or when there is seemingly excessive ‘responsibility’, such as when there is direct engagement –and thus conflict – in an unwanted task. Here, responsibility is referring to that sensation of resistance or unease chiefly elicited do to an unconsidered disagreement or repulsion to the situation in play. Responsibility is seen as a burden of some kind – perhaps a ‘social’ pressure requiring conformity (and as such, is a dependency: an unconsidered crutch). It is unwanted because of its requirements; its requirements are unwanted for to be responsible is to act without significant ground: it is to be fragmented, to act without understanding or agreement to that which is in play. To be responsible is not, as its most prominent attribute, to do the right thing; it is most prominently to react to the momentum. To act in accordance with one’s ground is to do the right thing; to act in such a way is to understand the effect the ‘requirement’ has on awareness, how the particular requirement dominates and filters the world in accordance with its particular ‘values’, and how to counteract or act beyond the filtering process.

The ground of awareness is not a permanent or innate set of values that may be called the self. It is rather something of an experiential databank of attempted and in-play life projects. It is the most basic vocabulary. To experiment experientially with this ground is to be a yogi – it is to investigate with completeness, not holding anything back – it is to investigate into both what the ground is and why it is the way it is.

What I have just described is a Technique of Self. It is a way to ‘remember’ the ground – to be in touch with both the various momentums in play and the most basic vocabulary in play. It is a technique of mindfulness, toward awareness and beyond unconsciousness or insensitive reactivity. As such, the most prominent feature is radical self-honesty: to see first hand the momentums and their filtering processes.

Emotion, desire, thought, and impulse – all of these movements are taken to be fundamentally the same. These processes are potential actions or potential momentums: they pull and dominantly filter or shape the world in its light, thereby attempting to elicit action. As such, the movement toward ‘freedom’ or toward action with ‘ground’ is itself a potential momentum, a project.

All potential momentums have a source, a story that puts form into its energy. The task of this Technique of Self is to notice the separation of momentum and awareness, to move beyond reactive fragmentation and into experimentation with the most basic vocabulary.