I recently went to the grand opening of Yoshi’s in San Francisco to see Roy Haynes playing with Ravi Coltrane, Gary Burton, Nicholas Payton, Kenny Garrett, John Patitucci & David Kikoski. It didn’t take long to notice they were exceptionally skilled musicians. But after the initial bedazzlement, the lack of any emotional investment in the display of their virtuosity became deafening. I started to exchange notes with the friend who was accompanying me, to see whether I was alone in sensing this. He had similar thoughts. He reminded me of the difference between art and entertainment, and it was then that I realized I was tired of being entertained. I wanted to feel.
I am not saying the particular artists mentioned above are incapable of expressing emotion in their music. I’m sure they are. But that day, they didn’t. You see the kind of musical performance I am looking for is not something that can be reproduced like a commercial product. Because it requires certain psychological presuppositions that cannot simply be summoned by will. In Kierkegaard’s Diapsalmata we read:
What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris’ bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; Which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful.
It is not possible to reproduce anguish in one’s heart a couple of minutes before every performance. It does not surprise me when I see the second or third album, of a band who had a successful first album, be a complete disappointment, exactly because the conditions (both material & psychological) under which they created the first have subsequently changed exactly because of that original success.
The gap between entertainment and art is that between the display of skill and the expression of emotion. A skilled performance without any emotional expression resembles art as much as an unskilled expression of emotion does - not much. A machine playing with technical perfection a musical piece on a piano is not artistic nor is a crying child an artist.
Yesterday I witnessed once more, gladiators of music, and yet people clapped unfailingly despite the butchering of art. I was wondering what would it take to witness art? Perhaps eavesdrop on a lover singing to his beloved a song he written for her?
The minutes passed at Yoshi’s and yet I was still thinking of the subtle difference between entertainment and art. What were these people moving arms and legs on wood and string, inhaling and exhaling their breaths in brass doing?
Then I remembered the Greeks. When Pheidippides ran his marathon, he did it to inform the Athenian populace that their army had won the Persians at Marathon. He ran to deliver a message of victory and freedom. And legend has it that he died on the spot after delivering the news. What message do modern marathon runners deliver? Perhaps the same message that musical entertainers do…none. Would they die for it? Hardly; even if they did people wouldn’t find the sacrifice admirable because of the absence of the message. We might admire marathon runners for their stamina and disciplined training, but they do not carry a message, except perhaps from their sponsors…and it just seems to me that in order for the gladiators of music to be doing something other than just entertaining us they would require a noble message [1], expressed either through the lyrics, or if there are none, through the music by delicate interpretation.
Perhaps two examples might illustrate what it means to make the leap from entertainment to art. The first demonstrates how a song, even though not written by the performer, can be sung from the heart. “I Want You”, was written by Elvis Costello, but here it’s sung by Fiona Apple (with Costello on the guitar). Notice her expression at 6:53-6:58…
The second is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” written and sung by Jacques Brel. The emotional expression is undeniable:
(for an English translation go here and scroll down to find the translation by “Aurore”. Despite what she says, I like her translation)
Now, thatis art.
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Notes:
[1] Which explains why certain rap songs, even though their beat and words might be well crafted, do not feel like art because their lyrics express nothing more than petty vanities.
The idea behind Dark Vanilla was born while I was chatting online with Alejandra Guerrero, aka Corporate Vampire, about the absence of a name for a group of people who don’t clearly belong to any of the traditional groups in the realm of sexuality.
Communities around the extremes (bdsm etc.) are easy to find but whenever I browse most of these communities I just don’t feel much affinity to them. Sometimes they are vulgar, other times they are kitsch, or in some cases they are just plain sick.
On the other hand you have boring conventionalism around sexuality (what is broadly called “Vanilla sex”) hitting you in the face everyday. Men should be sweet, accommodating, kind, egalitarian….in other words, boring and castrated. That is because we are reacting to an age where men were all spine and no heart into thinking that we should swing to the opposite: men with all heart but no spine. Which is a recipe for boredom and a yearning for some biker, rockstar or any type of “bad boy” who will make a woman feel alive again! Women had to overcome their own obstacles, being seen as subordinate to men for centuries, while any woman who dared to express her healthy dark side was immediately labeled as a “slut”, “whore” and so on.
The truth of the matter, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle. People have a light and a dark side. Some people have more of the one and less of the other, but one thing seems certain: a healthy and exciting sexual life requires an expression of both. When it comes to the vast majority we are taught to repress the dark side and express only our light side. Even though an amount of repression and difficulty in life is necessary for the healthy development of our personality, a consistent rejection of certain parts of ourselves eventually has harmful effects. A boring sex life is not a healthy one and it occurs exactly because of a failure to cultivate and express both our light and our dark sides. Of course, the worst perversions occur when a complete expression of one’s sexuality is prohibited…an unhealthy predicament which has had considerable support in the past due to an inaccurate understanding of human nature and its needs.
The history of the dark side of sexuality is long. Sigmund Freud was the first modern scientist to explore the dark side of sexuality, and shed light to its relation to aggression and of course the unconscious. But going back further you always find references to a dark side in sexuality. For instance, the mythical Maenads of ancient Greece are a good example. East and West, you will find times, people and places where both sides of sexuality were explored and deemed sacred. The Kama Sutra in India and the whole philosophy of Tantra; the many Chinese texts on sexual techniques and their contribution to a better life (see for example “The Tao of Love and Sex”) all point to the obvious. It is what you do with your sexuality that determines whether it will harm or benefit your growth. There is no point denying it or trying to uproot it. One should cultivate it with care and make it part of the garden of one’s soul.
There are people who express darkness in their sexuality because their soul has no light. A soul without light ultimately ends up in unhealthy behaviors that do not enrich life. But there are those whose souls are filled with so much light that there bound to be shadows…only those belong to the realm of Dark Vanilla.
They enjoy cultivating the erotic as an art…true artists of desire. They aren’t ashamed of enjoying earthly delights nor afraid to reach out for heavenly love. Love so deep where borders between us start to fade away. It’s a realm for women who want to be loved gently and fucked hard (and vice versa)…and men who know how to do that.
It’s a realm for people who give expression to both their light and dark sides and enjoy the full range of sexual diversity, without being perverts or prudes. In short, sane people with an edge; having enough madness to dare be themselves.
The name of its philosophy should be called Sexistentialism. A succinct definition would be that a sexistentialist is an existentialist in which love and sexuality has replaced nihilism and gloom [1]. Haven’t you noticed how the founders of existentialism had problems with their love lives? Nietzsche might have been a virgin for all we know (let alone his misogynism, which is, however, subtler than most people think) and Kierkegaard pushed away perhaps the only love of his life.
The meaning of a philosopher is “the lover of wisdom”. If you wanted to learn how to love women you would go to those that don’t just love them but are loved back. For wisdom is like a woman. She does not give herself to you simply because you want her. That is something that mere professors of philosophy don’t understand. The difference between professors of philosophy and real philosophers is the difference between lovers who are never loved and lovers who are. A philosopher is someone who not only loves wisdom but wisdom loves him back. Which also explains why professors of philosophy engage in so much intellectual masturbation. In fact, the silence of philosophers throughout history on the topic of masturbation only heightens our suspicion…
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Notes:
[1] And no, I am not implying the way to overcome nihilism and gloom is to freely abandon yourself in bouts of senseless hedonism. What I am saying is that an existence in which love and sexuality are missing tends to become gloomy and nihilistic.
“Something is wrong.” That is the feeling one gets if he observes long and wide enough. It doesn’t take long for most people to get that feeling. What takes longer are the excuses we give to ourselves for not doing anything about it.
The size and complexity of the problems we face today are literally unprecedented. Never in our long evolutionary history were we called upon to solve such problems. In the past, things were pretty simple. Thus, the thought patterns that are most natural to us were developed in response to simpler times. When confronted with today’s extremely complex situations they tend to simplify our problems and suggest solutions that can have ultimately catastrophic consequences.
In an environment that is relatively stable, organisms soon were able to easily recognize the common threats and benefits in it. The ones with the fastest responses to the regular threats and benefits, survived and flourished. What has changed the last couple of thousands of years are not only the environment but also the threats and benefits in it. In addition, the rate with which these things have changed was much faster in comparison to our ability to harmoniously adapt to them.
Thus, it comes as no surprise, that with people moving into cities, and cities growing larger and more complex, and division of labor and stratification reaching unprecedented levels, we have phenomena that are new, either in kind or in scope. The new forms of violence and conflict between men being a rather prominent example.
Thus, with dramatic changes outside of us (environmental, societal etc.) came accompanying dramatic changes within us. Certain types of human beings were extinguished forever, while new ones took their place. Other times archaic forms were replaced with new ones. For example the shaman who combined knowledge of medicine and religion has since given rise to the professional physician, the priest, the psychologist, and psychiatrist.
With the Industrial revolution and the rise of science and technology, the pace of change has increased exponentially. Yet we as human beings, have changed little in comparison. I’m sure this phenomenon has been described by many others in many ways. One way to summarize it could be that our moral progress has not been as fast as our material progress. I know, being aware of the spirit of the times under which I am living at least when it comes to the West, that the mere presence of the word “moral” serves as anathema to many. Cynicism runs rampant everywhere and whenever one even hints at a common ground everybody shouts “difference!”.
Ironically enough, the mere shouting of difference in fact presupposes a deeper similarity because the concepts are logically interconnected. When you say for instance: “This is a different tree than that one,” you inevitably imply that both these things share enough to be called “trees” but it is just that one of them has enough differences to warrant the assertion that it is a different kind of tree - but nevertheless still a tree. On the same vein, even though human beings are different, they still share a common human nature. In fact, it is those similarities that make common life possible and those differences that make it interesting.
Going back to the observation that our moral progress has been slower than our material one, let me add more detail so as to make it more concrete of a statement. Electric light has spread throughout the globe and lights the darkness of people of all colors. Yet the plain truth that it is not the color of one’s skin that determines the quality of one’s character even though recognized for hundreds of years by eminent human beings before the discovery of electric light has still not penetrated the whole of humanity. In short, electric light is more widespread than moral light even though younger in its discovery.
Yet even though few will doubt the importance of eradicating racism for the future of humanity, billions of dollars are poured for new electrical infrastructure and only thousands are spent for moral infrastructure. With our actions we prove that illuminating moral darkness is not our priority.
Morality has a bad reputation. To young people it is usually a collection of seemingly absurd and unjustified restrictions upon their freedoms and desires imposed by others for their own interests. However, there were times and places where morality was of an utmost importance. During Christian times, it was the difference between an eternity in heaven or hell. And in Ancient Greece, your morality, or its synonym and Greek derived word for it, ethics, determined whether you’d live a happy and virtuous life.
The Greeks understood that the best life is not lived in isolation but with others. To live the best life requires thought, effort and imagination. Living well with others was for them an art. They named that art politics.
Politics has a worse reputation than morality. Instead of being considered the art of communal living it is considered the art of manipulation for special interests. Priests and politicians are not trusted anymore, for good reasons. In other words, we do not trust the people who were supposed to save our souls in heaven nor the people who were supposed to help us make heaven on earth.
But science we trust. Because our phones work. So do our cars, most of the time, and our electricity grid. But science cannot tell us how to live. It tells us how to the world is, not how it should be. It has been a recurring dream amongst intellectuals that we use the scientific method to arrive at unshakable conclusions regarding morality as we have done regarding physics. That dream has proven to be a nightmare in most cases, where “science” was used to justify horrible atrocities. If the scientific method aims at the truth, then it cannot but assist us in our search for a better future. But certain scientists tend to overestimate the methods of their own domain, and try to apply the same methods in different domains resulting in absurdities. However, as long as we are cautious in our thinking, the scientific approach will be a useful ally in our quest.
We live in an age where science, technology and the interconnection between nations and industries make our mistakes have serious global consequences. The personal greed of a few individuals can result in the poverty and death of the many. The lessons of history teach us that accumulated injustices create a volatile climate where explosions of blind revenge are not uncommon. Given the havoc that modern weaponry can cause, it becomes all the more necessary to follow the dictates of impartial justice which would undermine any cause for revenge and further an atmosphere of solidarity and trust among nations. Ironically, we also live in an age where the funds and expertise to drastically improve living conditions throughout the planet are available. So common sense begs the question: Why don’t we use our resources and expertise to improve our lives?
The question is not just global. It is local too. Take your city. Why don’t the rich people at the top act as benefactors to the rest of society? Not just in the form of charities that only alleviate urgent problems from time to time. But benefactors in the sense of transforming society to higher levels of general well being. The problem is not the redistribution of wealth, though that could be part of the solution. The problem has to do with how human nature responds to the situation it has found itself in. Lord Acton famously remarked: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What is it that happens to human beings in power that disables them from acting towards the best interest of the people that entrust them with this power?
The Pharaohs of Egypt wouldn’t have been able to move a single stone if others didn’t assent to their wishes. It is we as a whole that give power to the people who rule us. If soldiers don’t obey their commanders there can be no war. Immense power is based upon consent.
Think of this: Let’s suppose I am strong and skilled enough to beat three to four weak people. I beat them up unless they do as I say. If I beat them all the same, they will eventually conspire against me and assassinate me. If, however, I treat the strongest a bit more fairly and give them certain privileges, they will help me keep my power longer, and even expand it. The more I give to them, the more they trust me and the more they have to lose if I were to be eliminated. This model of social organization (I am not claiming it is the only one) has appeared throughout the centuries. What has changed over time is the amount and kind of privileges trickling down to the rest of the population.
Now think of this: In the distant past the social division of power was pretty obviously demarcated. Everyone in society knew who had the power, where they lived, how they looked like. They even interacted with them, provided you go back enough. Power was usually divided among three groups. The leader at the top had maximum privileges and authority, his minions underneath had less, and the “public” had almost none. If the public was dissatisfied it had to convince the minions that a different social organization ought to be established. However, many times the privileges that the public wanted were already enjoyed by the minions, so the minions had no reason to be motivated to change the existing social organization and risk betraying their leader and losing everything they had. So usually one or more of three things happened. Most of the times, the people within the public pushing for reform were simply killed or put to jail. That “solved” the problem and also acted as a deterrent towards others. If the number of dissenters were bigger and more organized, a prudent leader might recognize that it would be better to give some concessions to the public. That way he would appear gracious and he would avoid conflict. Finally, the first method might have the opposite effect. Instead of acting as a deterrent it would fuel rage and resentment against the leaders and his minions and ultimately lead to a revolution, in which the public simply overthrow the leader and his minions and replace them with a hierarchy that would give them the privileges they wanted.
Funnily enough, at times the revolutionaries would retain the overall structure of society and merely swap places with the ones in power. Other times the structure itself would change allowing for a different distribution in power. That is why the former types of rebellion should be called revolutions and the latter evolutions. There could be another form of rebellion where the group of rebels that get power in fact implement a societal organization that belongs to the past. In that case it should really be called a devolution.
Today however, the amount of groups that comprise society and the different amounts and kinds of power each group holds is much bigger. To believe that society is divided into three classes: Upper class, middle class and low class is simply naive. That is because there are many types of power. A professor might make a modest income but he commands more respect than a plumber who makes more. So the professor might be objectively poorer, but he has more social power than the plumber. So different people have different types of power to lose with the restructuring of the status quo, regardless of where they stand in the social hierarchy. The more groups there are, and the more complex the kinds and types of power that exist within society, the harder it is for a common vision to be found that would mobilize all those groups in restructuring society in a significant way. By now, most Western societies have supplied their public with enough goods, privileges and freedoms that the majority of the public belongs to the middle classes (or wants to think it does). Thus, most people believe that they have too much to risk from a significant restructuring of society, and tend to be supporters of the status quo. Looked at it from this perspective, ironically enough this would mean that the West at the moment contains perhaps the most conservative societies in the world.
While it is true that it has managed to create mechanisms with which reform can be achieved without conflict (voting etc.) it is also true that getting them to move is far from easy. Strangely enough, political issues that have been at the top of the concerns (e.g. universal health care) for most Americans (to take the US as an example) have consistently failed to come up in the political agendas of the candidates. And when they do, they show up in some ridiculously watered down version that is almost an affront to the American people. Even the road to high administrative positions is very difficult if you don’t already belong to the elite. Even though in principle open for all, in practice the examples of people from the gutters of society to emerge to the highest offices are very rare. A casual glance at the background of the vast majority of US politicians proves the point.
When was the last time you helped a stranger? We don’t do it often, do we? When was the last time you helped someone you knew? We do that very often. Does it come as a surprise then, that Western nations genuinely help distant nations of which they have little affinity much less frequently than they help nations they’ve been friends with?
We care more about our friends. We are literally wired by our evolutionary past to care more about people who are close to us because they have more chances of helping us survive than strangers half-way across the globe. When I say close, I mean it in a broad way. Today the internet has showed that people can care about people half-way across the globe provided they become close friends, even though they are far away in terms of physical proximity.
Now think of this: You grow up with a bunch of friends. You go to the same sports and social clubs. You have common friends. You go to the same colleges together. You marry within the same social circle. Then you end up with this same bunch of old friends in government together. Who do you think you are going to help first? The unknown, faceless farmer in the Midwest? Or your childhood friend who has done so much for you and now needs you to cover his back for some misdeed? Who do you think you’re going to grant favors to? Your college buddy or some annoying lobbyist who fights for rights you’ve enjoyed most of your life and thus have never felt the injustice one feels who is deprived of them?
It is the sum of small and big favors to and from friends against the interests of strangers that eventually result in grave national injustices. Satanic conspiracies orchestrated by evil people are usually a very naive way of looking at big problems. They rest on the psychological hope that given that the problem is caused by a handful of people, getting rid of them will get rid of the problem. So the solution seems easy and within reach. If however, the problem is *not* simply the cause of a handful of people but an outcome of an extremely complicated interaction of causes of which even ourselves are implicated, then the solution becomes almost impossible to grasp in its complexity. Conspiracies in fact offer hope because they make sense out of chaos. The truth, on the other hand, is much more complicated and might lead to desperation - unless you develop your mind and will to rise up to this noble challenge.
The heroes of the future are those who will see our problems for what they are and do something about them, rather than die fighting straw men and ghosts.
This is the latest documentary by Adam Curtis. It traces our idea of freedom through contemporary times and shows how a limited and narrow definition of human nature which originated in the Cold War and had the purpose of anticipating Soviet moves in the nuclear chess game, was later adapted and used to direct policy in disparate fields. From a diagnostic tool of mental illness to a way of organizing society and the economy. This had unintended and sometimes catastrophic effects and altered the ideal of freedom throughout the world.
Episode three is found in three parts, pasted below respectively:
The Power of Nightmares is another fascinating documentary by the same writer and director (Adam Curtis) that produced the Century of the Self. The issues it raises are multiple and I will refrain from a brief summary that will do injustice to the whole of the film. Instead I will simply post the videos and let them speak for themselves. The second part might be a little dysfunctional, but you can watch the whole video if you keep moving the tracker of the video to “wake up” the buffering process every now and then.
One of the best documentaries I’ve seen the past years. It is the story of how one of Freud’s relatives, the founder of “Public Relations”, took psychoanalysis and applied it to business and politics. It then takes you on a journey of how businesses and politicians realized the power of psychology to control and direct the populations to their own aims. A truly fascinating, eye-opening-get-out-of-the-matrix documentary, created by non other than the BBC, now available in its entirety on Google Videos, in four parts, posted below in order:
“The commercial world, then, treats us like celebrities - “Because you’re worth it,” it says. It flatters and kowtows to us and keeps on doing so right up until the moment when we hand over our credit-card details. Then we are cast aside and condemned to a purgatory of being held in queue on a customer service line for all eternity. What fools we are.” - How To Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson.
I was reading this and couldn’t help thinking how true it was when it comes to the vast majority of businesses today. Perhaps the most notorious device that exemplifies the implicit belief that the customer’s time is worth less than the company’s time are the automated answering systems. We all know them: “For Sales, press 1…for Billing press 2…” and so on ad nauseum. Now, whoever claims that this system is primarily for the customer’s benefit is a scoundrel - it is nothing but an infernal contraption by which your patience is tested by the narration of numbers in exchange for some benefit to the companies that institute it. Having a viewing of Network fresh in my mind, I believe it is time we shout with one voice: “I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
So, everyone who is SICK AND TIRED of automated call answering systems, leave a comment that says: “Press 1″ followed by the company that you’d like to REMOVE their automated call answering systems.
We’ll then send those comments to the companies listed and demand they remove that infernal contraption and give its job to a human instead. That way we’ll create jobs for people as well as give an end to our telephonic woes.
I also propose we make a badge for all companies that satisfy two criteria:
1. They have Humans answering the phone.
2. They do not put you on hold for *more than 30 seconds*.
So to all designers out there send me your proposed badge in a small jpg, and I will post a blog with all the proposed designs and have people vote on which one would best represent our mission.
And a small piece of advice to companies with a big volume of calls:
1. Find out what the majority of callers want. Let’s say most people call for billing questions.
2. Direct ALL calls to the billing department. This way most callers will automatically find themselves where they want to be with zero hassle.
3. The callers that did not call for billing questions can easily be re-directed to the relevant departments by the touch of a button.
4. Perform the statistics as to what most callers want every month so that you change the direction of all calls accordingly. If your company launches a campaign for a new product and everybody is calling to find out about it, it would be stupid to have them directed to the billing department just because the stats showed that 6 months ago the volume of calls went to billing questions. In short, adapt to caller demand regularly.
My mind works aphoristically. It comes up with insights about a variety of particular things effortlessly, but it takes me a lot of effort to put those insights together into a coherent system. When I try to put them together, they seem to lose their life. It is the difference between an orderly military march and an improvised dance solo. Though the dancer’s movements are not following the movements of any other dancers, they seem to have an organic harmony of their own; they are spontaneous but not chaotic; they are like the music a master piano player creates while improvising. You cannot necessarily predict the next move by the previous, but the harmony is there. It is not accidental but rather flows from a mysterious creative necessity. It is unclear whether the master follows something or something follows him. It is not the mere novelty that fascinates us, but the leaps of improvement from one pattern to the next. Improvement usually presupposes fixed standards, but the dizziness that comes when reading the mental dances of great thinkers is not solely caused by the speed with which they move within those standards but by those extra steps that transcend them without transgressing them. The great thinkers embody the spirit of the standards; the footprints they leave after their dance make up their letters and their writings.
No one ever danced philosophy like Friedrich Nietzsche. Many philosophers, accustomed to military marches, give up on him and blame him for being contradictory, confused, crazy. But anyone who was fascinated by the dance, and kept trying to learn it like they used to teach music in the old days – by ear and imitation – slowly realized it’s intrinsic order and profundity. We are now living in the tertiary generation of Nietzsche scholarship, and after the clearing of many gross misinterpretations, his importance is now secured in the annals of intellectual history. Even in hard-nosed Anglo-American analytic universities, at least his Genealogy of Morality is seen as an important though eccentric contribution to moral philosophy.
Never had a philosopher stimulated my mind in such diverse ways as Nietzsche. His writings tried to reflect the spirit of the dance of philosophy, not its letter. When I was being tortured by the likes of Heidegger and Hegel on the one side, and Davidson and Wiggins on the other, I used to open a book of The Gay Science in order to escape the morgue of thought for a breath of fresh air. I am not denying that one cannot learn a great deal from dissecting the corpses of thought. But to mistake dissection for philosophy requires you to kill her in the process. And that is what most philosophers have been doing over the last century, killing philosophy and making a living by being the anatomists of thought. No wonder the number of philosophy departments has been shrinking over the years and lay people don’t see its use in everyday life.
I am still plagued by doubts as to whether I should dance or come up with a military formation. I’m trying my feet at both, always experimenting, like my mentor. In the end, they don’t send dancers to the front. Soldiers win the wars – but only dancers know how to celebrate victory.
Philosophy is not just about winning the good life, but celebrating it after you’ve won it. It is not only about dissecting problems, it is also about living the solutions. A philosopher who has remained in the dissecting room is only half a philosopher. He may know the steps, but he doesn’t know how to dance. I’ve been in and out of the dissecting room, but I always felt the difference. The ultimate gift of philosophy is a flourishing life. A life geared towards actualizing the conditions, both inner and outer, for your maturity and the subsequent natural inclination to share its fruits. This is what I’ve been living from the end of 2002. I don’t know exactly how it occurred, but I’ve been trying to find out – it’s not much fun dancing alone, though it’s damn better than not dancing at all.
I belong to those musicians of thought who learned by listening and imitating, till they learned the spirit behind the music, and started to dance to their own, novel music. But many people want to dance to their own music before they know how to play. They want to follow their own drummer before knowing how to follow. They believe learning from another constrains their own creativity. They are fools. They will never become great artists. Because Art requires humility and no child ever lost its creativity by learning a language it did not create.
If I am searching for a key and somebody tells me “Look behind the candle”, and I look behind the candle and find the key, shall I not take it because I didn’t find it myself? Should I disregard the theories of Newton and Einstein just because I’m not Newton or Einstein?
The truth is something common, and that is why it is distinguished from personal opinion. That something is common doesn’t mean it is in plain view, or that it is easy to find. It merely denotes that it can be found by anyone who looks for it properly.
Does it mean that a personal opinion can’t be true? – Of course not. That something is a personal opinion doesn’t mean it is ipso facto[1] untrue. That would unwittingly make truth rest on something outside the person: an authority, ‘nature’, God. This would in turn presuppose an impotence of the person, an inability to find truth in his personal opinions and a need for an outside source to guarantee truth for him[2]. Personal opinions can be true. But they are true not in virtue of being said by a specific person, an institution, an expert or authority. The truths of physics are not true because they are said by a physicist. That would shift truth back to the idea of authority, that the truth is based on nothing more than personal opinion.
The desire to have your own thoughts, ideas etc. usually stems from the desire to be unique and to be recognized and most importantly praised as such. Thus it can be nothing more than an expression of narcissism, or if one wants to look deeper, an expression of an insecurity[3]. It can also be an expression of possessiveness. If something is taken from somewhere, it means it can be taken. But if I create it myself, from myself, then it is solely my possession and difficult, and ideally impossible, to steal. That is why narcissistic and possessive people tend not to acknowledge sources or influences for their ideas unless they know of the radical differences they have with them. Thus somebody who came up with a theory of the psyche which is remarkably similar to Freud’s, claims as an influence Aristotle, so as to simultaneously not appear ungrateful (parthenogenesis arouses suspicion) and original. This insecurity also leads scientists and intellectuals to remain intentionally blind to ways their own theories integrate with larger or better theories which belong to colleagues of their own or of some other department.
But knowledge is not like candy. If somebody does steal it, I still remain in possession of it. If I discover some new theory of light and a fellow physicist reads my notes, I do not, by such behavior, lose knowledge of my new theory. It is just that now both my colleague and I have ‘possession’ of this knowledge. The one’s possession of it doesn’t deprive it from the other. That is the wonder of knowledge – it is not depleted by being shared. What bothers a pioneer is not sharing his knowledge, but being deprived of the recognition of being the one who initially discovered it.[4]
However, that is not the only motivation behind the desire to think your own thoughts. To think your own thoughts is also an expression of our deep need to be free, and to be the agents of our freedom. To think our own thoughts, independent of all others is to assert that power within ourselves and affirm it. It is experiencing the power we have to be the savior of ourselves.
But truth is a relationship, and a relationship presupposes something outside oneself. Even the relationship we have with ourselves subtly demonstrates what Kant, Schopenhauer, the Buddha and others have been telling us for years. That in observing ourselves we realize that the observing self is distinguished from the observed self. Kant and Schopenhauer assumed that this shows that there is a self that resides apart from the phenomena of experience and makes experience possible. The Buddha[5], subtler, realized that this is an illusion. There is no ‘Self’ behind the multiplicity of phenomena[6]. Without the phenomena, without an observed self, there can be no observing ‘Self’. Our idea of self is as much dependent on the phenomena as they are on the self. That was his idea of ‘dependent arising’. And in that idea, he discovered that unity of ourselves with the world. A unity which is not merely in thought but can be experienced in meditation. Thus the Buddha was one among a few persons in history who solved the ancient riddle of how the Many are One and the One Many both in theory and in practice. That is why ultimately, the truth is One, because in realizing that we are many, and that we are not only the poles of the relationship but the relationship itself, we transcend duality, and transcend ourselves.
[1] Elegant Latin expression for the convoluted English equivalent of “by that very fact”.
[2] Incidentally, the role that God had in the philosophy of Descartes.
[3] For all narcissists are insecure. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to receive excessive praise either from themselves or from others.
[4] This however, doesn’t cancel the observation we made as to the motive of possessiveness. The possessiveness of a person is not due to the nature of the possessions but due to the nature of one’s character. Thus if a ‘possession’ (like knowledge) is by its nature impossible to ‘steal’ in the conventional sense of deprivation, that doesn’t alter the character of the possessive person who is engaged with such ‘possessions’.
[5] And others like Nietzsche for instance.
[6] To be fair to Kant and Schopenhauer we must mention that both of them entertained the idea that ultimately, there is no ‘Self’, because in the noumenal realm the categories of the understanding like individuation and causation do not apply, thus it makes no sense of talking about ‘a’ Self. In that realm everything is unindividuated, uncaused etc. But how can we understand unindividuation if we don’t refer to individuation? That is the problem of the ineffable, but yet nevertheless graspable, and according to the mystical traditions, experientially confirmable.
