change your reality

Life has no brakes

“Moral education” sounds like something contemporary teenagers would skip to go skateboarding. Why? Don’t they care about what is good for them? Of course they do. That is why they skipped class to go skateboarding! Contemporary teenagers are not corrupt! Corruption takes time - only old people are corrupted.

The teenager who is rebellious and does something different from what he is told is actually exercising his own judgment instead of obeying ours. That his judgment may be mistaken is the minor evil that should be allowed to avoid a bigger one: his enslavement to judgments other than his own.[1]

How can you encourage teenagers to trust their own judgment when we prescribe where and when it shall be used? How can teenagers trust something that they seldom use? How could they ever get better at it if they don’t use it? Would you drive a vehicle you don’t really know how to drive, especially if it has no brakes? Life has no brakes. When we allow people to drive on the highway of life, we are surprised by the number of crashes and casualties. Not to mention the insufferable traffic.

Then we think that the solution is to add rules and regulations. We think this way at least well avoid the casualties. But the crashes happened not because of the lack of rules but because people were never given the chance to exercise their judgment, thus improving it. Adding rules makes people worse. Road signs rob us of our judgment*. They are the sign that people are too stupid to trust. It is the same with laws. We do not trust each other. But the solution is not obedience to the law.

Laws were made for specific people, under specific circumstances. They become obsolete if the people and the circumstances change. I am at a crossroad around 4 a.m. Most people are asleep in their homes, their cars in their garages. I am not drunk or too tired. I am a competent driver. There is ample visibility towards all directions. It is a quiet night. I do not see or hear a car for miles. Yet the light is red. According to the traffic light, I shouldn’t drive forward. But the light does not know it is 4 a.m.; it does not know that most drivers are sleeping, their cars in their garages; it does not know I am not drunk or too tired. It cannot see or hear there isn’t a damn car coming for miles; it doesn’t know all these things. For if it did, it would have been green. And because it doesn’t know these things and I do, I drive on as if it was green.

Policemen or judges who charge you for crossing a red light under such circumstances have dehumanized themselves into ignorant traffic lights. They make those who embody the spirit of the law into criminals, while sometimes giving the green light to the bodies of criminals who only obey its letter.

Notes:

[1] Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims.

* For those of you who are pedantic, I obviously don’t mean all signs, rules and regulations rob us of our judgment, nor I am implying that all of them are useless.

Philosophy is not boring!

Philosophy is not boring. It talks about the most important issues in life – and it doesn’t tell you which those are. It is not an order, it is a question. You are supposed to find the answer.

Philosophers who are boring are failing in life. A boring life cannot be a good one. “So what if a philosopher is boring? He may still be a good philosopher.” Yes – only if you subtract one of the main aims of philosophy: Living the good life. That contemporary philosophy is filled with boring professors of philosophy only accentuates Thoreau’s remark:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not
kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. (from Walden)

Someone who has been a philosopher for years should be discernibly different in the things that matter from most people. He has supposedly made it his life’s task to live the good life. If he isn’t living better than most who haven’t set such a conscious goal for themselves, he is evidently not a good philosopher. Philosophy is not just another profession. It is a calling. You cannot be a philosopher from 9 to 5 and be a layman at night. Being a philosopher means being an example of your own philosophy. Walking the talk and talking the walk.
Of course, being a philosopher is a process, as most things are. If someone has just created the ideal to which he wants to strive, it is unfair to expect that he’s going to match it overnight. Because the ideals of philosophy entail the whole way of life. Changing your whole way of life overnight is highly improbable if not completely impossible. But being only a shadow of the ideal you still believe yet have sketched 20 years ago, should raise doubts about your sincerity or your strength of will. Doubts that you should at least have personally raised and examined. That is why philosophies have been called confessions. They are the sublimated confessions of personal struggles to live out ideals; the triumphs and tragedies of human actualization.

To restrict yourself to offering a little nugget of truth (which seems to be the rule among philosophers these days) while living in a fortress of falsehood can hardly be called noble. Will noble remain an honorific term for people who don’t deserve it? Why don’t people aspire to greatness anymore? And why should greatness always be equated with arrogance and conceitedness? Isn’t it time to believe that there is something more than a nihilistic humility? Have philosophers forgotten Kant’s motto? Sapere Aude damn it!

The Point of Education

The point of education should not be the memorization of true sentences or beliefs. Because what we thought was true may prove false, and we are now stuck with memories of falsehoods. The point of education should be good judgment. If you have good judgment you do not need to remember the good judgments of others because you have one yourself. Your knowledge is not a passive retrieval of memories, but an active judgment for what is true, good and beautiful. It is the difference between being given a fish and fishing for yourself. The former makes you dependent on the fish giver; the latter makes you free.

On Beautiful Thinking

Thinking is divided in how one thinks and what one thinks. Thus two men may entertain the same idea yet express it in a different way. The way one thinks, is the province of art; what one thinks, is the province of philosophy very broadly conceived. It is the common distinction between form and content.
Just as thinking has form and content so does feeling. Though Goethe and Rilke might share the same emotion, they do not experience it the same way. The influence of the way one experiences emotions can be so great that it literally transforms the content of the emotion. Just as the same wine would acquire a different taste when it is aged in barrels of different kinds of wood.
Our mental and emotional life usually consists in a continuous alteration of thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and feelings appear and disappear in our awareness like people in train stations. Some stay more, others less; some make an impression on us even though their stay was brief; others are unnoticed even though they’ve been there for ages.
Just as it is possible for painters belonging to different movements in art to produce entirely different paintings of the same subject, so it is possible to shape the way we think and feel in such a way, that we become the Impressionists and Surrealists of our souls. And just as the choice of a way of expression doesn’t hinder the choice of content we choose to express, so it is possible we can become Realist Platos or Abstract Spinozas.
If you want to paint like Michelangelo, you do not study under Matisse. If you want to think like Descartes you do not study the Scholastics. Your mind and emotions are molded according to what you’ve been exposed. Thus, it is not an unwise suggestion that if you want to think correctly, you shouldn’t hang out with fools, and if you want think beautifully, you should befriend poets.

On the Meaning of Life

Some perspectives on the subject:

1

To look back to the circumstances under which a question arises helps us in understanding a question better thus making it easier to answer it. Moreover, it can even point to the dissolution of the question altogether and make the answer unecessary or generate different, perhaps more interesting questions. The question regarding the meaning (or purpose, which is not exactly the same[1]) of existence has a complicated origin, where many factors play a role and contribute to its emergence.
I will start with the simplest, and one that has been experienced by all. When we were children, we asked questions about everything. When children ask the question “What is that?” they do not merely want to know the name of something which captures their curiosity. They want to know what it does and what it is for. We categorize external objects not only by what they look like but also by what they do and what they are for. This mode of questioning is then transposed on whatever the child needs to know. When parents shout or beat their children, most of them make sure the child knows why this happens so the child won’t do it again. The child feels it was responsible for the parents reaction. So children associate certain behaviors and the subsequent pain or reward (be it physical or emotional) with a reason, and it doesn’t take much time to generalize (the tendency for children to generalize is well documented[2]) this to most internal states: anger, envy, jealousy, fear. Their experience with their parents being the most intimate and most frequent, their initial model for explaining their internal states is that an external agent causes internal states (e.g. Parent causing pain to the child or child making the parent angry). Thus, they mostly seek external causes for what happens within them.

Let us summarize the above insights in order to connect them with later ones. Children are heavily assisted in learning the meaning and purpose of things from an external authority figure. He/She symbolizes their source of knowledge. They are made to feel responsible for their parents reactions. They are punished and rewarded by the same persons and during those processes they associate external causes with internal states.

Having said the above, it is now not difficult to be in the position to understand the Freudian point[3] regarding Christianity. God, as the benevolent father with supreme authority, is the agent who teaches us the meaning and purpose of things. The Father who can answer what our father couldn’t because he’s omniscient. The Father who punishes and rewards and make us feel responsible for our sins. Where our sins explain the pain and evil in the world, like our bad behavior explained the punishment our parents inflicted on us.

Thus, unwanted internal states, are moralized from the beginning. Even if the child is not brought up in a Christian environment the punishment he receives is given a moral justification: “You did something wrong.” Thus, the moral interpretation of natural phenomena has haunted mankind for thousands of years. Earthquakes and floods were seen as punishments and good harvests and fertile wives as rewards.

Children, as well as adults, can withstand meaningful suffering because they can change it by their future behavior. The child can ‘behave’ and the adult can be a good Christian or a good citizen. But pointless suffering seems unendurable exactly because we cannot do something to change it.

Thus, the usual emergence of the question regarding the meaning of life comes from the experience of pointless suffering. “Why?” is the incessant question of a suffering mankind. If only we knew why we suffered, we could do something about it, and hence avoid suffering. It is this quest that has given birth to all religions. The Buddhists answered it by claiming that the root of suffering is desire. Hence if I eliminate desire, I eliminate suffering. The Christians thought mankind was suffering because it had a sinful nature, inherited from its parents Adam and Eve. If you’re a Christian or a Muslim there is a meaning in suffering but there is no escape - at least not in this life. Virtually every philosophy addresses the issue of suffering and why it is present. The Stoics claimed that we suffer because we don’t live according to nature. The Epicureans because we do not prudently choose which pleasures to indulge in and which to avoid. Epictetus claimed we suffer because we care about things which are not in our power to change. Were we to concentrate on the ones that are truly within our power, then suffering would largely diminish and a happy, peaceful life would be possible. The list is endless but the point remains the same. We want to know why we suffer - in order to do something about it.

2

What is the meaning of life? Most people unwittingly subscribe to what in philosophy is called an “Augustinian” picture of language. That is, they take the meaning of words to be the objects for which they stand. Thus, for those persons (let’s call them Augustinians), the meaning of the word “apple” is the apple itself, and if someone were to ask them what they mean by apple, they would fetch or point an apple. The problem with this picture, famously diagnosed by Wittgenstein, is that you cannot point to an object for the meaning of some words. What object would you point, for example, for words like “No” or “Now”? There simply isn’t any object for such words, and this just reveals that the Augustinian picture of language is, if not mistaken, then at least limited, because it fails to explain how we understand words in which there is no object that we can point to.

Thus, when people ask, what is the meaning of life? They sometimes mistakenly search for an object, which simply confuses them and leads them nowhere.

Wittgenstein eventually came to the conclusion that the meaning of words and symbols comes from the way they are used. In short: Meaning is use. Think for example of the word “gay”. In the 19th century it meant: happy, cheerful. In the 20th century it means a homosexual man. The usage of the word has changed, and thus its meaning. This explains why it is so much easier to learn a foreign language while living in that foreign country, where the words and their uses are so vividly interconnected, instead of learning it from a book. Language is something you understand by practice, and practice is nothing other than use.

Thus, if we were to follow the developments in the philosophy of language and linguistics, we would say that the meaning of life, is not to be found in some object external to itself, like the apple in the case of “apple”. If you spend your life searching for it in the Augustinian way, you’re never going to find it, for the presuppositions of the question you are asking are leading you astray. Neither is it to be found in some value turned into a noun (so as to make it look like an object) like “the Good”, “the True”, “the Beautiful”, or even a conjunction of them. The meaning of life is found within the practice of life itself. It is is discovered in living it.

[1] See Appendix (not written yet)

[2] See A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, Cambridge University Press.

[3] In, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion.

Wisdom and Hydrodynamics

The good life is a correct balance between know-that and know-how. Knowing in an intellectual way is simply not enough for a full understanding and embodiment of wisdom. In fact, a good definition of wisdom is embodied knowledge. Or, in vernacular: knowledge in action. On the other hand, wise action is impossible with ignorance in theory.
That doesn’t mean that a man cannot swim in life unless he knows the laws of hydrodynamics. But someone proficient in hydrodynamics can do things no Olympic swimmer ever could. That however, is irrelevant when it comes to the good life, broadly conceived. When it comes to that, it is more important to know how to swim well than to know hydrodynamics. The problem we have today is that people know hydrodynamics and have forgotten how to swim – if they had ever learnt to do so.
And you can’t swim in life unless you get in the water. Contemporary philosophers are professors of hydrodynamics. That is why they cannot teach anybody how to swim well in the ocean of life. Poor students of philosophy, they enroll in philosophy hoping they will learn to swim and they are made to believe that hydrodynamics is all one needs to know. That is why contemporary philosophers can even seem incompetent when it comes to everyday life, whereas they should have been its graceful artists.
“Critics are to painters what ornithologists are to birds” Birds fly, painters paint. Critics criticize and ornithologists analyse and observe. Contemporary philosophy is in the same predicament. Instead of living life, they analyse and observe it. They cannot dance like the philosophers of the past. While true philosophy is learning how to fly, contemporary philosophy merely analyses what flight is.

Blaming the cook instead of the recipe

The human being sketched by most of our ethical ideals is hardly ever personified in real life. An ethical ideal resembles a cooking recipe in that it usually contains a description of a final exquisite dish and the recipe with which to make it. Looking at some, I sometimes realize that the materials they require for this dish do not exist in reality or if they do they don’t turn out into the exquisite dish that is described by the recipe, no matter how carefully you follow the instructions. Most creators of ethical ideals, instead of blaming themselves, opt to blame the persons trying to cook it. In the end both end up hungry.

The fragmentation of knowledge

We are flooded by fragments. Countless bits of information are given to us from everywhere: the media, experts, friends and last but not least – are own experiences. The sheer amount of information is overwhelming for any individual. We thought a solution would be for everyone to concern themselves with only a small portion of reality; this way we would collectively achieve something like a big picture by combining the particular visions of specialists. But who, among a society of specialists, can do that? A collection of short-sighted individuals does not result in collective long-sightedness. We do not live in the details. We don’t live in the big picture either. We live in between and in both, and blindness in one sphere has effects on the others. We may sigh for the past, smile in the present, and cry for the future. We have memory, awareness and vision. We enjoy the thrill of chaos as much as we fear it. We may choose the safety of order yet regret in not avoiding its boredom. We are complex and simple, pathetic and glorious, beautiful and horrendous. A view of our history sometimes fulfils our grandest hopes, other times our worst nightmares.

How do we make sense of it all? From the grand mosaic of life, what is worth our time, which is after all, so short? What are the conditions, both inner and outer, which we should be looking for? How do we know we’ve found them? And if we cannot find them, how can we create them?

The only thing you ever need to find

When I finished my Masters degree in philosophy, I decided to fulfill another great dream of mine: Traveling throughout Europe, without a plan or a tour package but with plenty of cash (blessed be my father). I traveled for almost four months straight, alone. From the bustling cafés in Saint-Germain; the astonishing Sagrada Familia in Barcelona; the arabesque Alhambra castle in Granada; the scenic coast of southern France; the imposing castle of Salzburg; the spectacular carnival in Venice; to the towering yet elegant David of Michelangelo in Florence, I didn’t take a single photograph. For once in my life I decided that being a traveler, instead of tourist, is to live your journeys inside the frame, not behind it.

In my closet on the top shelf I have a small bag of items. A cd from a cellist who haunted the Gothic quarter of Barcelona with his music; an envelope from Cavendish’s[1] old residence in Cannes (turned into a hotel); a card with the details of a new friend from Jerez de la Frontera; a dreamshare that consists of a unique alloy created by a Dutch artist I met in a train to Italy; a map of Florence and other paraphernalia. If someone else finds the bag, he might guess someone has been traveling; likes a particular cellist; met someone in Jerez; stayed in Cannes; is into original artistic stock exchange schemes and so on. But he wont be able to reconstruct the inter-twinning stories behind them let alone the emotions, experiences and realizations that went with them. Take the items out of the bag. Disperse them in the wind. Now these things might as well belong to different persons living different, separate lives.

When I started ruminating on the idea of writing a book, I thought that perhaps constructing a reading list might be better, since after much reading of my own I thought that at least when it comes to perennial philosophical issues of interest to anyone with a pulse, or for those trying to get one, the most interesting things have already been said if not explicitly then implicitly, in more than one way, in a number of languages, from various times and places, by people young and old of both genders. What I didn’t immediately realize, is that these vast number of ideas and written experiences which I thought were enough to, if not completely solve, then at least give you the necessary education to deal successfully with life’s problems and its mysteries, were like those items in the bag on the top shelf in my closet. Without me, they were as disconnected from each other as those items dispersed in the wind. They did make sense, but all the inter-twinning stories that were inextricably linked with the emotions, experiences and realizations that gave me a clearer vision of the truth and made me a better person were all lost between the lines.

Without me the most important thing: the living, breathing, feeling, remembering, promising, touching, kissing, and last but certainly not least, loving human being would be lost in the wind…

and that is too much to lose, and the only thing you ever need to find.

[1] Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) the renowned scientist.

The limitations of personal freedom

I remember one time we were sitting with my brother in a small park. We had just bought some snacks and were enjoying them in a crisp and sunny autumn noon. Just as we were laughing on some inside joke we had made up, I realized we were the only persons in the park. Not a single child running towards the swings; the benches empty, the birds chirping alone and the sun shining only on our puzzled faces. Where was everybody? The adults at work, the children at some daycare center. If they were lucky, they were with their grandparents, who could, being on pension, potentially take them to the park. If not, they were home alone, vegetating in front of the television.
My brother and I were fortunate enough to belong to a family that didn’t coerce us to “get a job”, as if getting a job is the solution to all your problems, and had some financial means to support us. We were free to laugh away in the park – but we were laughing alone. I remember another time, I was in a relationship with a woman that, like most women, had to work for a living. Many times I wondered: What is the use of personal freedom, if you cannot enjoy it with the people you love? Most of my girlfriends, friends, family are working in some job that takes most of their time and youth in exchange for some pieces of paper that can buy a lot of things, but they can never buy lost time or youth. So in effect, they are exchanging something invaluable with something valuable. That’s not a bargain – it’s a rip off. We call ourselves free, but we are not. You are not free if you can vote your masters every four years. Nor are you free, if you are living in a society that expects you to exchange the most fruitful years of your life in some obligatory drudgery (and everything done out of necessity becomes a drudgery) only to emerge at the end of your life, unable to enjoy the fruits of your labors, not only due to your physical incapability, but also because most fruits have by now turned sour. Add to that inflation and low pensions, and you barely can afford any fruit whatsoever.

Something has to be done – what are you going to do about it?