philosophy
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What are we?
D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?
You are viewing stuff tagged with philosophy.
Katherine Rowland writing at the Guardian, ‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness:
The late social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a sendup of what she saw as an “epidemic of wellness” in her book, Natural Causes. Our obligation to the self had become, in her opinion, an endless gauntlet of obligations. Our commitment to augmenting and bettering ourselves threatens to overtake, rather than improve, our minds and bodies. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it,” she wrote. “Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”
If we were to take the obligation to wellness seriously, wouldn’t it, ultimately, center on that possibility?
Wisdom from Marc Hamer’s Spring Rain: A Life Lived in Gardens, in Rivka Galchen’s review:
“There are two kinds of old people,” Hamer writes. “There are the old people who are in pain and are miserable, and there are the old people who are in pain and are light-hearted. All old people are in pain.” He has an inclination to celebrate and express love—an inclination that seems built out of the humus of a difficult childhood, characterized by an angry and critical father. “There’s nothing else to do with life but celebrate it, believe me; I am old, and there’s truly nothing other to do with life than celebrate the fact that it exists.”
After seeing a particularly arresting picture of it, I’ve been thinking about the Pantheon in Rome. Here are a few bits about it from Wikipedia:
Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
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It is one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has been in continuous use throughout its history.
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Throughout the day, light from the oculus moves around the interior in a reverse sundial effect: marking time with light rather than shadow.
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The large bronze doors to the cella, measuring 14.6 ft wide by 24.7 ft high, are original.
D’où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ?
Dear Essie,
You are one room over, humming a tune to yourself while you write a chapbook about mermaids using the stickers that Mama got you as illustrations. (I’m getting regular updates: it’s a great book.) I’m here in the next room watching the snow fall and ruminating about the world you’ll someday confront; all its inequities, violence, duplicity, rigged systems, cruelties. But those worries are not for you right now.
Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
All my anecdotes over twenty years of poor writing conclude with overwrought sentences of revelation and/or triumph. Scroll through the archives here and you can witness me try repeatedly to extract a profound conclusion or seismic change from stochastic tribulations. And so, I find my writing style to be annoyingly egocentric, and incompatible with a change in my philosophy, one that bends toward though hasn’t arrived at, nihilism.
In the style of Glennon Doyle…
Essie,
There’s a time in your life when you’ll be striving, reaching, seeking. Every new subject, every new interest, every new person will crackle with the possibility of sparking and bringing alive a part of you that you didn’t know existed. It’s the kind of ride you’ll know you’re on when you’re on it. It needs no label. And what’s more: by definition, you’ll enjoy it. It feeds the ego. For most, it occurs in late teens, early twenties. For some, it’s delayed by loss but ignites later in life, when there is time and space. For still others, tragically, it never happens.
I have no wise words to offer during a time such as this. I never dreamed of such a scenario in my life; I always imagined the more mundane disasters: hospitals, accidents, bankruptcy. I’ve had a brush with none, and yet here I am, with all humanity, in this disaster.
Have I, this whole life, been picking my way through a labyrinth, each choice sending me down another corridor of choices? Or was I launched from a canon, my trajectory unknowable, and yet fixed? Am I the latter, thinking I am the former? Do I write silly questions, straw men in dual, false dichotomies, the truth an ineffable middle-place?
Sheelah Kolhatkar writing in the New Yorker; The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes:
In the U.S., executive compensation has increased, on average, by nine hundred and forty per cent since 1978, according to one estimate; during the same period, worker pay has risen twelve per cent. Income inequality hasn’t been this extreme since the nineteen-twenties. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that, as a result of cuts to estate and corporate taxes, as well as the 2017 G.O.P. tax bill, the four hundred richest Americans pay a lower over-all tax rate than any other group in the country. In a Times Op-Ed, Saez and Zucman wrote, “This is the tax system of a plutocracy.”
I see people. Every day, I see them. Ostensibly, they’re there for a dental appointment but of course everything’s connected. I hear of sudden deaths, grinding mental illnesses, slow goodbyes. If I release the exigencies of those days from my mind, it leaves me with this low note: there’s not a lot we can do to make sure we are here tomorrow. We have the time we have, and nobody, no-thing knows when that time will run out.
James Wood wrote a tremendous review of Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom called If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything. Since I’ll be quoting a review that quotes the book, we’re two degrees removed from the source, but I don’t have the book yet and there are tons of ideas here I want to mark. Here’s one:
“I was born to be me.”
—Ess
Mykala and I have what we call everything’s going to be OK moments. They occur when, unexpectedly, you take a deep, clear breath and, finding the typical tightness and anxiety missing, begin to feel the awareness, just over the fence of obligation and the ditch of depression, of a peaceful field of calm.
My thinking, years ago, went like this: people, groups of people, compete for limited resources. Even if one side is consistently committed to negotiation, to peaceful compromise (even if BOTH are), physical aggression from a few rogues on one side will inevitably cause armed conflict. How could even the most egalitarian, humanistic leader do anything else, upon witnessing killing of their own?
I’m listening to a lecture by Alan Watts that begins with the topic “social institutions as games”. The term “games” in this context is not speaking of the trivial, but rather something that is always played for its own sake. Recognizing social institutions, (including identity!), as games, gives us perspective on our society and our lives that is sorely missing when we insist on taking everything deadly seriously.
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:
Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire department, why are you owed clean water or electricity, why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?
I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can not individually afford but whose existence we recognize, serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe streets and food. My life is better when the next generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic society and act as if it never existed before you showed up.
In Notes on an Unhurried Journey, John A. Taylor reminds us of the nature of childhood:
When we adults think of children, there is a simple truth which we ignore: childhood is not preparation for life, childhood is life. A child isn’t getting ready to live, a child is living.
The child is constantly confronted with the nagging question: “What are you going to be?” Courageous would be the youngster who, looking the adult squarely in the face, would say, “I’m not going to be anything, I already am.”
We adults would be shocked by such an insolent remark, for we have forgotten, if indeed we ever knew, that a child is an active, participating and contributing member of society from the time of birth.
Childhood isn’t a time when he is moulded into a human who will then live life; he is a human who is living life. No child will miss the zest and joy of living unless these are denied…by adults who have convinced themselves that childhood is a period of preparation.
How much heartache we would save ourselves if we would recognize the child as a partner with adults in the process of living, rather than always viewing him an an apprentice. How much we could teach each other: adults with the experience and children with the freshness. How full both our lives could be.
Little children may not lead us, but at least we ought to discuss the trip with them; for, after all, life is their journey, too.
I’ve largely discontinued my previous practice of linking to every little thing that I see on the internet that is interesting. I’ve done this because I find the most satisfying posts that I go back and read are the ones where I talk about how I feel and what’s going on, not the posts where I link to the latest article I’ve read. After all, one would rather know the person that all that reading and thinking produced, and not necessarily all the reading and thinking that person did.
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