Psychophant's Rants
31.5.12
No "Why", just "How"
I have always been extremely self-centered, and over-analytical, which is why I both know quite a lot about how this came to be, and I am frustrated by the remaining dark areas in the process. My world view, and inherent to it my personal take on philosophy and metaphysics, came to be through a bout of extreme reading in 1982, when I was 15. My Catholic school had an extremely well stocked library, so I alternated between Descartes and Michael Ende, Dashiell Hammett and Nietzsche. At 14 I had suffered a crisis of faith, which was quite traumatic for someone who not much earlier was seriously considering the priesthood. So, having concluded that God was a human creation, I needed a new framework. I found it in an unlikely place, Jacques Monod’s « Le hasard et la nécessité. Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne » (Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology). Unlikely because that is a very bleak book, even more so for a young man who had seriously considered suicide after deciding life was pointless. Its final quote is “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose” Materialist biology, and just what I was feeling but lacked the vocabulary to express.
The joy that a man like Monod had felt the same (and presented much more strongly than I could ever manage) surprisingly balanced out the bleakness. Man is not really alone as long as some fellow man feels like him, someone remembers him, someone cares for him. That was liberating, and at the same time crystallized so strongly my world view that I stopped my frantic philosophy search. Just knowing that “why” was a pointless question made most philosophy uninteresting, so I could focus on the “how” of the universe. For the first time since my 11th birthday I considered to exchange Chemistry (Material Science) for either Astronomy or Molecular Biology, the two frontiers where big questions were still being answered (Quantum Mechanics has always offended my sense of beauty, which made passing that course in University a torture). Then I slowly went back to earth and the matter of practicality and just plain preference for simple systems brought me back into the fold.
I moved through the years without concern, doing what felt right at the moment, till a series of conflicts between what I felt right and what society considered right (in my late twenties now, having lost the naiveness of youth) and an overdose of cultural relativism made me aware that even if my bedrock was as solidly materialist as the first day, that indeed I needed a guide of behavior, some Ethics to make me choose the kingdom above or the darkness below, or some place in between. Being faced for the first time in my life with the realities of money, the darkness below was more attractive than it should have, as well as a series of destructive ideas.
The system did not come full formed from a single source this time, however, but slowly, from a series of errors, discoveries, and missteps. However the golden rule was that I did not wish to be alone in the uncaring universe, so the welfare of those that thought like me, that cared for me, that came close to me, was important for my own welfare. That is a good framework for daily ethical living, but it is still very incomplete. The final breakthrough came from Taoism, and some of its related philosophies in the West. Cavafy's Ithaca is a good example of that kind of philosophy, while this one condenses how I see the "Eastern Way":
"Enjoy your life…live in your body, you are your body; where else is there to go? Heaven and Earth are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of Heaven."
This other quote also enlightened me on the way of knowledge as pleasure in itself.
“So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.”
It is not easy to overcome want, but I find those moments of clearness precious, a calm moment of introspection, when everything becomes simple and truth (lowercase truth, as it does not last long enough to grasp Truth) becomes obvious. I have found it most often in the shower, when you are already clean and you just let very hot water run over yourself, mind blanking and distractions gone. A short-lived man-made heaven.
The way is all we have. It does not concern itself with the destination, nor the origin, so it works as well whether you believe in causality or when you consider it is all blind chance. My own take on it has three precepts. Make the way as long as you can, enjoy it as much as you can, and let others travel along their own way too. Long is not an objective but a subjective term. Hours doing something I hate do not move me along the way, unless I learn to diminish the hate, or find some pleasure in it. Learning always moves me along, even if I later forget it, because it becomes part of me. Physical travelling usually means a travel along your personal way, to new territories of the mind. Learning a foreign language is one of the best trips, as whole new regions become suddenly accessible, and what seemed an impassable jungle may become a garden. It is a very selfish Ethical system, but it also respects others choices. No wonder society oriented Confucianists disliked the self-oriented Taoists.
I have found it helps in those moments of self doubt and confusion brought in by mortality reminders, such as age deterioration or the reversals of Fortune. A sure sign you are still moving along. ¶ 1:30 PM
