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A brilliant depiction of what a 21st century Enlightenment can be.
Activities may be divided into two categories, formative and transformative. Formative activities are any activities that by themselves leave our perception of the world unchanged. For example, watching a football game. The qualification ‘by themselves’ is inserted to remind the reader that potentially any activity given the right circumstances can become transformative. For example, going to the cinema is usually a formative activity, but there is a possibility that a movie will affect us in such a deep way that it literally transforms the way we view reality. Formative activities may be pleasurable, but at the end of the activity we remain the same person we were when we started them, and sometimes we even feel a sense of emptiness at the end of the activity. The reason for this emptiness is that man is always trying to find the solution to the problem of existence, and he is trying all these activities with the hope (whether conscious or unconscious) that they will be the solution to his problem. When he realizes that they are not, since he is unchanged at the end of the activity, he feels a vague but nevertheless distinct sense of emptiness. It is the feeling of failure, which increases over the years as all the attempted ‘solutions’ fail to solve the problem of human existence. As soon as he realizes that each of these formative activities do not solve the problem, he tries to perform them conjunctively with the hope that what one formative activity couldn’t solve many formative activities together would. He goes to work, but his work is boring, and if it is not, just the fact that he has to do it is enough to remove much of the enjoyment of it – but he realizes it is not the solution. He tries to buy things with the money he’s making, and he believes the more he can buy the more he will approach the solution, so he works harder in order to buy them. But as any rich person will tell you, things bought are not the solution; at best they are a temporary alleviation. The excessive amount of work he is required to do makes him idealize ‘rest’ and ‘relaxation’ and he thinks that if he could only not work and ‘relax’ on some beach in an exotic island he will solve the problem, but when he retires on that island he gets bored and realizes it is not the solution. He searches ardently for love, for ‘the one’ person that will be his salvation, but when he finds her and has a family with her, he realizes after a number of years that not only she and their children weren’t the solution, but now he is burdened with even more responsibilities and has to work even harder. He devotes himself to all sorts of hobbies: jogging, basketball, hiking, sky diving, rafting etc. he tries everything in case one of them is the solution. Then he believes he might find the solution by doing all of the above together; when he realizes it is difficult, he believes that if only he could find a golden ‘balance’ between all these activities he would find the solution, he would be happy. But adding zeros does not get you a one in whatever way you add them – it only postpones the realization of the result of a pointless addition. Sad though it might be, this postponement can last a lifetime, and thus, as Thoreau reminds us, people reach the end of their lives and realize they have not lived. The solution does not lie in formative activities. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t engage in them, they make up the spice of life, but spices can’t replace a meal. The nourishment of the soul is to be found in transformativeactivities. As I mentioned earlier, the transformative quality of an activity may not be due to the activity itself but the conjunction of many factors simultaneously. However, there are some activities that are transformativethemselves and do not require the simultaneous presence of additional factors. Transformative activities give birth to our inner potential and allow us to do more, think more, feel more – be more. What are some examples of transformative activities? The archetype of a transformative activity isphilosophy. This is for the simple reason that the very aim of philosophy is the transformation of life into the good life, the life worth living. Philosophy as it is practiced in the universities these days has forgotten its real purpose; that the analysis of concepts and the examination of aspects of reality, is done in the service of the good life, and not as an end in itself. Contemporary philosophy has taken the means for the ends. But philosophy is an examination of bothmeans and ends, and its domain is not limited to the crude division of academic departments. Philosophy deals with the totality of life, and the totality of life is not limited to logic and metaphysics but it encapsulates physics, psychology, sociology, biology, literature, history, just to mention a few. That is why specialization is nothing but a reflection of modern times rather than inevitable necessity. A plant cannot ‘specialize’ in gathering water, while being ignorant of how to face the sun. In the same way, a man will not flourish unless he has a thorough knowledge of himself and the world he is living. Only then, can he spread his branches, face the sun, and bear his inner and most beautiful fruits. Only then can he be fully human.
Source daretobewise
Reblogged from daretobewise
On Leadership
In an era still dominated by a naive belief in scientific method [1] many people believe that if they just diligently follow a step-by-step guide on leadership, in addition to imitating what their current leaders do, that will somehow eventually result in them becoming leaders too. But that is the mindset of those who obey, not those who lead. If it leads anywhere, it is not some place new other than a dull reproduction of the status quo.
Having the courage to disobey and venture alone into the unknown because you feel something better can be built there as an enactment of indepedent thought instead of a juvenile reaction to authority constitutes a large part of what it means to lead.
But where to? You’d think an answer to that question would make an essential chapter in every contemporary leadership book. Yet a casual glance at the contents of Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell, one of the most celebrated authors on leadership alive today, reveals that knowing where to lead is apparently not something a contemporary leader needs to know [2]. Perhaps the fact that we’re more interested in becoming leaders than in knowing where to lead is why we’ve been going nowhere.
Leadership is not just about expertise. What’s the value of expertly leading people over a cliff? Not much; by that logic Hitler and Stalin were great leaders. To make a fetish out of the techniques of leadership is to glorify the means over and above the ends. I think we can do better than that. We have to.
I studied philosophy, not management. I wanted to know what the good life is before trying to lead myself or others to it. You can’t be a good leader if you’re not a wise one, and wisdom is the province of philosophy, not management. We need to integrate both.
When you integrate both you want to lead somewhere better, not just lead. That’s what’s at the core of being an entrepreneur. If we want a better future, we need more entrepreneurs and better managers.
Successful leaders abolish the conditions that make them necessary, just like teachers through teaching students successfully, lessen the gap between themselves and their students till it disappears, thereby creating an equality that enables a more sublime relationship to emerge [3].
Notes:
[1] Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did a good job in demolishing the idea that there is a single prescriptive scientific method and that science progresses in a uniform way by following its dictates.
[2] Don’t be fooled into thinking Chapter 4 “How Should I Prioritize my Life?” has anything to do with overall ends. It’s more about how to prioritize not what those priorities should be and why.
[3] See Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. New York: Owl Books, 1990, p.96-97.
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Nietzsche lived with his intellectual problems as with realities, he experienced a similar emotional commitment to them as other men experience to their wife and children…He makes clear what he means by intellectual problems in these few posthumously published notes:
“As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!
I want to awaken the greatest mistrust of myself: I speak only of things I have experienced and do not offer only events in the head.
One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.
I have at all times written my writings with my whole heart and soul: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are.
You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however, am sitting in the carriage, and often am the carriage itself.”
In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.
”“He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows. And if someone who is a misanthrope withdraws from society, in his seclusion he loses his misanthropy.”
Past Glories
“Philosophy, moreover, which has helped to discover and establish all these institutions, which has educated us for public affairs and made us gentle towards each other, which has distinguished between the misfortunes that are due to ignorance and those which spring from necessity, and taught us to guard against the former and to bear the latter nobly—philosophy, I say, was given to the world by our city.” - Isocrates on the city of Athens in Panegyricus.
Objects, Values and Madness
There are similarities between perceiving objects and values. Thus, if you happen to live in a society where you don’t share its values, it is like not being able to see certain objects, or being able to see objects that others don’t; therefore, it is no coincidence that an individual with a different morality than that of his society, is considered by many to be like a madman who sees or responds to things that do not exist.
Childhood, suffering and the meaning of life
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 unnecessary or generate different, perhaps more interesting questions. The question regarding the meaning (or purpose, which is not exactly the same) 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 [1]) 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 [2] 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. Some 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 – for “If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how. - Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.”[3]
Notes:
[1] See A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, p.70-71, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
[2] See for instance, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion. In my opinion you’re probably better off getting a volume that contains both and more, like the excellent vol.12 of the Penguin Freud Library.
[3] F. Nietzsche, “Maxims and Arrows”, section 12, Twilight of the Idols, 1889. Penguin, 1990. The reference to the “Englishman” is of course a jab against the Utilitarianism championed by Bentham and Mill who were both English.
Wisdom is more important than knowledge
With the tremendous advancements in science human beings have reached the technological capacity to exterminate themselves and their world. In fact, at least one time we came pretty close to a nuclear war. Over the past decades, with the rise of the environmental movement, we’ve become ever more aware of the impact we have not only on the health and well-being of our own communities but on the planet as a whole.
It is, therefore, no secret that we currently have the know-how to radically change the world.
The crucial question, therefore, is not whether we can change the world. It is whether we are wise enough to act towards making it better, given that scientific know-how does not in itself make us wiser.
Shall we be more precise? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts,the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Ivan Turgenev’s (1818-1883) poem; he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in a interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken a part. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom – desire coordinated in the light of all experience – can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: because in these days our means and instruments have been multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p.2-3, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1961
“Philosophy?” someone may wonder in puzzlement. Could it be that such a seemingly outdated discipline may be required to play such an important role? Besides:
What is the task of philosophy today? We know the familiar answer: None –
for it is just the private business of a guild of specialists. These philosophers, we are told, occupy university chairs dating from the Middle Ages and meet in futility, at conventions which are the modern occasions for showing off. Their monologues are attested by a voluminous literature, scarcely read and rarely bought, except for a few fashionable publications with snob appeal.
If the press, as the organ of public opinion, takes note of these books and periodicals which gather dust in libraries, it does so without real interest. All in all, we hear, philosophy is superfluous, ossified, behind the times, waiting only for its disappearance. It no longer has a task.Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, “The Present Task of Philosophy”, p.125, ed. and trans. by E. Ehrlich, L.H. Ehrlich and G. B. Pepper, Humanities Press, 1994.
But Jaspers did not end that thought on philosophy with that paragraph, but with this one:
Against such strictures we may point out, first of all, that not everything which goes by the name of philosophy should be confused with philosophy itself. Philosophy exists wherever thought brings men to an awareness of their existence. It is omni-present without being specifically identified. For no man thinks without philosophizing – truly or falsely, superficially or profoundly, hastily or slowly and thoroughly. In a world where standards prevail, where judgments are made, there is philosophy. There is as much of it in the cohesive faith of the Church as in a conscious, self-contained philosophical faith; there is philosophy even in the belief of the unbeliever, in nihilistic disintegration, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, in the many precepts for living that are not popular, such as anthroposophy and others [a contemporary example could be what may be roughly called ‘New Age’ philosophies]. The very rejection of philosophy goes back to a philosophy that is not aware of itself.
(ibid.)
It is time we become aware and do our best to recover and champion the traditional role of philosophy which is the development of wisdom, not just in our words and heads, but in our hearts and actions. It is time for the philosopher, as an ideal, to come out of his academic cave and return to the market (agora), where he was originally born, to help his fellow humans live a better life.
Seducer of Wisdom
We finish high-school and know more about math than we do of ourselves. Yet knowing ourselves is more important than algebra. Current education does not create free, creative and wise individuals, but workers for the requirements of the market. Most universities give you an education that will supply you with a career – not a good life. But careers, as the etymology of the word betrays, are roads for carts - not for human beings.
I tried learning more about the good life by studying the discipline that claims to study it, Philosophy, yet I encountered the same problem. By the time I finished my BA and MA in Philosophy I realized universities prepare you for becoming a professor of philosophy, not a philosopher. Doing a PhD lost its appeal.
Most professors of philosophy teach you how to analyze the good life instead of living it. But mistaking conceptual dissection for philosophy requires you to kill her in the process. That is what most professors have been doing the past century: Killing philosophy and making a living being the anatomists of thought. No wonder people lost interest in philosophy, since hardly anyone wants to be solely an anatomist of thought - yet everyone wants to live a good life.
The word “philosopher” means “lover of wisdom”. But it is not enough for a philosopher to love wisdom. For wisdom is a woman; she will not give herself to you just because you want her. You have to learn to seduce her; because a life of unrequited love withers the soul and makes thoughts dry and sterile.
To seduce wisdom back to philosophy and into people who dare to seek it - that is my purpose.
