dithering

"metaphysics" as self-alienation

ZD wrote somewhere that Hume is the best philosopher, and I think I might be starting to get the point. I wanted to write something this month, churned out four or five drafts of essays on different topics, spared no expense with my words, and each time ended up with something that felt, somehow, insufferable.

I think some of my later drafts were less bad, and then I noticed the classic divide: there was my experience as I presented it, and then there was the intellectualization of that experience. I’m pretty sure over-intellectualization is a theme for me—J.M. responded like this when I told him I’d picked up Maudlin’s book on QM’s metaphysical intimations:

An important part of the point is that when we do too much metaphysics or over-intellectualize everything, we remove ourselves from the experience we’re actually having, which, really, is all we’ve got. That’s the Hume thing, and the Buddhist thing, and the Mystic thing. Alison Gopnik wrote something like this in her essay on Hume:

Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.

Did you know you can cry at a screen? I recently watched Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein, conducting the last five minutes of Mahler’s 2nd in Maestro. I couldn’t finish the scene without tearing up—and it wasn’t even a real performance. Instead of a living orchestra, I was watching an image of a caricature of an image (watch Bernstein in the last 5 minutes of his performance with the LSO at Ely Cathedral, here, which Cooper referenced along with other material). But not-even-Bernstein, existing only inside my screen, hit me with a kind of life-force I struggle to find words for.

If you watch the real Bernstein, you can see the kind of rapture he must be experiencing, something beyond the physical world he inhabits. There’s a bit in Maestro where Cooper-as-Bernstein describes his experience conducting the New York Philharmonic as having lost consciousness, only coming to at the audience’s applause. All Bernstein (or Cooper-Bernstein) has is his experience; all you have is the experience of watching him. Look at the expressions on his face, the way his body is warped and thrown about by the music. I almost want to say he’s possessed, his arms and face and legs not entirely his own.

I’m no New Years’ resolutioner, but the end of December always seems to bring about unavoidable self-reflection. I almost wrote an essay called “Against First Principles” this year, because I think some of the motivation I see among tech-types to derive and think about everything from first principles isn’t always a great idea. It’s ahistorical and, I think, naïve to assert that we need to build every worldview and every justification for a way to live ourselves. J.M. put it like this: we idolize internalizing a reference frame that would make sense from first principles, but this creates an alienation from lived human reality.

Although I’m, at least internally, somewhat critical of first principles thinking taken to extremes, I have my own “intellectual” addictions (hobbies? inclinations?) that drag me towards the same kind of self-alienation.

But I’ve also found ways to get more in touch with my experience. Running slipped into my routine a few months ago, and now I look forward to my long runs on Tuesday and Saturday mornings—I don’t know if this is “runner’s high,” but I’ve invariably found a meditative state somewhere in the fluency of exertion. For the hour and a half or so that I’m going, my mind is where my feet are.

The idea of deep attentiveness feels cliché, but it’s incredibly difficult to practice with much consistency. We do so much thinking, and yet in thinking we come to dismiss ourselves as much as we might learn about ourselves.

Proust had a few things to say about the intellect and feeling:

The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. the book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us (Time Regained).

Most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does not help us to identify them (Swann’s Way).

And, yet, for all this—the intellect has its place!

But it is to the intellect we must look all the same to establish the inferiority of the intellect. The intellect may not deserve the supreme accolade, but it alone is capable of bestowing it. It may hold only second place in the hierarchy of virtues but only it is capable of proclaiming that instinct has to occupy the first (Contre Saint-Beuve).

But we inevitably lean on the crutch of intellect when we write and try to articulate ourselves to one another. Nick Thompson said something about editing that stuck with me: writers strive to manifest something about themselves in their work, to condense their manifold of experience into words. In the most ideal world, it’s an editor’s job to deeply know a writer so as to enable that.

I like the analogy of striving to become a good editor for yourself and the people around you. People often have a deep generative drive in them, and a good editor can help that person fashion shapeless marble until they’ve arrived at something worthy of the term “creation” (we all want to be god somehow, don’t we).

This really isn’t a year in review, but it’s hard not to reflect on things. I moved back to the Bay Area at the start of this year. I turned 25, survived another 12 months of life. I made a couple of friends, who I didn’t get to see very often, and wondered. I watched some movies and read some books and cried at least once (thanks Bradley). I spoke a bunch of words into a USB microphone, sent emails, wrote code.

Maybe I’ll manage to write something I’m proud of next year. Maybe I’ll get to spend more time with people I like. Or, maybe, I’ll be writing these same words around this time next year.

I’m still working out a theory of change—as if I have the beginnings of one yet. I think we all have to find ways to believe we’re doing something of worth, lest despair creep in. I’m in the midst of fighting off this winter’s despair; the tools I have right now are running until my legs hurt, finishing Lord of the Rings again, eating oatmeal (have I mentioned how much I love oatmeal).