Maverick Philosopher

Unlike anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-communists, primitivists could attempt to live their preferred lifestyle in our world now. Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild presents academician Gene Rosellini's attempt to live a primitive lifestyle in the wilds of Canada. "I was interested in knowing if it was possible to be independent of modem technology," he told Anchorage Daily News reporter Debra McKinney. "I began my adult life with the hypothesis that it would be possible to become a Stone Age native." He "purged his life of all but the most primitive tools, which he fashioned from native materials with his own hands," Krakauer writes. For ten years, Rossellini toughed it out. Eventually, however, he gave up: "I would say I realistically experienced the physical, mental and emotional reality of the Stone Age. But to borrow a Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the land." In 1991, Rosellini was found dead in his shack, a suicide victim.

The author, Brian Oliver Sheppard, is drawing upon Krakauer's discussion on pp. 73-75 of Into the Wild. If I had the time and energy I would type up the whole of Krakauer's account, it is that interesting, assuming that you are, like me, fascinated by the wild diversity of human types. The quotations are from a letter Rosellini wrote to a friend. One inaccuracy: Sheppard speaks of Rosellini living in the "wilds of Canada." According to Krakauer's account, Rosellini was camped outside of Cordova, Alaska.

What is that makes chldhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us? In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.

One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But now, at 6' 1", brisk of stride and stern of visage, I've got noli me tangere written all over me, though, needless to say, not in the John 20:17 sense: Dicit ei Iesus: Noli me tangere, nondum ascendi ad Patrem meum. . . .

The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. You won't survive long in the blogosphere without a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.

In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But it does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.

So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.

22 December 1874. Written in the South of France. – Gioberti says that the French mind assumes only the form of truth and, by isolating this, exaggerates it, in such a way that it dissolves the realities with which it is concerned. I express the same thing by the word speciousness. It takes the shadow for the object, the word for the thing, the appearance for the reality and the abstract formula for the truth. It does not go beyond intellectual assignats. Its gold is pinch-beck, its diamond paste; the artificial and the conventional suffice for it. When one talks with a Frenchman about art, language, religion, the State, duty, the family, one feels from his way of talking that his thought remains outside the object, that it does not enter its substance, its marrow. He does not seek to understand it in its inwardness, but only to say something specious about it. This spirit is superficial and yet not comprehensive; it pricks the surface of things shrewdly enough, and yet it does not penetrate. It wishes to enjoy itself in relation to things; but it has not the respect, the disinterestedness, the patience and the self-forgetfulness that are necessary for contemplating things as they really are. Far from being the philosophic spirit, it is an abortive counterfeit of it, for it does not help to resolve any problem and it remains powerless to grasp that which is living, complex and concrete. Abstraction is it original vice, presumption its incurable eccentricity and speciousness its fatal limit.

The French language can express nothing that is budding or germinating; it depicts only effects, results the caput mortuum, and not the cause, the movement, the force, the becoming of any sort of phenomenon. It is analytical and descriptive, but it does not make one understand anything. . .

The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything, what appears is more relished than what is, the outside than the inside, the style than the stuff, the glittering than the useful, opinion than conscience. . . .

Your life is frontloaded in the measure that you live all out, go for broke, pursuing what seems to you to be of final importance -- for yourself if not for everyone -- regardless of the practical consequences and the judgments of family, friends, and society at large. The frontloader needn't be foolish or imprudent, though the security-conscious backloader will think him to be. He knows what he is in for, and what calamities may befall him, but he accepts the risks. And if he is true to his ideal, he blames only himself when things go against him.

The novelist John Gardner was a frontloader. He died in 1982 in a motorcycle crash at the age of 49. Frontloading has its perils. Here his student Charles Johnson quotes him:

"All my life," he wrote his fiancee Susan Thornton, whom he was to marry on September 18, four days after his fatal accident, "I've lived flat-out. As a mororcycle racer, chemist, writer . . . I was never cautious." (John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, 1994, p. xvi.)

I am too conservative and security-conscious to count as a full-bore frontloader. I'm as bourgeois as I am bohemian and thus a bobo in David Brook's terminology. But I made two bold frontloading moves in my life that have paid off handsomely, not in the coin of the realm, but in the coin of personal satisfaction. Both moves were 'foolish' judging by the standards of the 'practical' and security-obsessed and those who think the purpose of life is the piling up of money, consumer goods and social status.

The first was to abandon electrical engineering for philosophy. I recall one of my engineering professors commenting after I had withdrawn: "What are you going to do when you graduate, philosophize?" That is precisely what I did do, am doing, and will continue to do as long as soul and body remain attached. (The post-mortem soul will either be unable to philosophize or won't need to.) Where there's a will there's a way. But you had better have a strong will, well-disciplined appetities, and the willingness to pay some serious dues.

The other move was perhaps even more 'foolish.' After earning a Ph.D., (not that difficult), securing a tenure-track appointment (very difficult and very chancy) and then getting tenure (extremely diffiuclt and extremely chancy), with its guaranteed lifelong job security and a modicum of social status, I tossed it aside to live the life of the independent philosopher.

Looking back, I am proud of myself for having had the courage to make both frontloading moves, though I would not recommend them to anyone else. Ask my advice, and I will retreat to a fully backloaded position.

Frontloading is something one lives onself, not advises for others.

The last essay in Thomas Nagel's The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997) is entitled, "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion." One hopes that Nagel does not consider it the last word on the topic given its fragmentary nature and occasional perversity. But it's a good essay nonetheless.

Nagel's essay begins by pointing out a certain Platonism in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, a Platonism that is foreign to pragmatism as usually understood. Nagel quotes Peirce as saying that the aim of science is "eternal verities," a notion at odds with the Jamesian view that the true is that which it is good for us to believe. What science is after is not a set of beliefs conducive to our flourishing but a set of beliefs that correspond to the world as it is independently of us. The researcher aims to "learn the lesson that nature has to teach. . . ." But to do this, the inquiring mind must "call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale [the natural light]. . . ."

Nagel finds these "radically antireductionist" and "realist" thoughts "entirely congenial" but "quite out of keeping with present fashion." (129) And talk of an "inward sympathy" of the inquiring mind with nature he finds "alarmingly Platonist."

But why should Nagel be alarmed at the Platonist view that reason operating properly mirrors the antecedent structure of reality? His alarm is rooted in the suspicion that the Platonist view is "religious, or quasi-religious." (130) A rationalism such as the Platonic "makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable." (130, emphasis in original.) That there should be a fundamental harmony between mind and world makes people "nervous" nowadays. This uncomfortableness and nervousness is one manifestation of the fear of religion in intellectual life.

Nagel makes it clear that he is talking about the fear of religion as such, and not merely fear of certain of its excesses and aberrations, and confesses that he himself is subject to this fear:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (130, emphasis added)

Chalk it up to my contemplative, quietistic bias, but activism as a way of life strikes me as ultimately meaningless. It is similar in meaninglessness to money-making as a way of life. And it doesn't matter whether one's activism points Left, Right, or sideways.

It is self-evident that money can only be reasonably pursued as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. I would say the same about activism: the only reason to be active is to secure the conditions of contemplation. I intend the latter in a broad sense to include scientific and philosophical theorizing, artistic and literary creation, and the like.

If I had Nader's ear, I would say: You need to be more and do less. Enjoy what is, which, after all, is the constant and irremovable basis of all your frenetic advocacy and activity.

Setting aside his policies and programs, I admire Nader the man. His honesty and integrity are manifest. He is not in public life to feather his nest or advance himself in the usual ways. Still, a life consumed with activism falls short of the ideal.

If you can 'relate' — as we used to say in the 'Sixties — to what I have just written, then you have more than a few paleoconservative bones in your body.

One mistake I have made, more than once, is to assume that since I value truth above many other things, others do as well. But there are plenty of people who do not value truth at all, or else assign it a rather low priority. There are many, for example, who value human feelings over truth. That makes no sense to me; to me it is self-evident that, although both are values (to be precise: things that ought to be valued), truth is a higher value, if not the highest value.

There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything. They interpret every type of interpersonal transaction as a power struggle. Thus if you calmly try to persuade such a person of the truth of some proposition by appealing to facts and reasoning correctly from them, he will interpret that as nothing but an attempt to dominate him psychologically. Such people are utterly blind to the fact that truth can sometimes be attained by dialectical means. They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move.

There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything else in terms of it.

I once had a superficial colleague who, motivated by a neurotic need to advance himself socially and economically, scribbled a number of articles. Once, when I had published an article, he told me that my motive was to see my name in print. This is a classic case of projection: he could not understand me except as being driven by the same paltry motives that drove him.

One fellow in particular sticks in my mind. I’ll call him Mel. Mel never finished and dropped out of sight. With Mel, the problem was three-fold: unrealistically high standards, performance anxiety, and an obsession with the board game, Go. His performance anxiety manifested itself mainly as an obsessive fixation on getting his tool box in order. What I mean is that he felt he could not get down to the business of writing any good philosophy until all his tools were in place. So he had to have a complete library stocked with all the classics, in the original languages. He once unloaded a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on me on the ground that it was in English, and he wanted to read everything in its original language. Many an hour did he spend on foreign languages. But to do philosophy, one has to be able to think, so logic was also on his agenda. Time was spent acquiring an impressive logic library, and somewhat less time on actually reading his acquisitions.

The physical act of writing required, he thought, the very best of tools. Since those were the days before word processing, he had to have the very latest IBM Selectric electric typewriter, the model with an erase key! That was a big deal in those days. Luckily, Mel’s father worked for IBM which fact translated into a substantial discount. Mel once showed me his typewriter’s different ‘balls’: different ones for different character sets. Of course, he had one for Greek since he planned to write on Aristotle.

But no office is complete without all the peripherals: wastebasket, organizers stocked with various sizes of paper clips, etc., staplers of different sizes, staple extractors, paper, pencils, pencil sharpeners, electric and manual, pens ballpoint and fountain, in different colors, magic markers, erasers, all accomplices of his evasion of beginning the dissertation.

Somewhere Schopenhauer quips, "Forever reading, never read." Apropos of Mel, I would say: Forever preparing to write, never read.