I got through the better half of Siddartha for the first time today and have been doing assigned Anicent Legacy of Greece class readings of Boethius's The Consultation of Philosophy. Siddartha's awakening when he realizes after all of his teachings as a Brahman, as an ascetic, as a brief student of Gotama that he has only really been deceiving and taking flight from him/(his)self is when he realizes he knows nothing. He has lost himself in learning and realizes that looking to external sources to understand the internal is mislead.
Socrates also made it the goal of his life to understand and held the seeking of this understanding of the self above learning anything else. Because why would one bypass the change to perceive the epitome of one's being to study the external? To him, this contradicted reason and this is why Socrates is always accredited with incessantly questioning those around him and provoking thought. In the end, he was executed for it. I don't think he found what he was looking for in the external before he was killed though and maybe he never would have.*
This seeking of truth and understanding in the external is also explored in Boethius's text. Boethius is a philosopher who becomes a wealthy politician and hopes to bring his conclusions about philosophy to higher office. Eventually he is persecuted and brought down by his political enemies. Prior to being executed he spends a short time in jail where he falls into depression. He then has a vision of his "nurse" Philosophy appearing and speaking to him. The dialogue that follows is how Boethius is healed and brought to enlightenment by Philosophy before he is executed. Among many motifs explored in the dialogue is true happiness. Before Boethius's downfall he was wealthy and Fortune was on his side and he believed himself to be truly happy. But what Philosophy imparts on the despairing philosopher is that if wealth, etc. can be lost it can never truly be had and thus, all the external things man seeks - wealth, fame, power, pleasure, love, possessions - are only false roads to true happiness. True happiness being defined as a state of perfect self sufficiency, lacking nothing. So based on the Bothetian logic for true happiness to be had it must come from a place internally where nothing can be lost or taken away.
I think subconsciously this is similar to what Siddartha realizes in terms of how he must learn from himself and be his own pupil to solve the riddle of himself. I'm still working through all these concepts and forgive me if this first post is unorganized or lacking in genuine conclusions but I feel like a lot of literature has been converging with my own thoughts on how I want to develop and grow as a person, as an intellectual, as a philosopher and then at the same time I'm being voluntarily subjected to external forces of familial and societal expectations. I think because discovering the truth of the self is so complex yet weighs so heavily on who we are is why people graduate from college utterly confused, because for four years they've been studying only the external and teaching themselves nothing of the internal and they become lost. I think there must be a balance that can be struck in which a harmony can exist between the two but I think to be most effective, for me anyway, an understanding of these realms and harmony between them must begin in its process now rather than later.
*Maybe Socrates represents a sort of self-discovery continuum in which questions are incessantly presented because knowledge of the self is never ending?
Big post! Whew. I will definitely comment on this... after some consideration.
ReplyDeleteLet me start out by saying I think this is an extremely thorough and intelligent analysis. I would even go so far as to call it jolly good. it just so happens I disagree with you on most points.
ReplyDelete1) is our identity intrinsic in our genes or is it an aspect of socialization?
I think that there is pretty good evidence to suggest that the traits that define us as individuals are socially instilled. There has to be a reason why children with liberal parents(regardless of biological relation) grow up liberal. There is a reason why children who are abused grow up and abuse their children. Those who grow up in an isolated tribe in Africa will seem unimaginably different from ourselves not because they are significantly genetically dissimilar but because there experiences are extremely dissimilar. by these examples I only wish to say that our differences can be understood by our varying environments. Our similarities, however, can be understood through our shared evolutionary heritage. Just as all humans have evolved similar beneficial physical features(opposing thumb, head hair, etc.), I suppose that certain personality features(actually physical features of the brain) have also been subject to evolutionary selection. Accordingly we can look across all cultures and name the truly transcending human characteristics greed,lust, empathy, etc. (perhaps the desire to explain the universe?)and establish those as evolutionarily foreordained aspects of our personality. In short differences=nurture similarities=nature.
2 Socrates vs Siddhartha, contextual vs introspective understanding of the self
I found it extremely interesting the way you compared these philosophers method of understanding the self. From what I have read it seems you think that Siddhartha has a more "enlightened" method of understanding the the self. I think you are wrong. I think from a purely practical standpoint I have learned infinitely more from the collective understanding of mankind than of my own independent epiphanies. Socrates also believes we should harvest the wisdom of this shared experience. Siddhartha thinks that introspection is the best tool. Im not sure you have taken psyc 101 so I will relay some information that I learned in that class that seems relevant. prior to the 1900s psychologist only used an introspective method of understanding the mind. Since then it has been established that it is impossible for introspection to be objective enough to be held as scientific truth. Since then Behaviorism has become the research norm for psychologists, a research method that experimentally isolates certain behavior in a large group of individuals and then draws conclusions on the average individuals decision making accordingly. I would equate behaviorism to the Socratic method, seeking to understand an individuals decision in the context of society. Though a contextual understanding of the self seems more important it is also probably important to be introspective.
Happiness and transience.
ReplyDeleteTransience must be on your mind a lot because I remember you wanting to talk about it at the free thinkers club. Unfortunately we ended up talking about buttons boxes and poisons gas... oh well. There were two points that seemed of particular importance that I will respond to.
"if wealth, etc. can be lost it can never truly be had" and "true happiness to be had it must come from a place internally where nothing can be lost or taken away." Firstly I think that TRUE happiness, in its conventional sense, is not a condition that is biologically available to humans. I think it would be impossible to be happy all of the time, if only because it would be impossible to understand happiness without experiencing sadness. This in and of itself implies that all happiness is going to be transient. Accepting happiness as transient inherently seems to give value to all the things that you listed as giving only transient happiness love, material wealth, etc. Shakespeare put way more eloquently and succinctly than I ever could, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"
So I'm still not sure what to say about introspection and knowledge of the self. But: knowledge, I posit, is the accumulation and rationalization of patterns. Is this what we strive for? Is it worth striving for?
ReplyDeleteMy mom had some recording of a shaman once upon a time, and I heard like ten minutes of it, but one point has stuck with me since: joy and grief are two sides of the same coin, (a cliché, at this point, but apt nonetheless). Joy, I think, is easy to understand, but grief is a little tricky. When we grieve we are recognizing the loss of something joyous; this recognition manifests itself as gratitude, though it can be hard to see while grief is still present. We can usually identify happiness, therefore, much better in retrospect than we can in the present. Question: is happiness the same as joy? I would say they are degrees of the same thing (mainly, joy is a greater level/amount of happiness). I think we can agree that we are the most joyous when we lose ourselves in a moment (you could say you experience no-self, not in the sense of absence but along the lines of nen), and experience it without thought; recognition of the moment, can, in my experience, take away from it. So presence is requisite for joy.
Presence, if you were to ask Robert Pirsig, is the same as dynamic Quality; it is the cutting edge of experience, the instance before we recognize/intellectualize what we perceive (fit it into a pattern; my understanding of the concept). This means that dynamic Quality, which is presence, is what we call joy, which is happiness.
I don’t know if this is logically sound; I would love some feedback. I just came to this series of conclusions as I wrote this post, so it probably isn’t quite right yet, but I will say that the framework sits well with/feels right to me. I think there is a missing connection to intention, but I might be getting ahead of myself. Both, I think, require full presence.
A missing piece: the presence of Quality is necessary for joy; if we are fully present and having a low-Quality experience, like sitting on a stove, we are obviously not happy or joyous. Also, grief being analogous with joy, is a retrospective recognition of Quality.
ReplyDeleteIt might be annoying that I keep talking about Quality, but it's been on my mind reading Lila, which provided a complete metaphysics based on it. Both Zen and Lila are more than worth reading; they definitely changed my outlook on life and experience.
Quickly Matt - Don't you think that was a fucked up analysis of quality though - the experience of burning yourself as a low quality experience? it would seem like the highest form of quality what more dynamic experience can you have then of burn - pain - ouch that was dumb.
ReplyDeleteI think that true happiness is in direct correlation to the amount of freedom you have. All the ways you are oppressed, be it by society, your friends, family, social norms, grades - all these things confine you to a smaller and smaller thing. Instead of being a student you become a bad student, then a bad philosophy student. Every way that you are defined is a form of oppression on your limits of a human being.
There are two ways to deal with this that I can think of. Remove as many of the oppressors as you can from your own life or intellectualize recognize that you are not oppressed.
I think of this as anarchism vs zen. Do you have a truly free life or do you just convince yourself that you exist in a pool of lovingkindness and serenity?
Exactly - definition limits everything ( Pirsig would say that we can function on a day-to-day basis and recognize objects by recognizing patterns of Quality; not the same as definition). And there is no freedom or oppressor if there is no definition; should we free ourselves from freedom? Freedom implies a comparative gain or loss of something. We start to run into linguistic problems because our language is based on a dualistic metaphysics.
ReplyDeleteOkay I'm just going to blabber for a sec cause this is an area of interest for me and I have too many thoughts and not enough time to formulate, translate, then communicate them in a way that would begin to make sense.
ReplyDeleteFirst, as you pointed out Matt, language is a huge obstacle in this discussion. I think most of what's been said here has been semantical and beside the point.
Nathan, I don't think psychology has anything to do with metaphysics (which is what this discussion is about). The line between the two is one of the few that were wisely drawn in the almost entirely silly and preposterous process of the intellectual compartmentalization of academia. Pcych may implicitly teach us about mf and vice versa but I don’t think it goes any further than that. The whole point in Siddartha is that the Self is beneath and subsequent to the ‘Self,’ which by nature doesn’t actually exist. Subjective, personal qualities, as you say, are largely socially conditioned, which I would take to mean that behaviorism is the study of what the self is not. (And I’m not implying that that the nature and behaviors we are born with are our ‘true self’)
(Ok, important side note. Notice how we have to use references to space and time [beneath and subsequent] when trying to describe the self. This is a perfect example of the linguistic barrier. We are forced to use dualistic language to describe something which I would say is obviously and self evidently nondualistic and have nothing to do with time or space. Another good example in the same vein is that we have to decide between nature vs nurture in the first place)
Matt, I agree mostly what you say about quality and presence, except that I think quality, as Pirsig uses it, describes a way of being, not a measure of that way. That may not have come out right. What I mean to say is that quality is the pre-intellectualized experience/reality, not a description of it. Quality is not high quality or low quality. That’s post intellectual language. Hence the difference between pain and suffering (and, for that matter, happiness and pleasure, a distinction that is important elsewhere in this discussion (yes I’m lookin’ at you, Nathan)). I’m not saying that getting the flesh of our rump burnt off, hearing the sizzling meat somewhere among your screams, while some suppressed animal part of your brain starts drooling at the smell of it (after the hair burns off) is a high quality experience. But I am saying, most definitely, it is an experience of quality. We are very acutely in the pre-intellectual consciousness while getting our ass grilled. Sitting there screaming there is only pain—there is only reality—we are very present, and very much ourselves. It is afterwards (and this will probably not take very long), when we start worrying about when the Aspirin will kick in, hospital bills, and our sex life, that we lose the experience of Quality.
In a nutshell I’d say that philosophical speculation on the self is fruitless. This is a philosophical speculation, not a dismissal of it. I think it’s an important discussion, but in the end we are something completely other than the most eloquent and accurate descriptions of ourselves. I don’t like to point to other philosophies to describe mine, but I’d have to say I’m pretty much on board with the Buddhists in this one. Not their ethics—ethics are ethics are ethics—but their metaphysics. I’d recommend reading The Compass of Zen by Zen Master Seung Sahn (or something like that). And Krishnamurti.
Thanks for calling me out - you're definitely right. It's hard to talk about Quality without thinking of it as a metric, but the end point is that Quality IS. I've had a lot of internal resistance talking about all this stuff because its contradictory, and you can't actually share your own experience. With Quality it's impossible to see the moon instead of the finger because it transcends* the subject-object split. Quality IS.
ReplyDelete*"Transcends:" another smooth-sounding but obnoxious word that's stuck in linguistic hell.