I’m borrowing Dylan’s title, but this post has nothing to do with LSD, Vietnam or the American Civil Rights movement. I’m thinking more about selves, and the idea of finding one’s self buried under yourself, so to speak. There are two immediate problems here – the intrinsic one, which revolves around knowing which self is authentic, if one of them is (rather than a 3rd self, constructed from the available elements), and the extrinsic one, which is realised in the difficulties one has with how others relate to you, in that they are legitimately confused as to who they are talking to.
Category: Headspace
Often abstract thoughts on things that don’t necessarily hinge on any contemporary events.
What do you consider to be essential character traits in a friend? If you had asked me this question last year, I would have answered it by reference to those people who had shaped many of my experiences over the past decade, and listed at least 2 attributes: honesty, and the synchronicity of interest that allows for good and easy conversation. But there are things missing from that short list of 2 – particularly the attribute of empathy. In other words – or by my definition – the ability to, and interest in, seeing things from the reactive stance (see Strawson for more on this). Instead, I typically treated myself and others as objective logical puzzles, to mull over and manage when necessary. But there is very little room for spontaneity and pleasure in the objective stance, as useful as it can be in terms of troubleshooting.
The simple point is that one can extol and present the virtues of logic and consistency without them being all that your interactions are about. We don’t make ourselves less consistent and coherent in being silly, or in being able to let our critical standards rest for a few hours. Instead, we can reinforce the importance of those standards, in that people can then see that they aren’t simply habits, but rather positions that make sense, in their proper context. For myself, perhaps it could be that my lack of empathy encouraged those I thought were my friends to be dishonest with me, but I can’t believe that it excuses that. I do think that one can rank these attributes, in that without honesty, there is little chance for empathy and enjoyment of company to flourish. And as simple, and formulaic, as it sounds, taking care to keep these fundamentals intact now seems crucial to keeping yourself intact – or to developing an intact self.
Be careful out there.
Because it’s more difficult to know whether the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or nth glass of wine will be the one to prevent us from finishing that item of work that’s due tomorrow, we look for what Ainslie calls “bright lines” to regulate our behaviour – we stop drinking, or we stop smoking or gambling, because by choosing absolute principles, and narrativising them as evidence of strength of will, we can regulate our behaviour while at the same time validate our characters in doing so.
An email received this morning, which in tone brings to mind a recommendation to try a new shampoo or somesuch (if one ignores the patronising conclusion of the email, of course). It’s sad to imagine how this person’s life will destruct if his complacency has cause to be unsettled one day…
Hope you well. This may come as quite a surprise to you and in fact i did not think of it until this morning, but after praying about it, then seeing you this morning I knew I needed to. And before we get any further yes I am a christian so you dont have to be scared of me coming at you from some hidden angle or agenda which probably happens and you getting bible bashed. Christians are so often saying oh those philosophers talk nonsense, but that is not my heart. I really enjoyed [coursename] lectures and wanted you to know what i thought. I dont actually know where you stand in terms of belief, but really felt i just needed to say that you should check out this whole christian thing.
…
I believe it, and from personal experience know it to be true, you dont have to at all, but why not give it a shot, maybe read John or something. You may read it and say well that is a load of rubbish and want nothing to do with it and that is fine, completely your choice. But why not give it a try? You may just find it changes your life, and gives you a purpose you have never felt before. And if you have been hurt by some church/family member/christian before, that is not Gods intention, He wants to know you.Have a great day and feel free shoot anything back at me.
Erik Hoekstra may not be as crazy as I first thought when encountering this story about him. He’s still pretty damn crazy, in that he seems to think that what he’s attempting could be considered a proof of his thesis. But the basic principle makes more sense to me now, in that one certainly doesn’t need too much. Recent events have caused the loss of many things I thought were essential, and I’ve always been quite frugal in terms of what I hold dear. But the losses came with an enormous reward, and one which in some respects gives meaning to the cliche “less is more”. An uncluttered head – and crucially, one that allows you to see that not everything needs to be political – is an astoundingly useful thing to have in terms of making you realise that there are a number of very good reasons for climbing out of your barrel, and that more reasons keep arriving. So long as you know where to look for them, and to recognise them when you see them.
Say what you will about wine, beer or any cocktail; there are times when whisky – and only whisky – is right. For starters, whisky has always been good for conversation. Mignon McLaughlin (in The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960) said “we come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier”, but he was wrong. Perhaps it has something to do with him not being a Scotch-drinker (whiskey with the “e” generally indicating American or Irish, rather than Scotch), or perhaps he just couldn’t do philosophy. Because when you get together with an old friend, or when the pressing issues in life bear down particularly heavily, whisky and reflection are easy bedfellows.
Enjoying a fine whisky in deserving company starts with that particular sound of a whisky cap being unscrewed, followed by the careful metering of a drop of water into your glass. You can then recline, and (sometimes, depending on the whisky and/or your pedigree) allow the ice to serve as metronome, keeping your thoughts and dialogue in time. Without the ice, swirling the whisky in your glass serves nearly as well, if you pay attention to the tenacity with which the liquid resists settling, preferring to cling to the sides of the glass. This also works when alone, once everyone has departed or as meditation before their arrival.
Meditation is an activity always enhanced by whisky. When drinking single malt, we are acutely aware of place and time – especially of time, not only in the age of the dram but in the ages of geology and geography that are so essential to the particulars of the whisky. History lives in whisky, through place, time and also through the art of distillers and blenders, who carry the obligation to maintain standards set decades or even centuries ago. And it is for this reason that drinking a fine whisky sometimes takes the form of ritual, for in drinking it we celebrate a possible immortality that we, as individuals, can never fully know.
More from Larkin
Talking In Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Had some warthog at SB’s house tonight. Some good wine and conversation, and reaffirmation that all the things I want to say to you are worth saying, if only for myself. It’s strange to now know – to understand, to be more accurate – the multiple ways in which one has sabotaged one’s own existence, along with those of others, and to not be able to explore the issues with the relevant person. The astonishment at one’s own blindness is so striking that it’s equally astonishing that one could have been so blind.
Reading Raymond Carver tonight. This is his:
Hummingbird
Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
Another borrowing from someone who expresses things far better than I’ve ever been able to:
Paul Auster – from the essay “White Spaces”
A man sets out on a journey to a place he has never been before. Another man comes back. A man comes to a place that has no name, that has no landmarks to tell him where he is. Another man decides to come back. A man writes letters from nowhere, from the white space that has opened up in his mind. The letters are never received. The letters are never sent. Another man sets out on a journey in search of the first man. This second man becomes more and more like the first man, until he, too, is swallowed up by the whiteness. A third man sets out on a journey with no hope of ever getting anywhere. He wanders. He continues to wander. For as long as he remains in the realm of the naked eye, he continues to wander.
Despite appearances to the contrary, this is – to me, at least – a rather cheerful sentiment.
Steven Pinker offers a solid overview of the current thinking around consciousness, both from a philosophical and neurological viewpoint. The gap between those two viewpoints has been closing for some time now, and it’s good to see that “idle” speculation has again pointed in a useful direction. Of course, this doesn’t redeem philosophy (in the completely armchair sense) in that critics could always – and probably correctly – assert that for every one good idea, we’ve wasted thousands of person-hours on very bad ones. Which, I suppose, is why at least one of my colleagues will no longer have anything to do with philosophy that’s unconnected with actually poking a stick at something, to see how it responds.
Towards the end of the piece, Pinker mentions a typically perceptive thought from Colin McGinn: even if all the evidence is in, and we begin to understand how simple (in one sense, because it’s clearly not simple at all) we are, we’d probably not be able to believe it, or live with that belief. There may well be a drug that can fix you, and me, whatever our afflictions are, but would we want to take them? Or is this the wrong question, because if we do take them, would we not be glad we had?