A personal letter on some of my own thoughts, anxieties, and conflicts. A personal philosophy.
S.R.,
Something of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s comes, at intervals, to mind:
“You are so close, Lucilius, that I begin to doubt whether I should write you notes rather than letters!” (Seneca, Letter 50.11.18–19; my translation).
This might come to you as no surprise (and yet I feel it worth saying) that in writing to you, I am writing for myself.
There are, if you’d like, prior correlates. Seneca and Lucilius, Montaigne and La Boetie. Rilke and Kappus.
There is a luxury in these one-sided dialogues; if but for a moment, I can set aside a few minutes and take stock of my thoughts in a tangible way. The feeling, I think, is that of catharsis.
Just a moment ago, I stepped outside for a cigarette. Standing on my porch, in the rain, I gazed out at the dark hollows of the street, and the patches of light cast down by the street lamps, and in a moment those lines from Ecclesiastes came to mind,
“What advantage is there to man in all that he labours under the sun? Generations go, and generations come; the world stands to the ages. And the sun rises, and the sun sets…” (Ecclesiastes 1:3–5; my translation from the Septuagint.)
For some time, as you know, I’ve felt a crushing weight (perhaps it’s better called a malaise, or an ennui, though I think that the two are inseperable), which progresses along many avenues – namely, that something ought to be done. That thereis, out therein the world, something to see. That whatever it is herein the world is not enough, and that the hunger and restlessness and vagantry of the soul cannot be sated by it.
“So my two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, one spiritual, were in conflict, and they wasted my soul by their discord.” (Augustine, Confessions, ?)
And in moments similar to these there likewise comes upon an overwhelming desire to do, and not to do. What it is that ought to be done, however, I’ve yet to realize. And yet the feeling persists, and the moments pass. The Existentialists, I think, would call this anguish. And yet I think they have no philosophical monopoly on the term.
It is a fundamental experience.
The thought has recently occurred to me that perhaps the Epicureans hold more sway over me than do the Stoics. They do so, at least and if only, in one regard: their account of our biological imperatives.
When Epicurus thinks of pleasure as the end goal of all action, he is not necessarily referring to particularly titillating pleasures of the body (e.g. as an epicure would), but the pleasure that supervenes in the removal of pain. The greatest kind of pleasure is that of freedom from pain, both in the body (i.e. aponia) and in the mind (i.e. ataraxia). Setting aside a full account of desire in Epicurean philosophy, I’ll try to summarize it in this way: our needs are simple, and our desires great.
We can achieve happiness if only we restrict our desires to those things which are absolutely necessary (e.g., the satisfaction of hunger, thirst, shelter, and companionship), and dismiss the rest in varying degrees.
The fulfillment of our biological imperatives – what we need as human beings, as physical organisms – is a simple matter. The issue which arises is everything else: purpose, fulfillment, meaning.
These are all open questions, and in certain regards philosophy falls short. That virtue is simultaneously a general quality and a particular application, and yet situations are so concrete as to be unanalyzable when giving a general definition of what it means to be virtuous. That meaning and fulfillment are aesthetic in nature, that what is meaningful to one is not meaningful to another, and that a pluralist view of meaning and fulfillment seems probable. I think, in any case, that it’s an unanalyzable intuition , or quasi-perception – much like beauty (though I’m not much taken by the idea that it is conditioned as thoroughly as some might think.)
If there were any advice I could give (far be it from me to do so) in the pursuit of purpose, I would say this: start from first principles (what all human beings hold in common, what univerals there are, if any).
What does nature say?
That we pursue pleasure and flee pain. That we are first and foremost rational beings. That our first psychological instinct is self-preservation.
Extend the circle from the self outward (the Stoics call this oikeosis) in ever expansive degrees, as reason dictates. Soon enough you’ll find that the circle of the self encompasses the whole cosmos – that we are, by inference, moral beings, and that all ethics is a duty we have to one another. (And yet I think that the injunction is much more fundamental than inference dictates – that it’s intuitive.)
And so it is, a tenuous map of life:
Nature dictates that we fulfill our biological imperatives, which are simply met.
Reason dictates that we are moral (the Good itself, I think, is intuitive, though of course this needs explanation).
And of the aesthetic? That, I think, is a question of one’s own intimate knowledge of oneself (imagine that – that we could be strangers to ourselves if not watched diligently!)
And so, what to do?
Even as I write it still feels as if I’m
“…falling into a labyrinth.” (Plato, Euthydemus, 291b.)
Farewell.
Yours,
George