Slowly

My writing is moving mighty slowly. I have plans, outlines, ideas.

Plans, outlines, and ideas, about a writing project that is against the idea of planning.

How odd.

What I'm really against is not the idea of planning, but the idea of naive planning. The idea that planning is a necessity.

I asked a friend earlier today, 'Why do we think we need to make life happen?'

Life happens whether we plan for it or not.

It is like Taleb, when he said, 'As if the world needed to be governed.'

Take it easy, now.

Let it come as it does.

Look At Yourself.

"Look at yourself, boy," says that song I'm listening to.  It is a women singing, actually.  I wonder what she means.

"Look at the sunrise, look at the moonlight.... I know what's best now," she says.

Sometimes when I listen to songs I imagine that these people are talking to me.

And when this woman talks to me I have a hard time with what she is telling me to do.

I never thought it would be so hard to look at myself.  Not because I look away in disgust, but because I find myself looking at so many things that I don't know which thing is authentic.

I have so many ideas, so many things I feel, that it can be hard to know what is real.

I once told someone that I was afraid of all the secrets that I kept from myself.  They didn't understand.  They felt that honesty was something that was easy and only a matter of intention.  In some ways, they are right.  But in other ways it is much harder than that.

I have many ways of keeping difficult feelings at bay.  I had many walls that I had put up.  Some of them narrative.  Some of them needed no words.  I simply didn't look at certain things.  Didn't feel certain things.

It is difficult to know where to look when attempting to look at oneself honestly.

But I'm starting to feel it all much more clearly.

I'm reckoning more than ever with the limitation of thought.

What I'm really discovering is the power of feeling.

So strange for me, a person who has always been incredibly emotional, to realize that I have fought my feelings so much; that I had chosen to ignore their logic in favor of a cleaner, clearer, more superficial intelligence.

I'm beginning to understand the intelligence of my feelings.

Telephone Vines Invade My Ear

Once I was picking up a phone and suddenly found myself with the image of a large vine sprouting from the phone, going straight into my ear.

On the way in, the vine sprouted all kinds of little branches and twigs and flowers and stuff. All up in my ear canal.

I couldn't help but laugh.

My girlfriend at the time asked me what I was laughing about so I told her.

She laughed and said 'who thinks about things like that?'

I am not comfortable with how strange I am.

I've Begun.

This is the introductory portion of my new writing project, tentatively titled: Planning, Understanding, and Duty: On Technological Nihilism and Historical Consciousness.

1. Introduction: Planning and Understanding

Predictive knowledge, that is, ways of understanding that claim to forecast future events and prescribe responses, is both a comfort and a hindrance.  It feels good to claim that we know what is going to happen, and that when the time comes we will know how to act.  It feels good to have a plan. Believing that we have predicted and adequately prepared for the future can temporarily relieve anxiety.  

The comfort of a plan, however, is often illusory, and comes at a price.  Things rarely go according to plan, and often a plan is a merely narrative that protects us from the harshness of reality.
When a plan reveals itself to be an illusion we are left unprepared to deal with the complexity of reality, facing instead our own self-deception.  Rigid plans and narratives fragilize us by giving us a simplified and inaccurate view of reality.  We are left without knowledge of ourself or our situation.  Meanwhile, reality is still out there in all of its complexity and incomprehensibility.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans.”

Living without a plan, however, seems inconceivable.  How does one moves through one’s life without a trajectory, without a sense of the future? How am I to live if I am not trying to predict and anticipate the future? This obsession with prediction and planning, however, is a uniquely modern condition.  Historical-philosophers like John Gray and Nassim Taleb have persuaded me that it was with the Enlightenment that the incitement to predict and plan first seized Western culture.  This habit of planning, moreover, is related to more serious cultural problems that came out of the Enlightenment.  In particular, it implies that the West has developed an unhealthy relationship with science and technology; that our culture has developed an addiction to superficially articulate language; and that we have traded in the slowness of wisdom and judgement for the speed of naive rationalism and interventionism.  In short, Western culture’s addiction to prediction and planning is a result of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment.  

Individuals living prior to the Enlightenment had less of an inclination to plan and predict.  They were closer to what Taleb calls ‘a nonpredictive view of the world’.  The antidote to the West’s technological nihilism, I believe, is to be found in this idea of a nonpredictive view of the world.  That is, a view that assumes we are never going to fully understand the world, that we will never be able to predict the difficult and tragic events that lie in the future, and that the task of prediction and prescription is a fool’s errand that must be abandoned.  Our only option is to develop a nonpredictive view of the world, to learn to live with difficult questions, to cultivate the courage to go forth into uncertainty, to rely on our own capacity for judgement, and, perhaps most importantly, to welcome uncertainty and volatility into our lives.  I am here to try and add to that project.   

I will defend the idea of a nonpredictive view of the world by focusing on a simple distinction between planning and understanding.  As I’ve tentatively argued, the modern world has inherited an unhealthy habit of prediction and planning, and that this habit is a part of the technological nihilism that emerged from the Enlightenment.  This is not a claim that I expect to be taken on faith.  Part of this writing, therefore, will be spent providing evidence that the Western world does indeed have an unhealthy relationship with planning that needs to be overcome.  Once I feel confident that I have established this, I will then advocate a nonpredictive view of the world.  

The main claim is that understanding ourselves and our situation should take precedence over planning a potential future.  This follows from the claim that plans will organically emerge from understanding, while understanding will not necessarily emerge from plans.  It is possible to have a plan without grasping reality, but it is impossible to grasp reality and not know what is the right thing to do.  As a friend of mine once told me, you don’t need to imagine the future, because if you are fully in the present, grasping reality, you will be creating the right kind of future for yourself.  It is this type of living, this nonpredictive view of the world that relies above all on understanding, that I intend to elaborate.

By drawing attention to the benefits of understanding I am not trying to completely discredit the idea of planning.  Rather, I am suggesting that we are in the habit of turning to planning before we truly understand what is going on, and that we may benefit from redirecting our mental energy towards the task of understanding.  As I said, plans will emerge organically from our understanding.  I feel justified, therefore, in distinguishing between naively rational plans and organic plans.  I believe that we are more inclined to rely on naive plans than to let plans emerge organically from understanding.  God knows that I have had plenty of naive plans, and boy did they burn me in the end.

The idea of a nonpredictive life, one that is best lived in the present and without rigid plans has many precedents.  Zen Buddhism and aesthetics, for example, encourage living in the present while keeping planning to a minimum.  I believe, however, there is another mode of thought that can help us hold a nonpredictive view of the world: historical thought.  It is my goal in this essay to argue that historical thought offers us a nonpredictive view of the world, and that it also offers us a powerful form of morality.  This argument will rely most heavily on the work of R.G. Collingwood.

At the end of his life, Collingwood was attempting to articulate his philosophy of history, which he believed would culminate with something he called ‘historical morality’.  Moreover, Collingwood implied that he viewed historical morality as a counterweight to the European habit of scientific thought.  He believed that the West’s relationship with scientific thought was the definitive fact about Western culture, and that Western morality had suffered as a result.  In particular, he believed that scientific thought, with its focus on the distinction between subject and object, had led us to objectify people, treating them as means to ends.  He hoped that the philosophy of history could provide the foundation for a new type of morality that would not focus on mastering people, but rather on understanding people.  He put this point quite clearly in his outline of The Principles of History: “If [my philosophy of history] is worked out carefully, then should follow without difficulty the characterization of an historical morality and an historical civilization, contrasting with our ‘scientific’ one....  A scientific morality will start from the idea of human nature as a thing to be conquered or obeyed: a[n] historical one will deny that there is such a thing, and will resolve what we are into what we do. A scientific society will turn on the idea of mastering people (by money or war or the like) or alternatively serving them (philanthropy). A[n] historical society will turn on the idea of understanding them.” (The Principles of History, 246).  Collingwood, unfortunately, never lived to complete his final work. I, therefore, am attempting to chase his logic, and to answer the question: What would it mean to found a morality and a civilization on the notion of understanding?  Moreover, that Collingwood places historical morality in opposition to scientific morality provides me the perfect launching pad for addressing my concerns with Western nihilism.  He hoped to overcome the West’s unhealthy relationship with scientific thought by showing how historical thought could be a healthy alternative or counterweight.

I fear I have not been explicit enough.  What I really hope to accomplish in this essay is to show how historical thought has the potential to alleviate the anxiety and barbarity that scientific thought has bequeathed us.  This is not to say that scientific thought should be banished; it has done wonders for life on Earth.  Science, however, does not deserve the unabashed worship that it receives.  It needs to be criticized for its tendency to simplify reality and to prescribe action; we need to reckon with the fact that scientific thought encourages us to have rigid narratives that fragilize us to volatility and uncertainty.  It would be good to explore alternative modes of thought that rely less on prediction and planning; it would be good to explore nonpredictive views of the world that rely solely on understanding.  Historical thought, I believe, is such a type of thought, and can serve as a counterweight to scientific thought’s nihilistic tendencies.

So, that is what I’m here to do.  I’m going to show you that science possesses nihilistic tendencies, and that it relies too heavily on predictive knowledge and planning.  Then I’ll try to explain to you the value of a nonpredictive view of the world, and how history can help us rely on understanding, as opposed to planning. Onward.

Jive.

I'm jiving harder than I have in many months.

I've let go of many of my ambitions for the future, and my thought is flowing much more freely as a result.

I just finished Taleb's Antifragile, and I've just begun Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method.

30 pages in Collingwood has already told me that philosophy is thought that flows freely without obstruction; that the philosopher is the person that let's themselves think without obstruction.

I am ready to think again.

Evaluating the Heart

The problem with duty is that it rests on understanding and consciousness and seemingly nothing else.

But how do I know that what I feel is proper?

Is there not some way to evaluate my heart?

There are all kinds of thoughts and feelings that I have that might be improper or just plain wrong. Kahneman confirms.

So what to do about that?

How to evaluate my heart?

How to believe that right action emerges from a deeper part of myself and still be able to base my actions on deeper feelings?

Historical ontology and behavioral economics offer some advice.

Personal reflection needs to be coupled with historical reflection.

This isn't really a proper post bust just note taking.

Whatever.

How to make something both criteriological and aesthetic?

Necessity, Contingency, and Being

It occurred to me that the necessity in Collingwood's concept of duty implies that there is a definite being. People are a certain way. More specifically, we simply think and feel certain things.

We are not pure becoming. We are not a blank slate that can be transformed into whatever we want. We come from definite histories that determine, to a certain extent, our patterns of feeling and thought.

Contingency, however, emerges in how we make sense of our being. Contingency comes from the relationship between our thoughts and feelings.

Duty, it seems, is just a certain type of self-knowledge. A knowledge of our hearts and minds that tells us that we cannot act any other way.

Strange. So, it is a little bit clearer to me how Collingwood's concept of duty involves a certain sense of necessity, yet leaves room for contingency.

I still don't really understand.

But it has something to do with the firm reality of our thoughts and feelings. It has something to do with determinism.

Something to do with the use of consciousness to glean a truth that we already know somewhere deep inside of us.

Duty is beginning to feel a little bit aesthetic, a little bit zen. That is, after all, where I knew this writing had to go. But now that I've realized that duty has something to do with being, something to do with definite ways of thought and feeling inside of us, it seems more obvious to me that duty is really just about a type of expression.

It is properly aesthetic, as Collingwood defines it. It is the use of consciousness to clarify a truth that has already been grasped in some ways by our heart.

Necessity, Contingency, and Choice

There is a big problem with the writing I did last night.

If action is viewed as a necessity, then where is the room for contingency?

Eh.

I don't have the energy to write about this right now.

Historical Consciousness in Reverse

Tentative thoughts.

For the historian, the past is a story of necessity. As Collingwood argues in 'Goodness, Rightness, Utility', "the historical consciousness is consciousness of a necessity which cannot be stated analytically in terms of reasons and consequences. When the historian has formed his view of the French Revolution as a complex of situations or actions in the past, he sees that this complex as a whole was a complex in which every detail had to be what it was" (In The New Leviathan, 477).

On this view, a historian is a person who understands an action as the necessary outcome of a unique individual acting in a unique situation in which they could not have acted another way.

Does this mean that historical actors were not free? If the actions of the past were necessary, how can we say that they were really choosing to do what they did?

For Collingwood, somehow, this view of the past does not compromise the concept of free action. Agency is kept fully intact.

In fact, Collingwood believes that our actions will be most free, most authentic, if we view ourselves as unique people acting in unique situations who can not act any other way.

If we are willing to accept that we must act as we must act, then our actions will be free and authentic.

In other words, if we take the historical consciousness (action as necessary), and reverse it, applying it to the present and the future, then we are left viewing our actions as necessary outcomes of our unique personality in our unique situation. Collingwood calls this view of action 'duty', and claims that it is historical thought's practical counterpart.

To me, this only implies one thing: Right action will emerge from a clear understanding of ourselves and our situation.

This might seem mundane, but I think it is in contrast to pervasive ideas about right action. Modernity, I think, emphasizes the importance of rational planning. We like to chart our lives on lists, +/- charts, graphs, and in clear rational language.

In short, we value clear plans far more than clear self-knowledge.

My task, then, is to show that right action emerges from clear self-knowledge, and that planning is indeed superfluous.

This is not something I've absorbed into my heart, but something I really do want to learn.

I'm not sure what the questions are that I need to ask. But some of them are these: Why do we favor planning over understanding (John Gray in Enlightenment's Wake)? How is it that right action emerges from understanding alone? How is it that the mind is able to do without knowing what it is doing (i.e. how does action emerge from understanding despite the absence of an explicit plan)? How does one gain an understanding of oneself, and how does that understanding lead to right action (historical ontology and meditation)?

I'm eager to write this essay.

It hits me somewhere deep in my heart.

Planning, Understanding, and Duty

I still have an essay sitting in my mind. But it isn't a journey that I'm willing to take, yet.

Tonight, however, I made an important discovery.

The primacy of understanding is easily relatable to Collingwood's concept of Duty.

Onward.

Thought, onward.

..

When I think of you,
I think of taking and
Making, in different forms.

I think of times and
Places unlike these
Times and places.

I think of a life
That was not real.

I think of stealing
You, all for myself.

Subtraction.

"I'm trying hard not to try so hard," says a song that I really like.

A paradoxical idea that leaves a humming in my chest. It strikes me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

Effort is a problem. For me, in particular. For modernity, in general. I want to be more relaxed. Even in this moment I am trying to let this writing come naturally to me. But it won't.

I'm working very hard at writing this. I don't know why.

I've stopped trying so hard these days. For a few years I was pushing myself way too hard. I was grinding away, thinking I was going to do something. Now I don't know what I'm going to do.

But is it really possible to put effort into not being so effortful? Is this something that can be done? Or is this looking to the poison for a cure? Can one think oneself out of thinking too much? Or is one just falling back into the same error?

A + B = C.

Problem + Proper Action = Solution.

Anxiety + Effort = No Anxiety.

But what if not?

What if the heart doesn't work like an equation? (duh.)

What if the problem is simply removed? Simply overcome?

What if the equation is wiped clean?

What if I just don't have a problem?

This is an idea that I am incapable of expressing clearly.

Nassim Taleb is offering me some help on this idea. I'm reading his chapter on subtraction, Via Negativa.

He claims that his main epistemological tenant is this: "we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition..." (Antifragile, 303).

Taleb at one point mentions Lao Tzu and the concept of wu-wei, 'passive achievement', or 'non-action'.

"Make haste slowly."

All of this rhymes with some of the other thoughts that I am working towards. The essay I've been waiting to write is one on the way the understanding ought to trump planning or prediction. I'm trying to learn to not try so hard. I'm trying to free myself from willful willing. Taleb is a powerful ally in this quest. He advocates a non-predictive view of the world.

Something very foreign to the modern world.

For him, this is something that is mostly subtractive. It is about removing things from our thinking and our living. Not adding.

So where to place our effort? What to do...

Do I try hard to not try so hard?

Or is there just a way to not try so hard?

Or Not.

I can't be so sure about this stuff.

I want to write an essay. My mind is beckoning me. I feel this desire to sit down and write an essay. Get all analytical and stuff just for the fun of it.

I got a bit of comfort from Taleb last night. In Antifragile he claimed that it was important to follow your own inclinations with your reading. That if you are bored with one book, go on to another book. Never spend time with a book that bores you. Don't trust the directed reading that the academies advocate.

I have directed all my own reading for the last few years. I've really enjoyed it. I've gone all over the place. But have often felt a sort of direction guiding me.

I want to write about planning, understanding, and antifragility.

A while ago I had an idea for an essay. It was in October.

A simple claim. Planning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I should start outlining it.

Retiring. Maybe.

I've been contemplating retiring this blog.

It has been a great outlet for me. It was in March of 2009 that I first began blogging. The point has never been for other people to read it. Which doesn't really make sense, seeing as how I'm putting it on the internet.

Why not just write into word documents that I don't share with others?

The possibility that others might read is exciting enough, though pursuing actual readership has never been a priority.

Amazing. I wrote so many essays for so long, and have taken such a hiatus from that kind of thinking and writing.

Yet whenever someone talks to me about philosophy I just light up, I have so much energy, so many things to say.

I still think I need to pursue some kind of intellectual life, but I don't know how.

I'm rethinking my professional life. Trying to put myself in some different directions. But don't know where or why, really.

I want to get into some intense intellectual thinking and writing, but don't know how to right now.

I've recently fallen out of the habit.

Though I know I'd still love to write an essay on the philosophy of history and cultivating judgement.

Perhaps once I finish Antifragile. Which is a great book, by the way.

...

In the dark, moved
By a fragile force,
I witnessed my body
Give in to violent

Thrashing and tossing.
Wood, cloth, space,
pain, all persisting
Under the weight of this

Patient sitting.