Here it is, notes and all:
“I haven’t said too much, have I? There are things you should keep to yourself.” - Meat is Murder
1. The Story of My Loneliness
2. Loneliness and Solitude
2. Loneliness and Solitude
3. Communities, Geographical, Economic, and Organized
4. History, Duty, and Forgiveness
4. History, Duty, and Forgiveness
5. Conclusion: Here I Am
1. The Story Of My Loneliness
I live a largely happy life. I am well liked by friends and coworkers. I eat good food. I drink good drink. I work hard to read, write, and stay thoughtful. I even exercise sometimes (throwin’ and catchin that sweet disc in the excellent way that I do).
The only problem is that words like ‘loneliness’, ‘alienation’, ‘nihilism’, ‘pain’, ‘suffering’, or ‘anger’ are never far from my mind. In fact, they are the words that I was raised to have ready at hand. Patersons sometimes have volatile, angry, lonely tendencies. No matter how much we love one another, no matter how much family and affection ease our pain, life’s grim realities are always waiting for their moment to return. Because attention will settle on them again and they will come back to life in a new form. It is very easy for me to feel, think, and speak in those ways, but I try not to.
So what I want to do now is to tell you about this part of myself. I want to tell you the story of my loneliness. This story, however, needs to be told differently than my normal writing. For I am a philosopher, and my writing is often philosophical. Frankly, I speak most comfortably through references. But this time I won’t be doing that. I almost want this to be a memoir of sorts. I won’t be able to resist citing some philosophers or other thinkers. But largely I will be on my own. Telling you my story.
The story of my loneliness, however, needs to be told in relation to two other stories. 1. The story of my relationship with ‘community’, both in terms of concrete community and in terms of my conception of community. 2. The story of my relationship with history, this encompasses the history of the world around me, my own concrete history, and the history of my relationship with the idea of history.
Thus you can see the sections of this essay. From loneliness, to community, to history. Here I go.
2. Loneliness and Solitude
As I mentioned, the idea of loneliness or alienation is one that has been with me from the start. Aloneness is something that both of my parents openly acknowledged. I swear I can remember them both saying to me at one point or another something like ‘You know, I love you and your sister and your mother/father more than anything, but at the end of the day I know that I’m alone. We come into this world alone and we leave this world alone.’ Further, I knew both of them experienced intense feelings of loneliness and isolation at many point in their lives. I’m not sure what I made of this when I was young, but it has undoubtedly stuck with me. I’ve felt those feelings in me on many occasions. But on the whole I don’t think that I felt lonely for a lot of my life. I always had friends, I loved video games, and girls even liked me sometimes. Life through high school was largely good. Sometimes I was anxious or depressed, and yeah probably felt lonely sometimes too. There is a moment, however, when I can say that loneliness started to play a larger role in my life.
It was the summer of 2006. I had completed a year of school at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). In the fall I would be transferring to the main campus, the University of Maryland at College park. My status as a transfer-student, however, left me without on-campus housing. I was young and overwhelmed by the idea of finding a house or an apartment to live in. So I resolved to commute from my parents house, a mere 30 minute drive away.
The social reality of my situation set in quickly. With very little effort at exploration I concluded that socializing with students on campus while living at home was going to be very difficult. I quickly lapsed into the habit of going to class and coming straight home, or maybe just skipping class altogether. I still hung out with my friends from home, but it pained me to be walking around a college campus full of peers and hardly speaking to any of them. I didn’t even have the nerve to speak to people in class very often. I was so painfully shy. I felt so incapable of initiating a conversation or of expressing myself honestly. Great pain hit me in those days, great feelings of loneliness.
I can’t really even explain to you precisely what was going on with me. I was going through a lot of difficult personal things: the end of a long term relationship, a round of surgery that put me face to face with a traumatic child hood injury, a new social situation in a difficult housing situation. A constellation of events that really broke my heart. This was the first time in my young-adult life in which I felt seriously lonely and depressed.
In the spring of 2007 I began working at the campus bookstore. I moved to College Park in the fall of that year. I met a fantastic professor and began to pursue military history, the thing I now intend to pursue as a career. Things were looking up in 2007. So much so that I declared it the year of the woodcat (woodcat being one of my many nicknames, of course).
Acute loneliness left my life for a time. I was surrounded by coworkers who liked me and wanted to hang out. I was thriving intellectually. I began to mingle with the students and peers who worked in the building I did. But the power of that loneliness that I experienced in 2006 has never quite left me. In fact, I believe that something changed in me that year, and I think that the culture of UMD, combined with my circumstances, has something to do with it. I’ll return to this when I get to the section on community.
My time at UMD was really a great triumph. I lived in two excellent houses with many roommates whom I very much liked and still very much care for. My academic life was an outrageous, totally unexpected success. I underwent an intellectual awakening, learning to truly read and think for the first time. But socially I always felt like I was lacking. I didn’t pursue friendships like I do now, or would if I could do it again. I was too content to hang out with the same people, too hostile to clubs and other forms of organization. I didn’t date as much as I wish I had. I was very insecure. A sense of isolation still stuck with me. My new acquaintance with my intellect, however, gave me new ways of looking at my situation.
The most substantial intellectual breakthrough that I made on this issue came from the distinction between loneliness and solitude. I was able to ask myself, ‘What is the difference between loneliness and solitude?’ In both instances, one is alone. Yet loneliness has all these connotations of pain and solitude of peace and pleasure. I was finally able to ask myself, ‘Why am I to think of myself as being lonely? What if I am simply solitary? What if I am enjoying my solitude?’ I remember telling my dad about this distinction and how it was helping me feel better. In many ways, I think learning to think at UMD helped me think myself out of loneliness and depression. Never entirely, of course. But my new mindset, combined with my new friends from work and my intellectual triumphs, loneliness wasn’t a problem in 2007-2009 like it was in 2006. Sometimes I was lonely, but I was also capable of enjoying my solitude.
In the summer of 2010 I moved to Seattle. I had graduated in December of 2009, and had been traveling and working in College park for the spring and early summer. But I had made up my mind to move to Seattle. I had friends out there, a bit of family. It was time to take a leap in life, move across the country. I knew that much of my life would probably be devoted to seriously scholarly work. So I wanted to spend my youth doing something wild, I wanted to live it urgently. I still want to live life urgently.
There was also a bit of loneliness driving my move to Seattle. I had become frustrated with the social scene in College Park. I didn’t like many of the people. I didn’t want to move to Baltimore. Too many people I knew were already there. The loneliness I experienced then came from the feeling that there were so many people around me that I knew, but so few who really understood who I was or what I was all about, so few that I felt could really assuage the aloneness that I felt. I think I was misguided in thinking that. In hindsight, there are a lot of people who were around me who may have been able to ease my loneliness. I can now see potential friends, potential lovers, relationships that I didn’t explore because I was too depressed, wrapped up in my ideas of alienation and aloneness. That and a few girls did just simply turn me down. Lol. So my move to Seattle was in some ways about finding new people. New faces and bodies to make me feel less alone. Because the familiarity of my current world, somehow, left me feeling isolated.
My move to Seattle, I think, was based on a logic that is characteristic of most modern conceptions of free will. At the time, I was thinking that I needed to remove myself from my present (determined) situation, radically break from my past and find a fresh set of circumstances in which I would be able to recreate myself. Modern morality, I feel and have been told, insists that freedom and choice are about breaks with the past, about the assertion of an individual will that is able to transcend personal or historical circumstance. This problem be rendered both in terms of habit and tradition. In his essay “Madness and Habit in German Idealism: Discipline between the Two Freedoms,” Slavoj Zizek argues that our modern conceptions of morality differ from ancient Greek’s precisely on the issue of habit. For the ancients habit was something that could be trained and cultivated, it could be a form of “organic inner rule,” thus an indispensable tool in the quest for freedom. Modern philosophers, like Kant, for example, believed that “freedom cannot ever become habit(ual), if it becomes a habit, it is no longer true freedom” (Zizek, “Madness and Habit in German Idealism”, 1, Google it). Alasdair MacIntyre, too, believes that modern morality characteristically endorses freedom as a break with habit or tradition. MacIntyre argues that modern philosophers like Sartre preferred to reject history and tradition as inauthentic. Instead, the individual alone is authentic, only you have the capability to create your own life beyond the circumstances of your time and place. “Indeed the self’s refusal of the inauthenticity of conventionalized social relationships,” MacIntyre argues, “becomes what integrity is diminished into in Sartre’s account” (After Virtue, 205). This view of freedom as separable from time and place, and as relying on a subject capable of exercising rational choice, is clearly problematic. We are not creatures without time and place. We are historically situated beings, both in terms of our own personal history and the larger history of our time. Nonetheless, I was, I believe, tacitly operating with many of these ideas in mind. I wanted to break from my history, from the traditions and habits that Janus had bestowed upon me.
I think this tendency to reject present circumstances in favor of a sort of rational autonomy can in part be explained by the plethora of narratives that we can use to explain our lives. Modern life is highly segmented. Within our own lives we distinguish between childhood, tweens, teens, young-adult hood and so on. In each of those phases I encounter more situations with more complex distinctions. I can choose my classes at the school I attend. I have to select a major and a potential career path. At each point I am presented with a new narrative about how my life will unfold, a new explanation about my life so far and my life to come. At every point in my life there has always been a narrative ready at hand by that I could emulate and compare myself with. It is this narrative density of our social space, I am thinking, that makes the modern rejection of circumstance and history appealing. I think that I was either overwhelmed by or unimpressed with the narratives I was already embedded in. I wanted this radical break that would offer the beginning of a new story. I am now philosophically opposed to this. The rejection of convention, tradition, and history becomes a weak position if we simply ask, “what would human actions deprive of any falsifying narrative order be like?” (Ibid., 214). What would authenticity beyond a determined social situation look like? In the final section on history I’ll be returning to things like narrative and history.
When I arrived in Seattle I was too busy to feel lonely. I was living with a family member, I was applying for jobs the first morning I was there. I had old friends to catch up with. Loneliness wasn’t on my mind because I was on the frontier. I was exploring brand new neighborhoods. I was applying for lots of jobs. I was busy busy busy. What a nice and bizarre time it was. I began to have the oddest dreams. I would wake up at night and think I was in my parent’s old house, the one I grew up in and the one they sold. My mind was clearly dealing with a lot of new information.
On my very first day I went to the University District to meet a friend. I walked up University Way, which from then on I would know simply as the ave. I saw a store, ‘The University Bookstore’. “Oh, of course there is a bookstore. Every college town needs a bookstore.” I had word for UMD’s campus bookstore and fancied myself qualified to work at such a business. I went inside and I asked the concierge if they were hiring. Little did I know, but I would come to know that concierge well. Seeing her many times, toasting many of her bagels. She kindly informed me that there was a barista position open and that I could apply on the third floor. To the third floor I went. The application I filled out. To the interview I went. And the job I was offered.
I began work at the Bookstore Cafe on September 7th, 2010. I was initially apprehensive. Scared of making coffee and by my new circumstances. Thankfully, I stuck with it. Because now I reckon myself an excellent barista and I very much enjoy my work.
More importantly to this story, the UBS quickly offered me many social outlets. I told myself that I wasn’t allowed to turn down an invitation, and I rarely did. I went out to many different neighborhoods with many different people trying several different things. I’m not sure how lonely I felt during that time. I can’t really remember. In December of 2010 I started dating someone, and that was nice. I felt less lonely then. We broke up eventually. After that I went through a bit of feeling lonely. I stayed single for quite some time. I was able to recognize what solitude was. I have been able to recognize my solitude. Because the situation I am speaking of is my current one. Pangs of loneliness that seem more minor than the ones of the past. I have many friends now, and I’m mostly comfortable with being single.
The story of loneliness in Seattle is different from the story of 2006 because it has never been pure loneliness. It has been an aloneness that has intermittently been loneliness and solitude. Sometimes it is a definite loneliness. But that loneliness always retains the possibility of being transformed into solitude at any moment.
My solitude has grown vast during my time here. I wish I had my Rilke in front of me. Because it was only recently that Rilke spoke to me of solitude. And it is only in light of that reading that I am doing that writing right now. Don’t be afraid if part of me wants to drown my solitude by turning to other people. This is quite a normal reaction. It means, however, that there is something deep and vast in solitude. What a shame that I’m not able to recreate Rilke’s words. They made quite an impression on me. Branding my heart.
The story of loneliness and solitude in Seattle cannot be like the story of 2006. For in Seattle I have always had friends, always had new social opportunities presenting themselves to me. I have perhaps been less successful at dating than I would like. But I don’t fault myself for this. I just don’t seem to meet very many people that I like.
The story of loneliness and solitude in Seattle, instead, has to be told in different terms, in terms of the idea of community.
3. Communities, Geographical, Economic, and Organized
Before I begin this part of the story I’d like to make some general remarks about the idea of community. For the sake of thinking clearly I would like to distinguish between a few different types of communities. These different forms of community that I’ll be distinguishing will naturally blur in real life. Still, I find it important to distinguish between geographical communities, economic communities, and purposefully organized communities.
By geographical community I simply mean that we come into contact with people and get to know them because we live in the same area. I see the same people on the streets, I see them in my apartment building. We begin to know one another simply because we spend time in the same geographical area. Geographical community, however, is inseparable from economic community. That is to say, me and all these other people near me come into contact most often in economic settings or in direct economic exchanges. Many of my exchanges take place in some kind of economic setting: I meet my friends at bars and restaurants where we buy food, I go to my favorite coffee shop and I talk to the baristas and see all the people around me, I talk to all kinds of people while I work. Of course these communities aren’t bounded by their economic background. Conversations still take on a meaning greater than the economic setting. We really feel for our coworkers and even our customers sometimes. But the economic setting still provides the foundation on which those interactions are built.
Ok so the bulk of my social situations spring up because of geographical proximity and economic exchange. So what? Well, the only thing I want to note is that there is a certain type of community that emerges from the necessary business of life. Even if I just go about my routine of working I will encounter people, I will be friends with coworkers and customers, I will become a regular at certain coffee shops, and with all my new friends probably a regular at some bars, too. Community arises naturally out of my daily routine of work and leisure. This type of community, I will call ‘organic’ communities, (geographical and economic being examples). I in no way mean no imply that other forms of community are inorganic or inauthentic. I just want to be plain that there is a type of community that takes little or no effort beyond routine living.
There is also another type of community. Typically these communities are more purposefully pursued and organized. They are bound by common interests or practices, and not simply on geographical or economic realities. A group of people may get together and form a community, for example, because they like a similar type of music or because they share a common diet. Thus we have communities based on things like bands, vegan diets, or philosophical discussions. While these communities can also be authentic and ‘organic’, they differ in that they are more explicitly pursued and created. These types of communities don’t bubble up as frequently as geographical or economic communities do. The interests that bind these communities are by definition more specific and therefore need to be more purposefully pursued. Thus we find people online networking among fellow anarchists, fellow vegans, or fellow local bands. And we find these people very purposefully pursuing one another.
These are the two types of communities that I want to distinguish between: organic and organized. (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, perhaps?). Other than the way that they arise, what precisely, makes these types of community different? I want to argue that one way these types of communities differ is in the range of the references that support them.
Reference, I claim, is the crux of community. We cannot connect with other people and form a community unless we have some common knowledge, interest, or goal that organizes our language. In other words, ever community subsists on a certain pool of references from which its members must draw. In some cases, such as with organic communities, the pool of references is broad and consists of common facts and goals, such as the existence of money and of the practice of purchasing and enjoying coffee. No specialized knowledge is required to engage with these kinds of communities, their reference pools are broad. As a result, however, their reference pools are also very uncertain: we know what we have to say and think in order to order a cup of coffee, but it is not as clear how I am to handle the small talk I make with the barista. The broadness of the reference pool makes it easy to act generically (order a drink) but makes it harder to know how to conduct myself specifically (have a unique brief conversation). Purposefully organized communities, I think, depend on a more specific reference pool. That is to say, when communities are organized around things like diet or a music scene a more specialized knowledge is required to begin to engage with said community. One must understand the complexity of gluten-free or vegan diets if one wants to come into contact with those communities. Or one must understand the different bands in a certain scene. To function in an organized community one must accumulate the proper experience with the reference pool. One cannot move easily among a community unless one moves easily in its reference pool.
I have little patience for highly specific reference pools (though I frequently indulge). I like my conversations to move strangely from one topic to the next, blending personal points with larger analyses. I also move very easily among certain specific communities. I can talk with other baristas about coffee and we will have a reference point that other people wouldn’t understand. I can speak in philosophical references that many people will not understand. I can talk about certain music in the same way. The list goes on. But in spite of my capacity for specific reference I stand by one conclusion: I must always be capable of engaging with an individual even if it is unclear what our mutual reference pool is. I always wants to be capable of abandoning specific reference and asking someone ‘so what do you do?’ or ‘whats up with you today?’. Because those questions operate at the frontiers of reference. We cannot get much further from specific reference than by asking someone what they are doing with their day.
It can be very difficult, of course, to speak to someone without a clearly delineated reference pool. But I so dislike those moments when you enter a group and no one is capable of giving up the referentiality they are comfortable with. I, for example, have gone and hung out with a group of four different people who all knew one another and knew a big group of people. I was around and none of them made a direct attempt to engage me specifically. They went about their normal referential business, talking about so and so who was joining such and such a band just in time for such and such festival. I remember being very disappointed that this sort of insular reference pool had put me at a distance from these other folks. I, too, have had moments where the size of my reference pool leads me incidentally to exclude someone. If I am talking with a philosophy friend, for example, and another friend approaches, there might be no comfortable way for me to initiate them into the conversation. We will say hello, but unfortunately I cannot welcome them into the world I am engaging in. They simply aren’t versed in the references, or I am not capable of translating the references into understandable language. In short, different types of communities depend on the existence of certain kinds of references, and unfortunately that referentiality is exclusionary for some just as it is unifying for others.
This reality of reference pools, I fear, makes organized communities harder to get involved in than organic communities. Organized communities often require a more specialized reference pool. They require a certain commitment to a practice or group. Thus people are critical of insular communities. The size of a reference pool has a lot to do with this, I think.
In my life I have often just floated in my life until I encountered some kind of organic community. In high school and early college I just let my life happen is it did: I became friends with kids in my classes, I hung out with my roommate during my freshman year, I joined a few clubs accidentally. I let my wandering guide my socializing, and therefore I never developed any taste for highly specific reference in a community. Not entirely true, because I was the president of MESA. But I had no consciousness of the idea of an organized community that subsists on a certain type of reference.
I first became aware of the appeal of these organized communities when I came to UMD. To put it more precisely, UMD was the first place that I felt envious of people who belonged to an organized community. There was one community, or constellation of communities, that I was particularly jealous of: I wanted to be at the place where the food co-op, the activism, and the music scene intersected. In that world there was a group of people that dressed a little like me, had tattoos and piercings and seemed to think things. I never quite found my way into that community. The things they cared about didn’t excite me. I was friends with some of those folks, and very much liked many of them, but I never felt a real sense of community. My community existed more so in my group house, in my classes, and at my jobs. I found all of those things a lot more exciting.
I think maybe I never found my way into those communities because I never felt like I adjusted to the reference pools that sustained them. I was never sure what I could talk to them about, interactions felt opaque, and I really didn’t know how to conduct myself. I think I’m very different now. But then I was never able to think along with many of those people in those more organized communities. I just didn’t feel very connected. And more importantly I was convinced that there was a reference pool that I needed to learn. It never occurred to me that I should simply disregard all my presuppositions about what I ‘should’ talk to someone about and instead actually just talk to them. “What do I say?” I once asked a friend. “Hello,” they responded. Ruddy brilliant. Just say hello. I use this move all the time now.
In my home, my classes, and my job, however, I felt remarkably connected to people. This, too, can be explained in terms of reference pools. Me and coworkers have a very clear reference pool that establishes our immediate relationship. When I first meet a coworker there is no uncertainty as to how we are to interact with one another. We need to introduce ourselves, establish a mutual understanding about the work we are going to do together. But from there we are free to talk about whatever we please: there is little to no pretense other than what is expected of us economically.
I find that at work I am very likely to ask people odd questions, to go out of my way to get to know someone. I have done this many times and I will do it many more times. I am able to do this at jobs precisely because the conditions of my being around someone are purely economic, thus leaving our pool of reference simultaneously specific and vast. Specific in that we know exactly what kinds of things we can talk about: the job, the neighborhood we are working in, basic things about ourselves. Vast in that you can really get to know someone by spending so much time with them in a less determinate reference pool, such as with working or living with someone. Connections formed in this way are, for me, deeper and all the more satisfying because 1. they grew slowly and 2. they grew despite the fact that, on paper, we probably shouldn't like one another. I made many good friends at jobs who I had little or nothing in common with. I thank the work environment.
In Seattle I have continued to organize my communities through work and living. As I mentioned, the UBS quickly offered me a lot of social opportunities. It is a big store, and working in the cafe meant that I met more people than your average employee. Very quickly, then, the realities of work and food put me into many social positions. A coworker invited me out somewhere, I went with them. That coworker was friends with other coworkers who I then became friends with. Before I knew it a year had gone by and I had many friends in many different departments. All unique people who I liked in different ways for different reasons. The UBS undoubtedly dominated my community for the first year or so I was in Seattle. Even when I left the UBS my jobs continued to organized my communities. Many of my current friends I met through the doughnut shop and the bakery, where I currently work. Work is undoubtedly how I have met most of my friends in Seattle.
Geography, too, brought me into contact with people. This is true both in the neighborhood I work and where I live. I’ve worked in the U-District, in First Hill, and Belltown, and everywhere I have come into contact with all kinds of different people: regulars at the cafes, people who work at surrounding bars and stores, people who walk the streets. It is fun to be able to go into the local bar after work and have the people know that you work down the street. We can talk about how busy or slow we were. We bring each other products, we give each other discounts, we tip each other well. In my neighborhood, too, I have become a regular at coffee shops, have gotten to know employees at certain stores, and have gotten to know a few people who live in the area.
My communities in Seattle are therefore largely of the organic variety. I spend so much time working, eating, and drinking, that my communities have organized themselves around those habits: I know people largely from jobs, restaurants, cafes, and bars. I like this about my community. There is little or no pretense beyond economic exchange and geographical proximity.
This doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t felt the desire to pursue more organized forms of community. Seattle is loaded with people and places that seem like they ‘fit in’ somewhere. There are so many bars, music venues, and other ‘communal spaces’, that have a definite feel to them, that possess a sphere of belonging (and by default, a sphere of exclusion). For example, I live a block from a small music venue that is also a vintage clothing shop. I was at one point very curious about getting involved with this communal space. I quickly found, however, that that community was very loosely organized around a certain sense of fashion and a collection of local bands. When I entered one of their social events I quickly felt like an outsider. Everyone there was already sharing a reference pool and seemed to have very little patience for accommodating me into that pool. There were very few people who stopped and said, ‘oh, what do you do?’, or ‘how was your day?’ People continued to have conversations about this band, this person, these things. When I left, the person who brought me said that they were aware that ‘Riley has no idea who any of these people are.’ Yet they all continued to throw references around like I either knew or they didn’t care whether I knew or not. Good for them. It is nice to be comfortable in a referential world. I know. I have my own.
But at the same time I dislike this failure to expand a reference pool based on the presence of a new person. If I encounter someone new I take very few references for granted. I try to keep things basic, I try not to use words that are too opaque or referential. I simplify my language and I try to approach someone as candidly as possible. But, as I noted above, this is very difficult to do and sometimes I simply can’t do it. So I can’t really blame a big room full of people, already comfortably swimming together, for failing to extend the effort to talk to an outsider. And some of them did and it was an okay time. I don’t want to paint a negative picture of anyone. I am just trying to understand my relationship with the idea of community.
This is not an uncommon problem, I think. Community inevitably finds itself in this double bind between two needs: 1. the desire to maintain a specialized reference pool (the community’s life blood) and 2. the need to bring in new members (the necessary condition of its continuation). It can be very difficult to initiate new members into a community if the reference pool of the community is too specific, too exclusionary, or simply too annoying. I guess I can say that I have very little patience for specific reference pools unless they seriously interest me. (I love philosophy, after all, so I can’t complain too much about dense reference pools).
I fear that my attitude towards specific reference pools has prevented me from getting involved in a more organized community. Because Seattle is loaded with different groups of people trying to create alternative spaces, communal spaces, group projects that are focused on the good of individuals and groups. Foucault might say that there are a lot of people in Seattle who are involved in the creation of new subjectivities: new experiences, new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. And Foucault would applaud this ‘limit-work’ that is going on here. But I just can’t seem to be excited by it.
Perhaps it is just because my daily routine already occupies so much of my time I have no idea how or when I would pursue these organized communities. It is true, there are a few communities that I’ve flirted with but have failed to join. In particular, there are a group of individuals who use the internet to arrange a time to drink and discuss philosophical issues. Drunk philosophy, they call it. I really ought to go to such a meet up. But I have failed so far to go. I don’t know what it is. But man I already feel super busy and socially satisfied with the work and friends I already have. I’m always open to new people and things. But I have a thing I’m doing. That, and my real passion lies in thinking, reading, and writing. Not in a certain type of diet, music, or social issue. The things I truly love to do are solitary things.
This is all I really want to say about community in Seattle. I have largely brought myself up to the present moment. My communities are still organized in the organic ways I described, and I still have failed to click with any type of organized community. At this point I am starting to doubt the validity of the distinctions I have made. Are those organized communities really so different from the ones that have sprung up in my economic and geographical world? I hear that many people in different circles also lack a sense of community, or feel like a little fish in a big reference pool. But I also have heard people speak very seriously of their community, of the connection they feel to people. I think that there are people out there who are having a very different experience of community than I am. But these people very well may have lived in Seattle their entire lives and have spent years accumulating this community. I am willing to admit my ignorance to what is really going on in these different communities, and to say that I don’t know what to call them, ‘organized’, ‘organic’, whatever.
But there is something else going on in my heart. Some other feeling I have about people, action, and community. This feeling has something to do with history, my history, and my world’s history.
4. History, Duty, and Forgiveness
The thing I continue to work hardest on is a conception of ‘historical morality’. I want my morality to be based not on any kind of rule, or on any kind of analysis about ends and means. I want my morality to be based on my relationship with the past. I always want my choices about the present and the future to be framed by an understanding of the past. This means we acknowledge that in life "We enter upon a stage that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama [playing] subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others” (After Virtue, 213). We are always born into a historically determined situation that partially dictates how we live.
What this means is that historical knowledge is an indispensable element in the quest for free and moral action. If we don’t understand where we come from we will never understand where we are, and we will thus not be in the best position to make decisions. Historical knowledge, MacIntyre claims, exists both as knowledge of individuals and of larger settings: We must consider both our own unique history and the larger history of”the setting or settings to which [we] belong” (Ibid., 208). In my own work I have claimed that we need to think about both of these layers of our history: Our own personal history and the larger history that makes our’s possible.
Moreover, historical morality overlaps with an aesthetic morality. History, after all, is another form of literature. Many authors (Collingwood, John Lukacs, MacIntyre) have convinced me that there is a deep continuity between aesthetics, history, and morality. To think of ourselves historically is essentially to think of ourselves aesthetically: Life or history is essentially “an enacted dramatic narrative in which the characters are also the authors” (Ibid., 215). Life and history are only understandable if they are expressed aesthetically.
This, in fact, is the main difference between the study of the natural world and the study of the human world: The natural world can be explained in terms of cause and effect, while the human world can only be explained in terms of narrative. The only way to explain action, I believe, is by reference to an individuals thoughts and feelings. This means that if we want to explain an action we need to create a story that renders those actions intelligible. Our capacity for morality thus in some way depends on our ability to construct explanatory narratives, which is really just historical thinking. Moral thinking, it appears, can only be historical thinking.
So, I’m preaching some kind of continuity between morality, aesthetics, and history, whereby we have to use narratives to explain both our own actions and the actions of others. But so what? What does any of this have to do with loneliness and community?
This idea of historical morality is relevant to the rest of this essay because it is the method of thinking that has let me understand and accept why I have the kinds of communities that I do.
I have often chastised myself for not pursuing more organized communities. I wish that I had rallied behind certain causes in college. I wish now that I made music or had some interest that would connect me with large numbers of people. Coffee, perhaps, could do that for me. It does already. But I somehow feel that the coffee thing has just happened to me. I didn’t mean to pursue this. I’ve wanted to understand why I haven’t felt connected to other communities that I wanted to feel connected to. So how does historical thinking do this for me?
Historical thinking, at the end of the day, is the supreme form of empathy. To think of someone historically is to think of them as a unique individual making unique choices for unique reasons that only they could make at that particular moment. To think historically is to try and understand people’s actions as necessary expressions of their character and their circumstances. The historian understands that people do what they must do, that people act dutifully.
This conception of duty does not mean that people are acting in relation to some rule. On that contrary, as R.G. Collingwood argues in The New Leviathan, “A man’s duty on a given occasion is the act which for him is both possible and necessary: the act which at that moment character and circumstance combine to make it inevitable, if he has a free will, that he should freely will to do” (17.8, author's italics). Duty, then, is a way in which we view our own actions: we regard them as necessary outcomes of our circumstances and character, what we did was what we had to do. Duty and history, moreover, are identical in the way they approach action: both try to explain action by reference to the uniqueness of character and circumstance. Duty and history differ, however, in that duty is a form of practical reasoning (by which we explain our own actions) where as history is a form of theoretical reason (by which we explain the actions of others). As Collingwood argues, “The idea of action as duty, as we have seen, is inevitable to a person who considers it historically.... The more a man accustoms himself to thinking historically, the more he will accustom himself to thinking what course of action it is his duty to do, as distinct from asking what it is expedient for him to do and what it is right for him to do; and the more he will accustom himself to thinking in the same way of other people’s actions explaining them to himself not by saying ‘this person did this action in pursuit of such and such an end’ or ‘in obedience to such and such a rule' but 'because it was his duty' (The New Leviathan, 28.9). We can now see how historical thinking inevitably leads to a certain moral attitude. To think historically is to approach other people’s actions with the greatest understanding and empathy possible. To explain action in this way is to think dutifully. This is, without a doubt, the approach I want to take to myself and others. As I’ve been saying for years, forgive everyone for everything (even if you still punish them).
For many years I have been trying to be a sympathetic historian of my own past. I’ve been trying to forgive myself for everything wrong I’ve done. When I reflect on what I’ve done, the choices I’ve made, I try to unconditionally forgive myself. Because I’ve done things I regret, I don’t feel good about everything I’ve ever done. But I don’t want to say ‘oh well I was being stupid’ or something like that. There were reasons that I did what I did, and I want to do my best to really understand and forgive myself for what I’ve done.
So if I haven’t come into contact with more organized forms of community, I want to be okay with that. Further, I don’t want to blame people who are in organized communities by saying they are pompous or arrogant or cliquey or this or that. I want to be able to understand and accept someone even if they don’t want to give me the time of day. Sometimes I still get pissed off, and rage out over this customer or that jerk. But at my best I try to understand everyone in the most forgiving way possible.
What that means is that I try to give people the benefit of the doubt by trying to imagining a narrative that paints their actions in the most forgiving way possible. Sometimes this takes some real effort, because people do such stupid things. To explain someone’s actions in a forgiving light is a serious task, and one that is so easy to avoid. It is so easy to just call people stupid and move on.
Boy, I get overwhelmed by the challenge of thinking this way. I love to do this, to try and forgive everyone for everything. I try to understand everyone historically. I try to explain everyone’s actions in terms of duty. But it is hard. As I said, it takes a sort imaginative effort, a mental exertion. One that, I think, is aesthetic. Everyone conversation, every interaction, is an opportunity to create something, to act in a way that expresses your duty, to understand another person as acting dutifully. A conversation is an aesthetic-dutiful collaboration of sorts: “a conversation is a dramatic work, even if a very short one, in which the participants are not only the actors, but also the joint authors, working out in agreement or disagreement the more of their production” (After Virtue, 211). This is the way I want to think of myself and others: as unique people collaborating on our lives, embracing the constellation of circumstances and characters that brought us to that unique moment. Sounds all silly and exciting, yeah?
5. Conclusion: Here I am
So this is where I find myself these days: trying to think historically, dutifully, empathically. I’m not lonely, and I have a diverse community that has been built piecemeal through living and working in this city. I don’t feel inclined to pursue organized forms of community, and I don’t feel any hostility towards those that enjoy organized communities. I understand why my life has gone this way so far, why I relate to community the way I do, and I want to (and might) understand why other people do indeed belong to communities in the way they do. It is an expression of their duty. And my life has been an expression of my duty. My character and my circumstances made it inevitable that I freely chose what I did.
Notes:
- History, duty, and forgiving myself for having the kinds of communities I have.
Well, what it really has to do with is the notion of duty in it’s non-regularian sense.
- I fear that organized community is anti-historical in that it attempts to create something new without reflecting on what we are making something out of. It pushes into the future without regard for the past. Rather than forceful creation, raw choice, I think that reflection on the past can lead to something new.
UMD as first encounter with highly specific reference pool and also intense loneliness. Intense loneliness = response to the intensity of the images and reference pools around me. A loneliness so intense can only exist in relation to a community that doesn’t actually exist, a simulacra of community, creating a simulacra, intense loneliness. GOTTA INCOPROATE ALL OF THIS UP THERE
say something more about people not being able to engage with a stranger and just engaging with the ingroup. Something about how moreover it is my duty to talk to people even if they are excluded from the reference pool.
From there
- Community in Seattle has to do with the fact that I am very social, generally well liked, have had some success with women, and that I still feel this alienation, this isolation, that I hope community could solve. But so far it cant.
- Something at some point in the history section on narrative understanding and human self creation
- COMMUNITY AND REFERENT! With geography, economics, there is a central referent, but one that is loose and can be quickly shed if one knows what they are doing. Other communities, however, don’t always lose their referent so easily.
- *** ALSO! Very important: Something about history and particularity and community. Something about Kahneman and psychology not teaching that kind of appreciation. Something about Cairo and psychology appreciating generality.
Of history will be plainly stated
I will casually and with minimal reference describe the major tenants of what I’m working towards.
Of History
- I fear that
- The main point of this section will be the feat that organized communities discourage historical thinking. Organized communities thrive on specialized reference pools. Specialized reference, according to Hedges and Berry, makes us disconnected from your everyday person, makes it hard for us to appreciate what is unique and novel in the world. It gives things a sheen of normalcy or classifiability. History, on the contrary, is about the appreciation of the individual, about action as duty. I, of course, cannot avoid the conclusion that in order to understand these people who are tacitly embracing antihistorical forms of thought are also acting out of duty. I must give into the temptation to think of them historically.
I. Art and History
Both of them containing ‘organic’ qualities, we do it because we must, both in art and duty and history
II. Narrativity in life
- Narativity and morality. SOmething about morality in relation to the size of the reference pool. For if one exists in a small, dense reference pool then one has less options for creating unique narratives, and thus a rare chance for morality.
Art and history
