The one thing I’ve begun to recognize is that truth and happiness, truth and health, do not go hand in hand. Sure, you can exercise and eat well, but real health requires what most doctors I’ve read (like Mehmet Oz in ‘You: An Owner’s Manual’) call “connecting to something larger than yourself.” Having a reason to wake up in the morning, a purpose, a project.

Real health requires optimism, the absence of stress, and a sense of purpose. But given the state of the world, is optimism something that can even be considered a valid way of looking at things? Could the desire for certainty be something of an obstacle, some sort of problem one suffers from?

Alan Watts, the well-known bringer of Eastern goods to the Western philosophy scene, has been on my mind for a while now. He’s got a video I highly recommend, called “A Conversation With Myself.” In it, Watts saunters through a patch of San Francisco wilderness, discussing his philosophy at a graceful, dignified kind of cadence, talking to himself the whole time. It’s really beautiful, and a hell of a way to express some philosophy.

One of the many insights I’ve gained from him is the idea of nature as, in his terms, fundamentally “wiggly.” It isn’t straight or quantifiable, it sways, part of a pattern and an order, to be sure, but one that is far beyond human comprehension or manipulation. It’s a pretty obvious statement–observe the tidy geometry of your house, then go outside and look at the softly shaking, intricately-leaved trees–but one that carries with it some reorienting implications.

One reason I have always been such a fan of nominalism and pragmatism is that they recognize the huge difference between our world of concepts and quantifiable distinctions (in short, the straight world), and the phenomenal world we inhabit, full of the over-complex, elegant wiggle-world Watts explains. Pragmatism, in one of the ways I’ve understood it, disengages our concepts regarding the world (the work of what Robert Pirsig calls “the knife of Reason,” chopping and dividing and hierarchical-izing) from the world as it really is. We may divide our emotions into different groups–positive and negative, love, greed, hunger, sadness, lust–but these divisions only exist because they have been proven useful, not because they represent the incomprehensibly intricate expanse of our emotional reality. They’re tools, they serve purposes; they’re never truthful-in-themselves.

But what Watts suggests (or seemed to suggest in my grasping) is not only that the Straight world exists apart from the Wiggly world, but that we must relinquish our over-reliance on the Straight world, stop trying to “straighten things out” or “square things away.” Whereas I had once thought that the pragmatic Straight world should become more conscious of itself, stop pursuing truth-for-its-own-sake and aim itself towards human happiness and Quality (once again, Pirsig does a great job with this), I’ve started to wonder if maybe we should seek to absolve the whole thing. This may be an artificial kind of dichotomy, a split that doesn’t need to be there, but in any case I think the contrast is something that needs to be explored.

If we exist in a Wiggly world, being Wiggly beings ourselves (meaning we can’t even understand ourselves, because our own bodies and personalities are themselves wiggles and un-straightenoutable) would it be best to work towards ridding ourselves of our straightness, instead of utilizing that straightness the best we can?

As is usually the case when I’m breaking new ground with something, I’m having a hard time articulating exactly what I’m trying to say. My “Rational Knife” doesn’t yet see the differences clearly enough to chop them in two. However, I’m starting to wonder if there aren’t two types of people and ideas out of those who recognize the Straight/Wiggly distinction. On the one hand, I see the Pirsigian, pragmatic, take-control-of-concepts-and-use-them-for-improving-ourselves crowd, and on the other I see the Taoist side that tells us to embrace our wiggliness and relinquish the possibility of conceptual understanding and control.

Could these two be related to the distinction I’ve made in the past between Nietzsche and enthusiasm on one hand and Buddhist, ataraxia-calm detachment on the other?

Nietzsche understands the wiggliness of ideas. In “Twilight of the Idols,” he says “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” The integrity systemizers lack concerns the truth of philosophizing and concepts in general–be honest with yourselves, Nietzsche is saying, the world does not divide up that neatly. If we’re going to get anywhere in thinking about things, we must be willing to grant self-contradiction and ambiguity–precisely because the world is wiggly. What could be straighter (and impose this straightness on the wiggly natural world) than, say, the math-book metaphysics of Spinoza?

So it’s clear Nietzsche has some wiggle in him, but it seems he reacts to the Wiggly-Straight conflict in a different way than Watts, the Taoists and the Buddhists, who all recognize it as well. He says, “Embrace enthusiasm! Involve yourself in the world, give yourself goals and strive to control yourself, even if your straightness is bound to miss the whole wiggly reality.” On the other hand, the more Eastern heads (whom Nietzsche would call pessimists) tell us that happiness consists of the removal of our straight lines, to aesthetically appreciate the un-understandable Wiggliness of our existence.

I may be over-simplifying here, and I’m certainly still unclear about what a lot of these things mean. But I’m beginning to wonder if the conflict of Straightness (human schemes and thinking) and Wiggliness (the undeniable over-complexity of the natural world) is at the root of many a philosophical problem. Taking life too seriously, for instance–I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately.

What if the crowd that takes life too seriously falls more into the Straight category; Nietzsche is a perfect fit for this side, being someone who always took himself extremely seriously. We call over-serious people who can’t loosen up and chill “Squares.” The Wigglies are those who don’t take things so seriously because the recognize what we are, what thinking is, never matches up to the environment and we might as well relax a little and not get too excited about our thoughts.

The book is an examination of the phenomenology (the direct, conscious experience) of non-literate, gatherer-hunter societies–how they consciously viewed the world; what they thought of space; how they interacted with their environment. Central to the world-view of past humans was animism–the belief that many substances, both living and non-living, are imbued with powers (powers considered by ethnocentric anthropologists to be ‘supernatural,’ which Abram demonstrates is only a Christian hand-me-down; animists wouldn’t comprehend the idea of something beyond or above nature). The trees and stones around the village, the spiders and gnats and dogs, all are imbued with some participation, all have energy that is almost volitional–all are beings in the way that humans are human beings.

There’s PLENTY that can be said about that, but like I mentioned earlier, I want to hone in on one fun little implication. In my attempts to put everything into some sort of anthropological or historical context (to understand what goes on around me in terms of its relationship to things that have happened before it, to look at my surroundings with more objectivity and with more alternatives in mind), I’ve long wondered what the role of philosophically, artistically, intellectually-minded, solitary people would’ve been in a more organic, pre-historical culture. I think, after reading this passage in “The Spell of the Sensuous,” I have a hypothesis:

• “That alphabetic reading and writing was itself experienced as a form of magic is evident from the reactions of cultures suddenly coming into contact with phonetic writing. Anthropological accounts from entirely different continents report that members of indigenous, oral tribes, after seeing the European reading from a book or from his own notes, came to speak of the written pages as “talking leaves,” for the black marks on the flat, leaflike pages seemed to talk directly to the one who knew their secret. The Hebrew scribes never lost this sense of the letters as living, animate powers. Much of the Kabbalah, the esoteric body of Jewish mysticism, is centered around the conviction that each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew aleph-beth is a magic gateway or guide into an entire sphere of existence… Perhaps the most succinct evidence for the potent magic of written letter is to be found in the ambiguous meaning of our common English word “spell.” As the roman alphabet spread through oral Europe, the Old English word “spell,” which had meant simply to recite a story or tale, took on the new double meaning: on the one hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written letters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other, it signified a magic formula or charm. Yet these two meanings were not nearly as distinct as they have come to seem to us today. For to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth!”

When looked at this way, poets, authors and philosophers are a sort of modern-day caste of shamans, organizing and effecting spells with our civilizational brand of animism. We found a new kind of magic with the phonetic alphabet, a way of combining our sight and sound (since we hear words more than we see them when we read, Abram says) into the sort of synesthetic blend that once enraptured animist shamans. Is there another iteration animism could take, from seeing magic in natural objects and magic in written words to something totally different? Where else could we find ‘spiritual’ animation?

The things I want to be able to do the weekend before break begins are as follows:

-Accomplish 3 hours of zazen (seated meditation) in one sitting

-Fill this blog up with the basics of my ideas

-Ride my bike every day to school

-Bring more music, movies and other artwork into my life

-Write and record a new song

I have week-by-week plans for how I’m going to do things: in meditation, for instance, the first week I did 30 minutes a day Monday-Friday, then 1 hour on both Saturday and Sunday. Next week, I’m doing 45 minutes Monday-Friday and 2 hours on Saturday and Sunday. On and on. There’s a little checklist I’ve got taped on my wall to give myself gold stars each time I do my daily thing.

One of the things I found interesting about my goal attempts is how undefined they are. Bringing more artwork into my life, for instance. There’s no finish line or sign post to let you know you’ve accomplished that. My first instinct was to say that wasn’t a legit goal to have, since you need to have quantifiable, easily established progress to work on. But I think that misses a lot. Many of the most important things to accomplish–developing virtues in oneself (discipline or open-mindedness, for instance), or being kinder to people, learning to accept crappy things you can’t change–all resist attempts to place a quantifiable finish line somewhere.

The way I made the transition from open-ended vagueness in filling a blog with my ideas and enjoying more art was to simply pencil in daily routines of doing so. They don’t necessarily culminate in anything big (although I was thinking I might go to the movie theater or possibly a show up in Washington, DC near the end), but I’m still going to plug away at them in the particularity of my day-to-day life.

I have 30 minutes of blogging every other day, and a quota of music I need to listen to each week. Little lists of artists I might want to check out have also been really helpful.

Making my self-cultivation a little more teleological seems like it’ll be a way more rewarding path. Having a purpose and a project to work on, a short-term one you can see approaching, is a no-doubt improver of health and prospects. It’s easier and smarter to bypass questions of cosmic, lifetime purpose and just plug away at things tangible and welcoming.

Once, back when I had just started getting really psyched on philosophy, I remember I saw the terms of the metaphysical lexicon–mind, consciousness, free will, material substance, reason–as somewhat self-explanatory. It was obvious what mind meant: it was the (supposed) place where our thoughts happened, a separate realm divorced from our brains and bodies. It was obvious what free will meant: it was the belief that human beings have control over their lives and are thus separated from the rest of nature. Consciousness was being aware of things. Infinity was a sideways 8.

Recently, though, things have gotten much more complicated. When I hear people talk casually about mind, matter, free will, determinism, etc., I often get hopelessly confused. What do these terms mean, exactly? Another confusing question: how are they and their supposed antitheses (free will vs. determinism, reality being ideal vs. reality being material) really at odds with one another?

Take free will, for instance. I once thought choosing the one side or the other was a matter of whether or not you were a cold, rational realist (in which case you’d admit we have no control over our lives) or a warm and fuzzy romantic in need of good vibes (in which case you’d have to assume we had free will because if not, human beings are not special and what’s the point of anything). Now, things are more confusing. Both sides seem self-evident. Of course I have free will–I feel it, I experience it phenomenally. I used to get frustrated with people who’d try to refute my staunch determinism by flailing their arms in the air or saying, “I choose to not believe what you’re saying.” Of course you don’t! You were raised to be sentimental and romantic and petulantly dismiss what I’m trying to tell you is the case. If you were born into a family that told you from day one that you weren’t free, you wouldn’t ever consider otherwise.

But these arm-flailing romantics have a point. There’s an unmistakable phenomenon of choice in our lives–it is not as if our experience of life is like watching passively as our arms and legs move and we think different things. It’s not like “Being John Malkovich,” where we are inside our own heads, observing the spectacle without having any say in what goes on. The closest people come to that phenomenally determined experience is during operations where there’s some mix-up with the anesthetic and people see what’s going on but are completely paralyzed. I don’t know about you, but I’m not on perpetual auto-pilot.

In this argument, the determinist would respond, “Yes, but that’s an illusion. You have that feeling because you’re thrown into this body with its neurochemical brainwaves that tell you you are making choices, but that doesn’t mean you’re free. Did you control everything that formed how you think–your family, your genes, your education, your culture, your birthplace, your subconscious motivations, your instincts?”

And likewise, they’re right. What could be more obvious? Of course you don’t control your life. It’s logically ridiculous to think human brains somehow exist outside of the causal laws of the rest of the world. “Free will” is just one of the many attempts Western culture has made to single the human race out from the rest of the world, to establish our special-ness, and like the rest of them, it’s wrong.

What gives? How could both sides of an argument be so intuitively right? I think the key in resolving this confusion is to dig deeper into what both statements mean. How could there be this big debate over two things known obviously to be right?

Maybe these polarities, these big debates, represented cultural, value-based arguments that the terms ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’ were just covers on. This is just a guess, but I’d say the debate itself, the entire system of concepts, is rooted in a debate between the Christian worldview and the emerging scientific one during the Enlightenment. “Free will” in those days was the only way to defend a reward-punishment based afterlife–it was some pure, metaphysical idea of freedom that justified heaven and hell. This all-encompassing “Free Will” applied to the mentally ill, beaten and battered, abused and spiteful children, and people who never read the Bible, and was the only way one wouldn’t feel like an asshole for telling an African who has never heard the name Jesus he was going to be tortured eternally for not believing in him. The determinists were those who wanted to refute this, and burst the bubble of rampant anthropocentrism. When the clash underneath this dichotomy is no longer useful, shouldn’t we look to dividing up our world into ways that are relevant now?

But that’s only one possibility as to why these things feel so confused to me now, that the dichotomies are culturally outdated. It could be that they’ve always been confused at the core, that people have always been confused about them. That reminds me of Heidegger, who was confused by all of Western philosophy’s use of the word “being” and thought everyone had been confused about it up to his point. Maybe Heidegger was feeling similar confusion and frustration. But maybe it’s wrong to put blame on humankind and not myself–maybe this is a problem in a bad way, that I’m somehow losing track of things (though I doubt this).

In any case, the best way to move forward when this kind of confusion comes, I think, is to look to re-dividing the world. Concepts should be judged by how usefully they help us navigate the world we live in. There is the universe, the world that contains everything we experience, the ‘given,’ and nobody doubts that, but it’s a mistake to think that this universe ultimately and always corresponds to the different ways we’ve divided it: into mind and body, ideas and matter, being and non-being, red, blue and green. If these divisions cease to be useful, it doesn’t mean by rejecting them we reject the whole world. When these things get confusing, we should look to coming up with new concepts and new tools, new ways of navigating our experience that are relevant to our current problems.

I’ve always been worried about taking myself too seriously. There’s nothing worse than being that type of person, all scoffy and solemn, who can’t enjoy a joke or take criticism without turning stone-cold vengeful or over-sensitive.

In any case, I think that’s kind of the picture people have in mind when they say someone takes themselves too seriously–I’m never quite sure. What do those words mean, anyway? That you can’t laugh at yourself? This may be an indication of taking yourself too seriously, but I don’t think it’s what’s at the root of the issue.

It’s probably a matter of image; saying a person takes their self too seriously means they’re too worried about what people think about them, and have some samurai seppuku code of honor that forces them into self-pity and melodrama every time they say something dumb or accidentally fart. I think this is the best way of coming at it. I can’t do such-and-such unflattering thing, I must always conform to the positive, superior image I have of myself or there will be a crisis.

When you say you don’t take an idea seriously, you usually mean it’s not worth considering. This idea doesn’t require spending energy– it doesn’t make a persuading case for getting your attention. In this instance (which I think comes closest to using the word ‘serious’ literally), whether or not to take something seriously is a question of its worth. Is this the same for life and one’s self? It would make sense in the latter case; to take yourself too seriously means to think you’re too consideration-worthy, that you’re more important, more worth taking a good, hard look at, than you really are. This makes the accusation of taking yourself too seriously almost synonymous with being egotistical or arrogant (which is usually how the accusation is used in day-to-day speech).

I think, then, that it’s safe to say the person who takes themselves too seriously seems to be saying: “The person I am is something worth sitting down and thinking real hard about.”

Now, there’s a sense in which that statement is ridiculous and a sense in which it’s not. To tell other people that you’re real worthy of consideration is ridiculous because it’s a sign you want attention and praise that you don’t deserve. Let other people decide how much attention you should get.

On the other hand, there’s a sense in which that statement is important and needs to be recognized–when you say it to yourself. “The person I am is worthy of my own deep consideration.” What kind of person are you, and what kind of person do you want to become? How could these not be questions that deserve massive time and energy?

So, again, we’re back to a question of image. Taking yourself seriously in the wrong way is worrying if other people think you’re worthy of prolonged consideration. Taking yourself seriously in the right way is making yourself worthy of prolonged consideration–to yourself. Maybe the solution is considering who you are and who you want to be carefully without letting that examination bleed over into worrying if other people appreciate it.

But the problems don’t end here. An example of something I do that is usually seen as an indication I take myself too seriously is beating myself up over ‘little’ things (things not worth considering?). I try to not drink coffee, for instance. If I slip up and have a cup (which I’ve done before writing in this blog several times already, damnit), I’m slow to forgive myself. This sort of self-loathing, over something as innocent as a little caffeine use, seems to broadcast self-seriousness. “How could I have committed such idiocy!? This is not fitting for a man of my caliber!” But other people don’t have to be involved. It is a standard I hold myself to–it doesn’t really matter if other people are judging me for my caffeine ingestion, and I really don’t care whether they approve or not (most of the time, when people see me beat myself up over these types of things, they wonder why I’m being so hard on myself and want me to quit whining).

So it’s not always just a matter of other people’s opinions. It can also be standards one sets for oneself. But the high expectation-seriousness need not immediately look bad. I remember reading once about an interview a man had just conducted with the Dalai Lama, who had just accidentally killed a small insect. He has very ashamed of himself and was not quick to forgive. Why is it that, at least in my own mind, I don’t want to say, “Oh, lighten up, it’s not that big of a deal. Don’t take yourself so seriously, you old coot.” (‘You old coot,’ by the way, is probably the coolest thing to call someone ever).

In this situation, it’s probably because the Dalai Lama was hard on himself regarding his conduct with other beings (his moral righteousness), whereas the things I beat myself are all self-contained, ego-problems (getting an A- in a class, eating too many donuts, writing a song that someone thinks is crap).

Seriousness, in everyday language, has its opposite in laughter, in absurdity and humor. Is it possible to take life seriously in the good way and still have a sense of humor about life?

Here are the things I like reading about the most in philosophy:

-Buddhism and other Eastern philosophy

-Friedrich Nietzsche

-John Dewey & pragmatism

-philosophy of education

-environmentalism

-Stoicism and Epicureanism

-virtue ethics

But the names aren’t really all that important thing–the best way to sum up the stuff I like most is that it has a bearing on the way I live my life. That’s pretty much what I’m interested in, first and foremost. I do enjoy talking about metaphysicianal philosophistry, but more as a guilty pleasure. It’s totally reasonable to think that sort of thing is a useless waste of time, but philosophies of life, the types of things you actually do with yourself, are something I think people need to be more interested in.

So the plan with the blog will be to discuss philosophy as it intersects with my day-to-day existence.