Goodbye Monk Idea

I am not a monk.

 

I am not a monk. I am not a monk. I am not a monk.

 

This was obvious all along in my life. I never entered a monastery. I never publically identified with a religious order. I never took on vows of poverty or celibacy. I never committed in any systematic way to spiritual practices, even to more mundane ones such as prayer or meditation. I hardly ever sat still even for fifteen minutes with my mind focused on God or the Universe. I found that too hard. Maybe even more importantly, I found it too bizarre and other-wordly, as if it was voodoo magic.

 

Nonetheless, I felt within me that I was a monk, or on the path of one, or had the calling of one. And I felt that my philosopher identity was inseparably connected with that monk identity. Here was one of the reasons I had trouble identifying with the philosophy profession from early on. I got bent out of shape in my head about silly things such as how professional philosophers are always doing philosophy over drinks, or at nice restaurants, as if it was just another job. Somehow I imagined that the public philosophy I would be a part of would involve things like fasting or restraining from indulgences. Not that I ever did this myself. Though I tortured myself about it with pangs of guilt, as if I were a weak-willed hedonist. And I tortured myself about how I could be part of a profession which did not exhibit even the need for any such habits.

 

When I left the philosophy profession a part of me thought that I was now truly embarking on my monk path. That is, even though I was married and I was not part of any spiritual institution. So outwardly not a monk. But somehow, inwardly, finally, truly on the path of my monk calling.

 

But I realize now this whole monk thing in my head is over. Many of the questions I have been raising to myself about the philosophy profession--in particular, how it is compatible with everyone excelling at philosophy--are ones which apply equally to any monk role. If a philosophy professor is not universalizable, a monk is even less universalizable. I almost can't believe why I ever thought otherwise. Somehow for me being a monk was always equivalent with being on the side of the everyday joe. But, of course, monks have their structures of power and privilege, even if it is not explicitly in terms of money or fame. Monks were the product of an older time when they were seen as the spiritual shamans, who did, as it were, the spiritual work in the community, and which everyday householders could not do. In this sense, being a monk meant being initiated into a special, privileged knowledge, which was not in the purview of the everyday person. In our democratic age, can this idea still have a resonance? I don't think it can in the same way it did in the past.

 

Goodbye monk idea. I don't know how you came into my life, but it is long overdue that I said goodbye to you. Farewell. I am off into a new world without premeditated concepts constraining my sense of myself.

Vocation

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.

- Thomas Merton

The Divine

I belong to no nation, no civilisation, no society, no race, but to the Divine.

  

I obey no master, no ruler, no law, no social convention, but the Divine.

  

To Him I have surrendered all, will, life and self; for Him I am ready to give all my blood, drop by drop, if such is His Will, with complete joy; and nothing in His service can be sacrifice, for all is perfect delight.
 

- The Mother, Words of Long Ago, 1920

Enough

Enough about academic philosophy. Like all institutions it has its good and its bad. It is easy to focus on the less than perfect features of anything, and keep harping on those features as if one is fighting a great battle. But this can become a bit like running in place, huffing and puffing without getting anywhere.

 

The more interesting thing is to just think and to try to understand the world.

 

The point of the experiment is to do philosophy in everyday life. Not to harp about professional philosophy from everyday life. There is much that is good about academic philosophy. It is best to leave it at that, and to focus on the philosophy itself.

 

The joy of simply trying to understand the world. What a precious thing. Let me not take it for granted.

 

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The desire to rail against professional philosophy comes from fear. The fear that I have lost out on my opportunity to do philosophy. That out here, in this everyday world, I am lost.

 

There is a lot of this fear. Often I now feel as if I do not belong anywhere or to any group. This blog, for instance. Who are its readers? To most non-academics it might seem like gibberish. What would or can most of my family or friends who have not read academic philosophy make of my reflections on Rorty or Wittgenstein or how classes are taught? Perhaps the blog seems to them as impenetrable as picking up Kant's First Critique or a random philosophy journal article. I imagine them thinking, "A lot of noise. But to what end? What is the point?" And to most academics the blog might seem like the ramblings of a disgruntled soul, someone who couldn't make it and yet can't let go. Can they relate to the blog as a space for seeking the kind of knowledge they seek? That the very same intelligence which I might have channeled into a journal article is channeled into the blog. I imagine them thinking, "But why does he have to do philosophy over there, in that way? Why not here, the way he used to? This is just confusion."

 

The fear of being stuck in between. Lost to both sides.

 

And what if something happens to me? What if I get sick? Or struggle financially and get lost in the efforts to simply survive? Then what? The fear that the experiment will have failed for purely non-intellectual reasons. That perhaps my life would become meaningless. That no one would understand why I chose the path I did. The fear of the remark, "How unfortunate. He wasted his life." The fear of the pain this would cause those close to me. The fear of letting people down. The fear of losing myself.

 

In the face of this fear, a desperate grasping for any sense of achievement. Any sense of I am doing something rational and good. What is the easiest thing I can try to prove so that the experiment will not be deemed a total failure? Ah, atleast this much: here are the problems with that institution. If nothing else, I managed in my life to show the inconsistencies of that. Maybe that will help future people avoid those inconsistencies. I can contribute in that way at least. Something tangible that I can leave behind, so that my life will not have been for nothing.

 

Wittgensteinians

BV: Ludwig, you are generally quite critical of academic philosophy. What then do you make of your students, many of whom went on to have pretty normal academic lives? For example, what do you think of Anscombe, who many now consider the best among your students and an exemplary philosopher in her own right?

LW: Anscombe was intense. She would focus in on a problem and battle with it. But this doesn't mean I agreed with her! Or that she was a representative of my views! She was skeptical of the cogency of the philosophy problems from the early modern period (the mind-body problem, utilitarianism vs deontology, and so on), but she was generally more accepting than I was of the coherence of traditional philosophy problems, such as those inherited from Aristotle. She certainly would go on and on about Aristotle and Aquinas! This is a big difference between us. For me metaphysics is metaphysics, and I see all of it as a confusion. But for Anscombe there is a distinction between bad metaphysics (Descartes or Leibniz) and good metaphysics (Aristotle), and she saw her life project as defending a good metaphysics of human beings and highlighting its practical implications. That is certainly not how I saw things!

BV: It is ironic, isn't it, that you routinely told your students to leave academic philosophy, and yet the best of your students went on to become academics and never showed any of your torturedness about being academics?

LW: The best of my students? I don't think of Anscombe, Malcolm and so on as my best students! They were students I was close to, yes. They were students I depended on, yes. But did I think that these students would continue my life's work after I died? No. Because philosophy as I think of it is the deeply personal activity of rooting out one's own confusions so as to be at peace. It is a constant effort to see things just as they are, and not by gaining new knowledge we didn't have before, but by having the courage to see aright what we already know but refuse to see! This seeing aright no one else can do for me. That is each person's task and burden. My philosophy consisted of my attempting to clear my confusions. There was therefore nothing to pass on after I died as a philosophical tradition in my name.

BV: But you are an industry and a tradition, just like Plato or Spinoza or Kant. All your unpublished works were excavated and catalogued, and scholars pour through them to cull the insights from your gnomic sayings to see how they apply to traditional philosophical problems. Isn't this what your writings are meant for? If not, what is the point of the Philosophical Investigations?

LW: Maybe I should have burned my manuscript! This is exactly why I didn't publish it in my lifetime. Because I saw what people did with the Tractatus. I clearly said in the preface of the Tractatus that it was not a text book, and that only people who have already had the thoughts expressed in it will understand it. The book was not meant to teach others what to think. It was an expression of my journey from tortured philosophy to peace. If the book resonates with you, then it might move you to write your expression of your own journey. And yet people started treating it like a text book, and sought to use it for defending their philosophical views, even though if the book is right, no such views are sensical to begin with! But they brushed this off saying, "Oh, the genius says funny things!" I did not want to publish again when it was clear that my form of writing would be so grossly misunderstood. And after my death this is what has happened with the Investigations as well.