Examined life
The unexamined life is not worth living
-Plato
Cornel West
How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself?
What happens when you begin to call into question?
Your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions, and begin then to become a different kind of person?
For me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation.
We can define that in terms of we are beings towards death.
And we are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces…whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.
That's us. We are beings towards death.
At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time.
And so it's desire in the face of death.
And then of course, you have got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty.
Various forms of idolatry and you have got dialogue in the face of dogmatism.
And then of course, structurally and institutionally you have domination.
And you have democracy. You have attempts of people tying to render accountable
Elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people. So philosophy itself becomes a critical disputation of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism and wrestling with democracy trying to keep alive very fragile democratic experiments in the face of structures of domination; patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power, state power.
All those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by them.
Do you have to go to school to be a philosopher?
Oh, God, no. Thank God you don’t have to go to school. No. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
It takes tremendous discipline it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative examining yourself requires courage. William Butler Yeats used to say it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Courage to think critically. You can't talk.
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being, I think in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
Plato says philosophy is a mediation on and a preparation for death.
And by death, what he means is not an event, but a death in life because there is no rebirth, there is no change, there is no transformation without death.
And therefore, the question becomes, how do you learn how to die?
And of course, Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, "To Philosophize is to learn how to die. " You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
I believe that Theodor Aorno was right when he says that condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. So we are really talking about truth as a way of life, as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.
Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth, capital "T", we might have access to truth, small "t", but they are fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong, we have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand-in-hand with truth.
This is why so many of the existential thinkers, be they religious, like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular, like Camus and Satre, that they're accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality, the truth about things.
And therefore, there, you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're going to talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth.
How do you sustain a journey a path toward truth, the way to truth?
So the truth talk goes hand-in-hand with talk about the way to truth.
And Scientists could talk about this in terms of inducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so forth and so on.
Religious folk could talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you.
But they're always of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility.
I want all of the rich, historical colorations to manifest in talking about our finitude.
Being born of a woman in stank and stench what I call "funk".
Being introduced to the funk of life in the womb and love-push that gets you out.
Right? And then your body is not just death but the way Vico talks about it.
And here Vico was so much better than Heidegger.
Vico talks about it in terms of being a corpse.
See, Heidegger didn't talk about corpses. He talks about death.
It's still to abstract. Absolutely.
Read the poetry of John Donne. He'll tell you about corpses that decompose.
Well, see, that's history. That's the raw funky, stanky stuff of life.
That's what bluesmen do. See, that's what jazzmen do. See, I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind. I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas. Therefore for me, music is central.
So when you are talking about poetry, for the most part, Plato was talking primarily about words, whereas I talk about notes, tone, timbre, rhythms.
For me, music is fundamental.
Philosophy must go to school not only with the poets. Philosophy needs to go school with the musicians. Keep in mind, Plato bans the flute in the republic but not the lyre.
Because the flute appeals to all of these various sides of who are given his tripartite conception of the soul; the rational and the spirited and the appetitive. And the flute is appeals to all three of those, where he thinks the lyre on one strings, it only appeals to one and there is permissible.
Now, of course, the irony is when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do?
Well, he requested the Thracian girl to play music on the flute.
I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure.
And orgiastic pleasure has its place. Intellectual pleasure has its place. Social pleasure has its place. Televisual pleasure has its place. You know, I like certain TV shows.
My God, when it comes to music- Oh!
You know, Beethoven's 32nd Sonata, Opus 111.
Unbelievable aesthetic pleasure.
The same would be true for Curtis Mayfield or the Beatles or what have you .
There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied.
It's true that you might be socially isolated.
Because you're in the library at home and so on. But you're intensely alive.
In fact, you're much more alive then these folk walking these streets of New York in crowds.
With just no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
But if you read, you know, John Ruskin or you read a Mark Twain, or my God, Herman Malville,
You almost have to throw the book against the wall.
Because you're almost so intensely alive, that you need a break.
It's time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life.
Take Moby Dick throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw Von Kleist's work against the wall. It was just too much. It made Goethe, it reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping after he overcome those suicidal impulses with Sorrows of Young Werther in the 1770s…
That made his move toward neoclassicism in Weimar.
There are certain things that make us too alive almost, it's almost like being too intensely in love. You can't do anything. It's hard to get back to the Kronos. It's hard to get back the everyday life. You know what I mean?
That chirotic dimension of being in love with another person, everything is so meaningful, you want to sustain it. It's true.
You can't just do it, you know, you got have to go to the bathroom, have a drink of water. Shit!
Romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers.
Can you totalize? Can you make things whole?
Can you create harmony? And if you can't, disappointment.
Disappointment's always at the center. Failure is always at the center.
But where'd the Romanticism come from?
Why begin with Romanticism? See, I don't begin with Romanticism.
You remember what Beethoven said on his deathbed, you know.
He said, "I have learned to look at the world, in all of its darkness and evil and still love it."
And that's not Romantic Beethoven, that is the Beethoven of the String Quartet 131."
The greatest string quartet ever written, not that in classical music.
But of course it's a European form, so Beethoven is the grand master.
But the string quarter your go back to those movements.
It's no Romantic wholeness to be shattered as in the early Beethoven.
He's given up on that, you see.
This is where Chekhov begins, this is where the blues starts, this is where jazz starts.
You think Charlie Parker's upset because he can't sustain a harmony?
He didn't car about the harmony. He was trying to completely ride on the dissonance, ride on the blue notes.
Of course he's got harmony in terms of its interventions here and there.
But why start with this obsession with wholeness?
And if you can't have it, then you are disappointed and want to have a drink?
And melancholia and blah, blah, blah…
No, you see, the blues my kind of blues begins with catastrophe begins with the Angel of History in Benjamin's theses.
You see, it begins with the pillage, the wreckage on pile on another.
That's the starting point. The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed.
And black people in America and in the modern world given these vicious legacies of white supremacy. It is how you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness.
So that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic and calamitous and horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous.
See, part of the problem, though, is that, see, when you have a Romantic project, you are so obsessed with time as loss and time as a taker.
Whereas, as a Cheknovian Christian, I want to stress, as well, time as a gift and time as a giver.
So that, yes, it's failure, but how good is a failure? You done some wonderful things.
Now, Beckett could say, you know, "Try again, fail gain, fail better."
But why call it failure? I mean, why not say you have a sense of gratitude that you are able to do as much as you did?
You are able to love as much as think as much and play as much.
Why think you needed the whole thing?
You see what I mean? This is even disturbing about America.
And, Of course, America is a Romantic project.
It's paradisal , "City on a Hill" and all this other mess and lies and so on.
I say no, no. America is a very fragile democratic experiment predicated on the dispossession of the lands of indigenous people and the enslavement of African peoples and the subjugation of women and the marginalization of gays and lesbians.
And it has great potential. But this notion that somehow you know, we had it all.
Or ever will have it all, it's got to go.
You got to push it to the side.
And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment
And the language of failure.
And you say, Okay, well, how much have you done?
How have we been able to do it?
Can we do more? Well, in certain situation, you can't do more.
It's like trying to break-dance at 75. You can't do it anymore.
You were a master at 16, it's over.
You can't make love at 80 the way you did at 20. So what?
Time is real.
Q: the idea of the meaning of life? Is it philosophy's duty to speak on this?
A meaningful life?
Q: How to live a meaningful life? Is that even a relevant ? Is that even an appropriate question for a philosopher?
No, I think it is. No, I think the problem with meaning is very important.
Nihilism is a serious challenge. Meaninglessness is a serious challenge.
Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement.
The problem is, of course, you never reach it, you know.
It's not a static, stationary telos or end or aim.
It's a process that one never reaches. It's Sisyphean.
You are going up the hill looking for better meanings, or grander, more enabling meanings.
But you never reach it. You know, in that sense, you die without being able to "have" the whole
In the language of the romantic discourse.
The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.
-Diderot
Avital Ronell
Yes, that is scandalous. I can understand that the others would have 10 minutes,
But to bring me down to 10 minutes, is outrage, there is no doubt about it.
The thing is we don't know where this film is going to land, whom it's going to shake up, wake up, or freak out, or bore. But even boredom, as an offshoot of melancholy would interest me.
As a response to these dazzling utterances that we are producing.
But I would say that even if philosophy, and don't forget that Heidegger ditched philosophy for thinking, because he thought philosophy as such was still too institutional, academic, too bound up in knowledge and results, too cognitively inflected.
So he asked the question, what is called thinking ?
And he had a lot to say about walks, about going on paths, that leads nowhere.
One of his important texts is called Holzwege, Which means a path that leads nowhere.
In Greek, the word for path is methods. So we are on the path.
Is philosophy a search for meaning?
I am very suspicious historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning, because meaning has often had very fascistoid(fascistic?) and non-progressivisit edges.
If not a core of that sort of thing, so that very often, also this emergency supplies of meaning,
That are brought to a given incident of structure or theme in one's life are cover-ups, are a way of dressing the wound of non-meaning.
I think it's very hard to keep things in the tensional structure of the openness, whether it is ecstatic or not, of non-meaning. That's very difficult, which is why there is then the quick grasp for a transcendental signifier, for God, for nation, for patriotism. It's been very devastating this craving for meaning, though it's something which we are in constant negotiation.
Everyone wants something like meaning. But when you see these dogs play, why reduce it to meaning rather than just see the arbitrary eruption of something that can't be grasped or explicated. But it's just there in this kind of absolute contingency of being.
To leave things open and radically inappropriable and something and admitting we haven't really understood is much less satisfying more frustrating and more necessary.
That's why I think a lot of people have been fed and fueled by promises of immediate gratification in thought and food and junk, junk food and junk food and so on.
There is a politics of refusing that gratification. And I know that is a crazy-making, but I think that's where we have to pull the brakes.
How do you behave ethically if there is no ultimate meaning?
Precisely where there isn't guaranteed or palpable meaning, you have to do a lot of work and you have to be mega-ethical, cause it's much easier to live life and know that well, that you shouldn't do, and this you should do, because someone said so.
If you are not anxious, if we are okay with things, we are not trying to explore of figure anything out. So anxiety is the mood, par excellence of ethicity(ethic). Now, I am not prescribing anxiety disorder for anyone. However, could you imagine Mr. Bush who doesn't give a shit when he sends everyone to the gas chamber or the electric chair? He expresses no anxiety. And they are very proud of this. They don't lose a wink of sleep. They express no anxiety. This is something Derrida has taught. If you feel that you have acquitted yourself honorably, then you are not so ethical.
If you have a good conscience, then you are kind of worthless. Like, if you think "Oh, I gave this homeless person five bucks. I am great." Then you are irresponsible. The responsible being is one who thinks they have never been responsible enough. They have never taken care enough of the other. The Other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce. This in itself creates an ethical relatedness, a relation without relation, cause you don't know , you can't presume to know or grasp the Other. The minute you think you know the Other, you are ready to kill them. You think, "Oh, they are doing this or this. They are the axis of evil. Let's drop some bombs." But if you don't know , you don't understand this alterity. It's so Other that you can't violate it with your sense of understand. Then you have to let it live, in a sense.
Slavoj Zizk
This is where we should start feeling at home.
Part of our daily perception of reality is that this disappears from our world.
When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it.
Of course rationally you know it's there in canalization and so on.
But at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world.
But the problem is that trash doesn't disappear.
I think ecology, the way we approach ecological problematic is maybe the crucial field of ideology today.
And I use ideology in the traditional sense of illusory, wrong way of thinking and perceiving reality.
Why? Ideology is not simply dreaming about false ideas and so on.
Ideology addresses very real problems but it mystifies them.
One of the elementary ideological mechanisms, I claim, is what I call the temptation of meaning.
When something horrible happens, our spontaneous tendency is to search for a meaning.
It must mean something. You know, like ADIS. It was a trauma then conservatives came and said it's punishment for sinful ways of life, and so on and so on.
Even if we interpret a catastrophe as a punishment, it makes easier in a way, because we know it's not just some terrifying blind force. It has a meaning.
It's better when you are in the middle of a catastrophe.
It's better to feel that God punished you than to feel that it just happened.
If God punished you, it's still a universe of meaning.
And I think that that's where ecology as ideology enters.
It's really the implicit premise of ecology that the existing world is the best possible world.
In the sense of it's a balanced world which is disturbed through human hubris.
So why do I find this problematic? Because I think that this notion of nature, nature as a harmonious, organic, balanced, reproducing almost living organism which is then disturbed, perturbed, derailed through human hubris, technological exploitation and so on, is ,I think a secular version of the religious story of the Fall.
And the answer should be not that there is no fall, that we are part of nature.
But on the contrary, that there is no nature.
Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb.
Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.
We profit from them. What's our main source of energy today ? Oil.
What are we aware, what is oil?
Oil reserves beneath the earth are material remainders of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Are we aware, because we all know that oil is composed of the remainders of animal life, plants and so on and so on.
Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe had to occur on Earth ?
So that is good to remember.
Ecology will slowly turn, maybe, into a new opium of masses, the way, as we all know,
Marx defined religion.
What do we expect from religion is a kind of unquestionable highest authority.
It's God's word, so it is you don't debate it.
Today, I claim, ecology is more and more taking over this role of conservative ideology.
Whenever there is a new scientific breakthrough, biogenetic development, whatever,
It is as if the voice which warns us not to trespass, violate a certain invisible limit, like,
"Don't do that. It would be too much." That voice is today more and more the voice of ecology.
Like, "Don't mess with D.N.A. Don't mess with nature. Don't do it"
This basic conservative partly ideological mistrust of change.
This is today ecology.
Another myth which is popular about ecology namely a spontaneous ideological myth is the idea that we Western people in our artificial technological environment are alienated from immediate natural environments that we should not forget that we humans are part of the living Earth. We should not forget that we are not abstract engineers, theorists who just exploit nature that we are part of nature, that nature is our unfathomable, impenetrable background.
I think that that precisely is the greatest danger.
Why? Think about a certain obvious paradox.
We all know in what danger we all are, global warming, possibility of other ecological catastrophes and so on and so on.
But why don't we do anything about it?
It is, I think, a nice example, of what in psychoanalysis we call disavowal.
The logic is that of, I know very well, but I act as if I don't know.
For example, precisely, in the case of ecology, I know very well there maybe global warming.
Everything will explode, be destroyed.
But after reading a treatise on it, what do I do?
I step out. I see nothings that I see now behind me.
That's a nice sight for me, I see nice trees, birds singing and so on.
And even if I know rationally this is all in danger, I simply do not believe that this can be destroyed.
That's the horror of visiting sites of a catastrophe like Chernobyl.
In a way, we are not evolutionarily, we are not wired to even imagine something like that.
It's in a way unimaginable.
So I think that we should do to confront properly that threat of ecological catastrophe
Is not all this New Age stuff to break out of this technological manipulative mold
And to find out roots in nature. But, on the contrary, to cut off even more these roots in nature.
We need more alienation from our life world.
From our, as it were, spontaneous nature.
We should become more artificial.
We should develop, I think, a much more terrifying new abstract materialism.
A kind of mathematical universe where is nothing, there are just formulas, technical forms and so on.
And the difficult thing is to find poetry, spirituality in this dimension.
To recreate if not beauty then aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself.
That's the true love of the world.
Because what is love? Love is not idealization.
Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points.
And nonetheless the person's absolute for you.
Everything life that makes life worth living.
But you see perfection in imperfection itself.
And that's how we should learn to love the world.
True ecologist loves all this.
