Lost in the Cosmos / Head in the Clouds
Once you see an important idea for the first time, you begin to see it all around you.
At the end of 2024 I was wrestling with some things that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I listened to part of an Alan Watts lecture (set to trippy music of course) and I got smacked in the face by this quote from one of the great trendy philosobros, Alan Watts:
"A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions...I’m not saying that thinking is bad—like everything else, it’s useful in moderation: a good servant but a bad master.
"And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive because, through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That’s to say: we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world."
I had absolutely been lost in the abstract world (aka, spent too much time on Reddit) and unmoored from the concrete world.
It’s one of the reasons I didn’t anticipate the outcome of the Presidential election, among other things - an election really divided along idealism vs. pragmatism lines. And one of the valid critiques of those abandoning “the experts”.
I was experiencing this in my personal life as well - attempting to accomplish a physical project (fixing the timing belt on the truck) and failing because although I knew all the theoretical steps in my head, there was a three dimensional geometry puzzle problem of getting the damn timing belt covers off that could only be solved by hours of trial and error. No amount of youtube videos, theory, diagrams, or intellectual effort was going to save me from hours of dinging my knuckles, and rotating hard to reach little bits and bobs, and getting parts stuck and unstuck, and cursing that damn frame component that wouldn’t let me get my hand where it needed to go.
I was using multiple jacks and stands to move the engine in relation to the truck, and the truck in relation to the engine, to create enough space, to extricate the cover from a really tight spot…and I couldn’t.
In physics class they'll often give you a problem with the words "assume a frictionless surface" or "assume a spherical cow", and you can solve it on paper, with your brain. But I had neither a frictionless surface, nor a spherical cow, nor even a standard-from-the-factory truck.
There was no way to solve this problem except through three dimensional, grimy fingernail, trial and error. A LOT of trial and error. My least favorite kind of problem because it couldn't be solved by thinking about it and then typing some things on a keyboard and looking cool.
Such is life.
My friend Ben, an experienced car tinkerer, helped greatly with that project. He's less afraid to F*** Around and Find out, which is a pretty essential mindset when fixing old cars and trucks. You might break something in the process, but you will learn something. And sometimes that is the only way to make progress. Break something. Learn Something. Fix It. Carry On Towards Enlightenment.
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I recently spent a wonderful month living in my old college town, and sitting down with a few old mentors - Dr Ben Hegemann and Dr Don Little. And one part of our conversation was on the nature of abstract thought vs concrete experience.
Dr Ben mentioned a really important concept from Thomas Sowell - “Are you doing your thinking in a constrained, or unconstrained system?” An idealist can imagine a world without friction, or people. He can make an assumption like “If we can get everyone on the same page…” which is simply impossible. People are not computers - they cannot get all be updated to Optimal Monoculture 2.1.13.45.08 Beta. They will never be on the same page, and they will never have all the time in the world to read the great philosophers and arrive at the same epiphanies I have had.
We operate within constraints - friction, non-spherical cows, and the human lifetime of 80 years and X trillion brain cells that can only become experts in very small fields: “Post Tranhumanist Anti-Nietzschean Poetics in Hip Hop,” or “What flowers the bees in West Philadelphian Raised Bed Gardens Prefer, and How to Deter The Local Raccoons from Eating the Squash Without Overworking the Volunteer Laborers”.
And a political philosophy that is abstracted from the constraints of reality can actually really hurt the people who can’t live up to the ideal.
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Dr Don then recommended a book, of all things, written by a philosopher / motorcycle mechanic - "Shop Class as Soul Craft," which he was kind enough to loan to me.
It’s fantastic. You should read it not as what it is (a manifesto on the importance of developing practical skills to enhance and improve your abstract thought life) but as an exploration of the joys of building community through shared, pragmatic, practical pursuits: gardening, running an actual business with compromises between ideals and cash flow, working with odd people whose rough edges bump up against ourselves and can’t be polished away.
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And now this beautiful article from one of my favorite online publications, which should be bookmarked on your home page:
https://aeon.co/essays/for-mary-midgley-philosophy-must-be-entangled-in-daily-life
In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men…
“None of these [great] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children, which is, after all, quite an important aspect of human life. I wrote [‘Rings and Books’] drawing attention to this statistic and asking whether it might not account for a certain over-abstractness, a certain remoteness from life, in the European philosophical tradition…”
Descartes concludes that the only thing I can know with certainty is that I am thinking (and therefore that I exist) – or, as philosophers know it, Cogito, ergo sum. Summarised by Midgley: ‘Here I am, said Descartes, a soul, an isolated thinker.’ But, despite its prominence in canonical histories of Western thought, Midgley was not overly impressed by this argument. In fact, she thinks this Cartesian move is born from the philosophical ‘adolescence’ that Descartes never grew up from. As she puts it:
“People leading a normal domestic life would not, I believe, have fallen into this sort of mistake. They would have taken alarm at the attitude to other people which follows from Descartes’s position. For Descartes, other people’s existence has to be inferred, and the inference is a most insecure one … Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.”
As knowers, Midgley sees many of us (if not all) as already entangled in our close relations with others. From here, we can learn about the world, including the certain existence of other people. And Midgley thought that the experiences of those caring for children, in particular, could help illuminate the extent to which we really are entangled with one another’s existences.
Entangled Thinking
I’m in the middle of a month-long road trip right now - a privilege of being a disconnected and responsibility-free remote worker with a little bit of extra money. It’s a nice break from the routines of staying-in-one-place-too-long, and it lets me connect with many people I haven’t seen in years: Christian conservative friends in Houghton, Ex-Fundamentalist psychedelic enthusiasts in New York City, different yoga and jiujitsu studios with different instructor lineages than my own, police officers, feminists, oilfield workers and lefty queer friendly Christians in Pennsylvana, and even the atheist board member of a church I once attended.
And it’s really impacted me with how much, no matter what group of people I belong to, I tend to be automatically influenced by the ideas floating in their heads and day-to-day praxis.
There’s only so much room for so many thoughts in a brain on any given day, and most of them come are shared with the people around us. If they don’t bring it up, we won’t think about it.
And as a person who has, in the words of my yoga teacher, “walked between many worlds,” I have seen the world from lots of different “pools of shared knowledge and experience.” It can be dizzying to me at times to move from one of these vastly different pools to another. Like CS Lewis’ Wood Between The Worlds, I find myself shocked, eyes and mouth open, being dunked from one to another. My assumptions that are taken for granted in one pool, found to be shallow and one-dimensional in another pool
Psychedlic mushroom infused tea and watching Lion King? Check. People concerned about spiritual warfare and the presence of a bust of a Greek god on a schoolteacher’s desk? Check. People worried that I’m opening myself up to bad spiritual influences through yoga? Check. Christians who cannot fathom supporting terrorism? Check. Christian who cannot fathom supporting genocide or fascism? Check. Police officers who hold strongly that individual criminals are responsible for individual actions, and terrorism is never an appropriate response to injustice? Check. Pro-Palestine Christians who cannot fathom the injustice of separating the losers of a war from their homes? Check. Warmth and love and wisdom and hospitality from Christians who are pro-Israel and pro-Trump? Also check. An old converted factory full of rainbow flags and body positivity and floor-to-ceiling windows? Check.
It’s a wild world out there and there is much beyond my keyboard. But I’m really, really grateful to have experienced it. And read some really good books and articles this week.