Today, just minutes ago, I had a breakthrough of the most genuine ontological, doxastical, ethical and practical sense. Yes, that does sound quite grand. Unfortunately, I think most 15 year-olds that read Nietzsche have already experienced what I'm trying to explicate. The fact that I've somehow avoided writing a 2nd post on this blog for over 1.5 years is evidence for the following realization that I've had about myself.
Since my acceptance to grad school, I made it a priority to finally
and fully apply myself to my dream of doing philosophy. However, I have always been a horrible student, not in the sense that I don't get A's, but that I get them cheaply. My ability to procrastinate is profound and paradoxical. As an undergraduate, I used to just distract myself with video games, facebook, random internet searches, and music - the typical tools of the trade. When grad school came a calling, I had to step up my game. So instead of taking to the aforementioned amateur outlets of procrastination, I spent my time figuring out how to use my time. Little did I know that this commitment to meta-planning would cause a quarter-life crises of anxiety ridden disenchantment: the ultimate form of procrastination.
I calculated what activity was worth what amount of time and effort, obsessively planning for the next day, for the next week, and eventually the next few years. While this may sound like a great strategy to get your life in order, it does absolutely no good if you still fail to actually do the shit in the orderly fashion that you planned to do. And this is what has happened. I have filled the hours I should be studying for the current week's classes with calculating and planning how and when I will accomplish the following week's tasks. This dedication resulted in a level of work efficiency on par with my lazy efforts as an undergraduate, but now I had the added illusion that I was being disciplined, because I spent so much time thinking about how I needed to be disciplined.
When you detach yourself so frequently from the immediate experience of the world around you in order to calculate what you ought to be doing in this world around you, finding meaning in these goals becomes exceedingly difficult. I mean this both in a practical academic/work context, but also ethically and ontologically. In studying modern philosophy and adopting its veneration of rationality (not all phil is like this, but western-science/academia in general is), one quickly learns to throw any mystical explanations of the world out the window. And with those explanations goes any mystical or religious motivations and justifications for how to act and how to be. Thus, we are left with what Max Weber describes as a "Puritan asceticism" that lacks a divine origin. In other words, those who are in the sciences (natural or social) have made an implicit commitment to adhere obsessively with calculation, impersonal rules and self-discipline, without anyway to meaningfully (either mystically or rationally) justify these values. Frustratingly, these values are the internally legitimated ideals of science by science (hence, it is hard & maybe impossible to experience them meaningfully) - external justifications for ideals, values, goals, & morals that are independent from the reasons why any particular agent should act on that norm, are presumed by science (and often by this guy writing) not to exist... and this sucks if you are hoping to lead a happy and meaningful life... Most brave and honest folks call this nihilism.
However, those in denial about their own nihilism, call it confusion (that'd be me).
minus God = Disenchanted World
The following from J.M. Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001) may help spell out this dilemma more clearly. He cites Sheldon Wolin's account of the limiting affect of modernity (i.e. "the cage"):
"The cage is iron because the main forces of modern life, science, capitalism, and bureaucratic organisation are triumphs of rationality and so the mind has no purchase point to attack them...The cage is iron because the 'fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values.' Instead of being fired by religious, ethical, and political ideals, action has become simply a response to 'economic compulsion' or to 'purely mundane passions.'"
So, here's what I've discovered today (in a nutshell): I can't get myself to act - to follow my plans, because I am thoroughly confused about how to value those actions. My professional ambitions seem fantastically large (e.g. saving the world), but they lack a culturally/divinely justified target that I can feel ontologically and ethically comfortable putting in the time and effort. I'm unable to justify one minute of time spent on one task versus another, one career over another, because I have no basis for valuation of those endeavors. The past has resulted in a paralyses of action through planning and calculation of what I will do, but how can you calculate and plan if you rationally can't explain why one thing is better than another? It's like trying to add 2 + 3. Why should you believe the equation equals 5, when you aren't convinced 2 & 3 are even different values?... the sum could be any value (or number)!
To calm down, lets us look at a footnote from Bernstein: "In the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the lack of motivating reasons for action was consistently figured in terms of fatigue, ennui, melancholy, and above all boredom, which hence became...central reflective concepts for interpreting the experience of monderisation" (Adorno, 6).
If boredom manifests in evasion, diversion and flight from the world (i.e. procrastination), then it seems there could be a palpable link between our (my) experience of modernity and our (my) inability to get shit done. How might I reevaluate how I valuate? Perhaps Weber is right, that we need to sacrifice a little-bit of intellect for a lot-bit of faith. The trouble is trying to avoid rational valuation of the latter, of what exactly should one put faith in?
I will bid you adieu with some words from John Dewey's Wandering Between Two Worlds:
"Nature in ceasing to be divine, ceases to be human. Here, indeed, is just our problem. We must bridge the gap of poetry from science. We must heal this unnatural wound. We must in the cold reflective way of critical system, justify and organize the truth which poetry, with it quick naïve contacts, has already felt and reported”
Thanks for thinking with me,
J.A.
