Snorting Philosophy

Every day I viscerally miss academic philosophy. Over the years I studied Western philosophy, the ideas of Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein seeped into my bones and my body, and the desire to talk about them with others who care about it is intense. I don’t normally tell people this in my day to day life. If I do, they get this look of pity on their face, like they feel bad for me. Like I am a lost sheep who wandered away from my herd and they don’t know how to help me find my way back to the herd.

And when they do show sympathy, they are confused because I reject it. I get defiant and say I don’t want to go back. That I can’t go back. That leaving was the best thing for me, and I am growing so much outside academia. At this point, they don’t know what to say, and I don’t know what to say, and the conversation moves on to less confusing issues.

This combination of missing academia while feeling it is better for me to move beyond it often seems strange. If I miss it, why don’t I just go back? The strangeness has to do with assuming that academia must be just a unalloyed good. That philosophy more broadly must be an unalloyed good. That it can’t be harmful to someone. That one can’t use it in a way harmful to oneself.

But in my case I was addicted to philosophy. I had an unhealth relationship to philosophy – such that philosophy was actually hindering my personal growth. This doesn’t mean that philosophy generally, or academic philosophy in particular, are somehow intrinsically bad. No, because one can be addicted to things which are good. One can be addicted to alcohol, though in itself alcohol in moderation is fine. Or one can be addicted to food – even though very obviously we need food and it’s a good thing. Addiction isn’t always a feature of the thing one is addicted to (as with hard drugs), but is often a feature of the way one relates to that thing (as with everyday forms of addiction to food, video games, pleasing people, shopping, sex, and so on).

I have spent the last decade on my blogs highlighting the many problems with academic philosophy: its eurocentrism, its labor problem, its disconnect from the broader cultural situation, the groupthink that can be part of any organization and so on. But none of this of course implies that leaving was the right decision. Problems are problems. One can choose to stay and tackle them from the inside, or choose to leave and address them from the outside. Nothing implies one can’t tackle them from the inside.

The fact that I couldn’t tackle them from the inside says more about how I related to academic philosophy. While I was in it, I was addicted to it. By which I mean that I was using it to mask pain and unhealthy habits. I was using reading and talking about Kant, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the classes I taught as soothing mechanisms – as ways to submerge insecurities rather than facing up to them and living better in a more day to day sense. I was, as it were, snorting philosophy.

What a concept. I love that phrase – snorting philosophy. It just occured to me, and it feels so right to my experience.

Alienated Labor, Spirituality and Aurobindo

On his blog, Ravi Joseph has a fascinating discussion of Bildung and the Creator Economy. There are many interesting dimensions of his post, and he contrasts three approaches: Neiderhauser’s online academy model of Bildung, Koe’s internet business opportunity (biz opp) model of personal development and a Wittgensteinian model I have argued for which eschews any essence either in terms of the cosmic law or personal development. Part of what is fascinating about Joseph’s post is that he is trying to make sense of the vast open landscape in which we all are functioning – Neiderhauser, Koe, Joseph and myself, along with millions of other people trying to be intellectually and spiritually engaged in public conversations.

A similarity between Neiderhauser, Koe and me is that we are all outside of established institutional structures. Neiderhauser and myself are academically trained philosophers with PhDs, but we ditched academia. Koe is intergrating the online creator world with the self-help and spirituality worlds, mixed with what seems to me a kind of prosperity gospel of how to be rich and successful while fulfilling one’s potential and living a meaningful life.

Koe seems the most well off financially and in terms of having a vast platform. He seems to be a millionare, based on what he says he seems to work 4-6 focused hours a day on creating content, generally lives on his own terms socially and financially, is physically fit and eats right and exudes a sense of tapping into human potential in a dynamic way. Neiderhauser’s platform isn’t as big as Koe’s, but he seems to be doing well. His Halkyon Academy is trying to channel the German university of the 1820s in the internet context of the 2020s. Neiderhauser works with other thinkers like John Vervaeke, a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and a youtube creator, to create a lively and intellectually stimulating space outside of academia and which can tap into the needs of the public. Koe is functioning outside of academia, though his Kortex University suggests he is not averse to the academic model per se, or at least to its form of branding. Neiderhauser, while being outside academia, is very much with an academic model – his objection to contemporary academia being that it has lost touch with the potential it had for enabling personal and social bildung – that is, something like soul development, where “soul” here can be taken in a non-religious sense.

When thinking of myself in relations to these thinkers, it is natural to wonder: Should I be more like them? Am I missing something? Am I losing out on opportunities I could be creating for myself?

Most of the time I have a vague worry that perhaps I am wasting my potential. After I left academia a dozen years ago, I have mainly blogged as a form of intellectual activity, and I earn my living with a 9-5 job. The division of how I earn my living and my intellectual passion is often exhausting. Add on top of that my family and being a parent, and it feels like I am struggling to find time and space for my intellectual and spiritual passions. When I started blogging a decade ago, it felt like I too was joining the masses as they expressed themselves in the new medium. But now this digital world seems to be moving ahead, and there are new forms of social media and modes of communication, and I wonder if I missed the bus. Perhaps I am wedded to some older model of communication, and so am failing to catch up to the new ways that are becoming possible.

Arjuna’s Battle with Himself

The Bhagavad Gita is 18 chapters. In the first chapter Arjuna breaks down while facing the battle against his cousins and other family members and teachers. He asks Krishna how he is supposed to fight against those he grew up with and what meaning life could have in the face of such an action. The remaining chapters concern Krishna’s answer.

The usual way of reading The Gita is to assume that we all understand Arjuna’s struggle. Nothing seems more obvious than pain and suffering and confusion. Chapter 1 then is seen just as a set up chapter. What seems mystrerious and spiritual are Krishna’s answers. That is what is to explained – so it seems. What does Krishna mean by saying that the Self doesn’t die, and that Arjuna is confused in thinking he can kill people? What does Krishna mean that we should act without thinking of the consequences of our actions? What are the different types of yoga? How does one realize the ultimate nature of one’s self?

This standard way of reading The Gita suggests that the book is like a travel guide. A person visiting Paris might be lost and doesn’t know how to get to Notre Dame Cathedral from the airport. So he takes out the guidebook and follows the directions. Similarly, it can feel like The Gita is a guide book about life. Arjuna is confused about life – and like Arjuna, we are all confused about life. But the answers are in The Gita, if only we can decipher them. What is to be understood, then, are chapters 2-18. It is easy to assume what Arjuna lacked was some kind of knowledge – knowledge of the nature of his own self, or the nature of death, or the nature of dharma. He had false beliefs about these things, and those false beliefs led to his pain and suffering. So to alleviate the pain he has to acquire the right beliefs and understand them correctly.

Call this way of reading The Gita “the philosophy professor fantasy.” We can also call it “the guru fantasy” or the “youtube spiritual teacher fantasy”. In all these versions of the fantasy, the hero of The Gita is Krishna, and the professor or the guru or the youtube guide replicates in more ordinary language the meaning of what Krishna is saying. To overcome our pain we need the right beliefs. But Krishna’s words are mysterious and involve fancy concepts. So we need a Krishna interpreter – someone who will help us acquire the right beliefs.

This was the picture of The Gita I had for the longest time. I assumed my goal as a philosopher and spiritual seeker was to understand chapters 2-18. So that then I can be peaceful in my life, and then I can be an inspiring teacher of what Krishna is saying.

But I now think of The Gita very differently. To me now the power of The Gita resides almost entirely in Chapter 1. To me now Arjuna is the real hero of The Gita. This has a radical – and to me very freeing – consequence: one doesn’t need a Krishna interpreter. All those fancy words and arguments Krishna gives – the point isn’t to acquire them oneself as beliefs. The point of Krishna’s discourses is something radically different.

Philosophy and Sports

When I was younger, I was a big sports fan. 49ers in football. Lakers in basketball. The Mets in baseball. Boris Becker in Tennis. The Penguins in Ice Hockey. My life revolved around the main sporting events and seasons. My identifications with my sports heroes ran deep. Joe Montana. Steve Young. Kobe Bryant. The heros, the competition, the thrill of victory and the pangs of loss gave meaning to my days. The games weren’t just meaningless contests. They meant something. They meant a lot. They structured my evenings and weekends, and what I read on espn.com seemed to speak of the world I lived in.

In time, however, sporst receded into the background of my life. Super Bowls come and go. NBA playoffs go on and I barely think about them. The sports heroes of the current generation don’t resonate for me, and even the heroes of my youth are no longer heroes for me. They are just some people who were great in their domain, and who I fixated on to structure my life. Until….I didn’t. I know there are many people who still treat sports heroes as the main centers of their life. I can appreciate their passion, but am myself glad to have that in the past. I am glad to see the world without it being centered around sports figures and sports categories.

I see my philosophical interests in a similar way. In fact, I wonder if my passionate embrace of philosophy wasn’t connected to my passion for sports.

When I was in India, I loved playing cricket. I longed to be Kapil Dev, the Indian cricket star of my youth in India. When I moved to America in my early teens, sports became something I could only appreciate on TV. I didn’t know how to play baseball or baskbetball, and was too small to play football. American sports seemed too strange, and I felt too much of a stranger in comparison to the boys who grew up immersed in those games.

Could it be that part of the appeal of the idea of philosopher for my teenage self was that it suggested a kind of team I could be on? The team of philosophers. With its own pantheon of heroes to structure my life around? Shankara. Aurobindo. Wittgenstein. Heidegger. Kant. Lao Tzu. Was the passion I felt for them similar in kind to the passion I had for Montana, Rice, Jordan and Bryant?

It’s an intriguing question. Particularly so because I feel my life disengaging from the philosophy pantheon just as it did from the sports pantheon. I don’t read philosophers anymore. The questions that absorbed me – what is the meaning of life? what is my destiny? where are we going as a species? how is mind related to body? and so on – no longer absorb me in the same way. There are no eternal answers to the questions, anymore than there is a Super Bowl winner for all time.

The Joy of Parenting

I spent some time with my daughter today. She is four and we baked corn bread together. It was ordinary. Mundane. And incredibly fun. In the midst of it I thought, “Being with her is the happiest and most meaningful thing I have done in my life.” This too was a mundane thought. No doubt every parent feels it, even if it is easy to forget at times when the child is throwing a tantrum. But behind that mundane thought, I felt other things also.

I also felt confused. It is clearly true. Being a parent is the most meaningful thing I have ever done in my life. When I truly engage with her, most of my worries and anxieties and self-doubts recede into the background. It is a great way of being in the moment. It’s wonderful. But also puzzling.

For most of my life I assumed the most meaningful and happiest experience in my life would be getting close to enlightenment. Sat, chit, ananda. Being, consciousness, bliss. That is what I had dedicated my life to: bliss. And the study of philosophy and the sacrifice of the life of samsara and giving up the ordinary life of marriage and kids was – I assumed – my path to bliss.

I never felt much of that spiritual bliss. Didn’t come close to it. Whatever I imagined that bliss might be, it pales in comparison to the joy I feel as a parent. It seems that others have felt that spiritual bliss. I have no idea how they compare that bliss to the joy of being a parent. But for me, there is no comparison. My imagination of spiritual bliss was mainly theoretical – imagined, fantasied, projected. The joy of parenting is real, immediate, right there to be experienced if I let myself lean into it.

The question arose in my mind: what did I achieve spending thirty years on philosophy when I am happier as a parent than any time I spent trying to be a philosopher seeking the ultimate bliss? I spent decades reading, writing, searching, sacrificing in order to seek the deep philosophical truths. And here I am in my forties finding my main happiness and meaning in a way billions of people instinctively find their happiness without ever picking up a philosophy book: holding their child’s hand, seeing her laugh, watching her grow.

The Contingency of Concepts

Maturing is recognizing how narrow one’s vision of life used to be, accepting that and moving on towards a broader vision.

Reading Louis Menand’s history of American academia The Marketplace of Ideas, I had a moment of maturing. Something I had vaguely felt for years crystallyzed for me.

Since I studied philosophy in college, I assumed what I was being taught was something universal called philosophy. I fought against my education because I felt it was failing to live up to the universality of philosophy. But no matter how much I tried in the past thirty years to make sense of philosophy in a way which could be more universal, I kept running into a wall. It felt like what I studied and became “an expert” in couldn’t realize the universality of it’s own claims – and that this was not just due to racism or institutional bias, but somehow more necessarily.

This often led me into a deep background depression. It’s hard to accept an institution fails to live up to the ideal of philosophy. But it is harder still to accept the ideal of philosophy was itself nothing more than a construction of that institution. To accept that is to accept that one’s deepest sense of life doesn’t reflect the essence of the world, but was itself constructed through a series of historical forces of which one was unaware. To become aware of the contingency of one’s own identity formation – however grand that identity can seem, like a philosopher – is maturity.

Ask any teenager: maturing is hard. Ask any adult: maturing has no end, and that too is hard.

The basic thrust of Menand’s book is that American academia went through two main transformations.

The first transformation was in the mid-late 1800s when the modern research university was created. This change started in Germany in the early 1800s, and spread to America by the end of the 1800s. Until the late 1800s, most universities in America were basically theologically oriented, and were ways to cultivate the character of rich, young men. As science became a more central feature of modern life, and as society became more secular, the modern research university displaced the broadly theologically centered, character-cultivation model. The late 1800s was the start of departments as we now think of them. Physics, chemistry, history, literature, philosophy – these departments in their modern form in America were created around 1900. This is also when these departments started PhD programs, so that specialization became central to the idea of a department.

The second main transformation happened after WWII, with the massive expansion of American higher education. The cold war and rising capitalism required an educated middle class which could show the virtues of capitalism. Higher education became open to women and minorities. This expansion super charged the research university model which had developed 50 years earlier. More students meant more faculty. It also meant more competition to become faculty. Around 1950 one could still become a profession without a PhD. By 1970 this was impossible. Institutions had to formalize the process of how one can become a part of the institution.

Living from the Core

I started blogging in 2012, one year after I left academia. During my blogging of the last 12 years, I have shared a lot about my life – my relation with my father, depression, anxiety, the pain of leaving academia, feeling torn between cultures and between academic philosophy and spiritual philosophy.

Prior to my blogging, my writing in philosophy was academic. From 1996-2011, I wrote essays and a phd dissertation. In that writing, my personal life never entered into it. It was all about arguments, interpretations, debates – abstract and impersonal.

One reason I left academia was I felt academic writing left me cold. Like I was writing about life in general, but disconnected from my life. That was the reason I took to blogging. There were no guidelines or rules. I could write about my thoughts and feelings, and be as personal as I wanted.

But now I have grown tired of that kind of personal writing. Ironically, the problem with it isn’t that it was personal. It’s that it wasn’t personal enough. Or not personal in a deep enough way. It wasn’t vulnerable enough.

I want to write from the depths of me. I want to express myself from the core.

That core is certainly not determined by arguments about free will or God or the mind-body problem. Arguments are like math – the focus is on the proofs, on the abstract statements. It doesn’t touch the living of life.

But the core is also not determined by autobiographical facts and narratives. My life experiences, the ups and downs, are just that – life experiences. When I focus on them, it’s like I am writing about my life while looking at my life from the outside. As if I were looking at my life as if it were actually somebody else’s life – a part of a grand narrative.

I want to write from the core. That means to write not as part of a grand narrative of my life, but to tap into the part of me that is unformed and is still in the process of forming, and to ride that wave.

The Spirit of Renewal

Joseph looked at the scale in the bathroom with apprehension. He was over weight and he knew it. He usually avoided looking at the scale, as if it was a reminder of a deep seated failure in his life.

In ninth grade he was on the varsity wrestling team – his main athletic achievement being his natural skinniness. There weren’t too many students at his school at 90 pounds who were interested in wrestling. Joseph walked onto the varsity team without having to prove his wrestling skills. Filling the weight class meant at least there could be some wins by forfeit. Those were the only kind of wins he had before he ended his wrestling career at the end of that year.

By the time of college he thought of himself as an ascetic who gave up on normal social identities such as being married or having a career in order to devote himself to spiritual progress. He imagined himself as a monk or as a yogi. But there was no external reality to this identity and no one else looked at him that way. What is the meaning of giving up “normal life” if no one else sees one that way? Joseph’s spiritual social identity was a farce – like someone imaging himself to be a doctor even while no one else saw him that way.

Like most farces, the person at the heart of it was the one least aware of it. For Joseph the concept of monk had become dislodged from its social moorings. He didn’t pray or meditate or become part of a monastic community. Monk had become for him an essence – someone he just was, like the way he was a mammal. When others didn’t engage with him as a monk, he assumed, with that special tinge of self deception, it was because it was too obvious to merit explicit acknowledgment.

The self-identity of being monk like clearly was doing some psychological work for Joseph. The ferocity with which he held to it in his mind made that clear. What psychological work was it doing? Joseph in college couldn’t even consider that question, since he didn’t see it as a psychological issue at all. For him it was just his essence, no more psychological than his being bidepal was psychological.

In self deception there are often public tells – clues that the person’s self conception isn’t tracking their behavior. The main work of self deception is to cover over the public tells and to rationalize them away.

Starting in college, for Joseph a main public tell, which he waved away from his consciousness, started to form around his relation to food.

Home Runs and Enlightenment

Joseph was at the local park watching a baseball game. The batter on the field hit a home run and was rounding the bases. Joseph saw next to the field there was a child who mimicked the batter – the child swung his hands as if hitting the ball and ran around as if he were rounding the bases.

But when the child finished running, he started crying, saying “Why aren’t people cheering my home run? I did the same thing he did!” The child’s parents tried to comfort the child: “You hit a great home run!”

The child continued crying: “No, you are lying. I want to be just like him. Why can’t I be just like him? I want to hit a home run right now, right here! I moved my arms and I ran around just like him. What more do I need to do to hit a home run? Why can’t I hit a home run?”

Joseph was greatly moved by the child’s questions. He felt sympathy for the child’s confusion. The child was sad and felt bad about himself because he didn’t understand the nature of hitting a home run.

The child thought a home run was something the batter did all by himself. As if hitting a home run consisted just of swinging the hands and running around the field – and the child was sure he too was doing just that! And yet his home run didn’t seem to count. What did he miss? Was there some special way the batter held the bat? A special speed with which he ran around the bases? What magical, ineffable, mysterious thing did the batter do such that he could home run but the child couldn’t? The child wanted to know that magical thing so he too can do that! Why was no one telling him? Why were his parents keeping that special something a secret?

After his crying stopped, the child decided with defiance that tomorrow he would practice more and better how to hit a home run. Perhaps his parents didn’t know the magical thing required to hit a home run. Maybe no one in the stands did. But he would watch tape of the batter hitting the home run and mimic it to perfection, so he too can hit a home run all by himself.

——-

The next week Joseph went to a talk by a famous spiritual guide. Joseph’s friend had invited him to the event saying, “You really should come. This Swami is really enlightened. You can just see the aura around him. He has managed to completely transcend his ego. What a great soul! People are flocking to him!”

At the talk the spiritual guide was seated alone on the stage. He spoke of how to be free from the pain of the ego. How to breathe. How to detach from one’s thoughts. How to just watch the mind without judgment.

The spiritual guide had a serene smile and a twinkle in my eye. He seemed to say with his body language, “You are all caught in the cycle of life and death, of achievement and loss. I am not. I am free of that. I have detached from the ego and merged with the universal consciousness. You too can do it, if you manage to do what I did.”

A Portal in Consciousness

As Joseph was pushing the shopping cart in the grocery store, and about to turn into the cereal aisle, a feeling started to coalesce in him. It seemed to come from his inner depths the way one might take out a prized ring deep from within a hidden coat pocket. As the feeling started to materialize in his awareness, he thought to himself, “Now this is interesting.”

Joseph picked up the cereal and put it in the cart. He made his way next to the bread section and then to get some bananas. All the way the feeling was just there in a corner of his awareness, like a patient guest waiting outside the front door. Joseph didn’t know what to do with the feeling. Most emotions presented themselves to him with the force of a runaway truck. There was usually no question of whether he should engage the emotion – he was aware of the emotion only in the midst of acting it out.

This feeling wasn’t like that. It wasn’t an emotion exactly. It didn’t compel him to act or think any which way. It didn’t pull towards anything or push away from anything. It didn’t make B feel excited or unhappy.

While moving through the grocery store, Joseph let the feeling come closer to him in his awareness. As it got closer to him, like a shape shifter, the feeling morphed into a thought, and the thought was: this is what you have been looking for.

The thought unnerved Joseph. What is the “this” in that thought? The thought seemed to point away from itself. Away towards the “this”. But as he stayed with the thought, he saw this wasn’t the case. The thought didn’t gesture away from itself but was pointing only to itself.

The thought changed shape again. This time it became an immense sense of numbness. Joseph was familiar with the feeling of numbness. He had been feeling it for years. It was like life was sucked out of him. He had spent his life searching for a union with God. He read mystics and the great wisdom texts. He had given up many earthly and social pleasures to realize Divinity within himself. He had pursued it with single minded focus.

Yet, in recent years, he had felt the trail grow cold. He didn’t know what “God” or “the Divine” meant. What to him for years had felt the deepest aspiration within him had slowly started to disappear. It’s not that he no longer believed in the Divine, as if there were only the selfish, random drives of people propelling them around. He still believed some people might have experienced the Divine. He just didn’t think he was one of them. Initially this made him angry and jealous, as if others were achieving spiritual successes which were being denied him. But over time this too passed, and what remained was the sense of numbness.