How I Journal Now...

 

My current journalling regimen incorporates two key approaches from Ryan Holiday and Benjamin Franklin [Photo by Dr Michael de Percy].

After much reflection, a little therapy, and much deliberation, I have arrived at a new journalling regimen that has given new life to my daily reflective habit. I document my current journalling process below.

It is almost three years ago since I blogged here about my daily journalling regimen. At the time, I had been journalling on a daily basis for over a year, and, despite some major life interruptions, I continue to journal on a daily basis. 

My daily habit has not always been efficacious; not because of my journalling, but because my process became stagnant and the challenges I faced had changed over time.

Originally, I took the opportunity to journal using Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic as a prompt but also to develop a routine that reinforced Stoic logic, in particular Epictetus's Enchiridion, which can be summed up in the first three sentences of his work:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Like the ritualised practices found in organised religions, journalling is a constant reminder to defer to the source: my sense of reason, and, in particular, to continually assess what is in my control and what is not. There is power in the daily reminder which I find similar to the concept of daily (or regular) prayer or meditation found in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. 

Interestingly, my reading of many theologically inspired works confirms the ubiquity of Stoic philosophy's basic premises in many major religions and ancient philosophies.

My previous process began with free writing, followed by reflection on the daily meditations in The Daily Stoic, The Daily Stoic Journal, and the three-monthly program in Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal. I also added the morning and evening reflections from James Allen's As A Man Thinketh. 

(These days I generally journal only once per day whereas from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2019 I journalled each morning and each evening.)

For the final parts of my journalling I referred to various texts and reflected on a number of short passages of these texts on a daily basis. These included (among other works) La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the Qur'an, the Tanakh, the Holy Bible (yet again!), Patience and Gratitude: An abridged translation of ʿUddat as-Sabirin wa dhakhirat ash-shakirin, and the Shiva Sutras, and soon I will finish the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Slowly digesting classic texts this way is useful as it allows time for each morsel to make its mark, rather than racing through a book and forgetting soon after.

Ryan Holiday advocates reading slowly. And the point is that we should give ourselves time to do things for ourselves. Emerson¹ said it best:

Eminently thoughtful men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day, to meet their own mind and learn what oracle it has to impart.

While the paragraph by paragraph approach to reading worked over the last few years, I have started to lose interest in my old journalling process. Brett McKay from the Art of Manliness wrote about how he lost the journalling habit over time once his life settled down. I suspect this is part of what is happening for me, too.

But there is still this other part of me that needs to journal so that my monkey mind gets out of my way. Tim Ferriss says it best:

I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

This is key for me and if my journalling process requires too much effort I tend to only get to it piecemeal during the day rather than using it for its monkey-caging benefits.

I also found that my recent experience with EMDR was great but "checking-in" with my different "parts" and getting them to communicate (rather than running off when my adult self is on autopilot) stopped happening when I wasn't regularly checking in with the therapist.

EMDR, parts therapy, and internal family systems are really interesting and it is best to work with qualified practitioners. But for my personal record, and drawing on Rolf Potts' travel journal philosophy of my journal being for me, "an author and audience of one", here is my own "parts map" from September last year:

Dr Michael de Percy, personal "parts map" developed during EMDR therapy

Once I would have been afraid of exposing my vulnerability, but fuck it, I am over 50 now and I will do whatever I want with my own stuff, just as I did recently. And if Alain de Botton advocates psychotherapy, then who the hell is anyone else to judge?

Now to my most recent process. Once a day, I do the following:

1. Daily Stoic reflections. I wanted to make sure I reinforced the logic of Stoic philosophy as the first thing, so I have moved the Daily Stoic and the Daily Stoic Journal as a combined first item. I have hand-written the questions from the Daily Stoic Journal into the pages of my copy of the Daily Stoic.
2. Benjamin Franklin's Virtues Journal reflections.
3. Reflections on a "Quote of the Day" (that I like or I look to one of my Cabinet of Invisible Counsellors).²
4. Check-in with my "parts" (or what I am grateful for if I have nothing to discuss). 
5. Free writing to clear my monkey mind. This can be long or short depending on how I am feeling. Speaking of which, Mark Manson provides some helpful questions in this regard: What the hell am I doing? What the hell am I feeling? What the hell are my blind spots?

So that is my latest attempt to reignite my journalling. It is still a big part of my day but it allows me to spend less time thinking and more time doing. It reminds me of part of a Hemingway story that Fitzgerald told him to leave out because it was too clever:

Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.

 I hope this article is useful for anyone keeping a Stoic journal.

Notes

1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Conrad, Charles; Books, Best Success. We Are the Builders of Our Fortunes: Success through Self-Reliance (p. 58). www.SuccessBooks.net. Kindle Edition.

2. I am still developing my "cabinet" but here is my go-to list for now:

• Work practices: Cal Newport
• Literature: Harold Bloom
• Political Science: Charles E. Merriam
• Teaching: Ryan Holiday
• Scholarly Tradition: John Wanna
• Virtues: Benjamin Franklin
• Individuality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Existence: Albert Camus
• Blogging: Walter Benjamin
• Motivation: Kyle Eschenroeder
• Music: John Adams
• Writing: Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
• House and Garden: Dirk Bogarde
• Travel: Rolf Potts

Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

View all my reviews

Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

The Futility of Buying Life to Escape Death

El Tres de Mayo (The Third of May 1808) by Francisco Goya, 1814. Photo: [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

This novella by Graham Greene was written in 1944 (first conceived in 1938) as a screen play that was somehow discarded and lost in the MGM archives. Greene was unable to make a living from writing books and took a contract with MGM to write screenplays, and before the main story, the book includes a couple of screen sketches. In 1983, the story was found and MGM sold the rights to a publisher, hence this book.

Reading other's unfinished work is a great learning experience, and it is useful to see how the plot and structure of creative writing emerges from different authors. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a book I wish I had read while writing my PhD - the thought process is clear, but the details are still being threshed out. Seeing how Fitzgerald did this has left a powerful impression on me.

In the first part of Greene's book, he tells the story of what he was doing before and after the war, and how the story came about. He then introduces two film sketches that remained unfinished. It is interesting that in just a few pages, the outline of a movie appears. Greene added the film sketches because he had largely forgotten about The Tenth Man, thinking it was only (p. 10):

...two pages of outline but [it was] a complete short novel of thirty thousand words.

He then went through his own archives and found two other sketches - although less complete - that he had also forgotten about. (Wouldn't it be lovely to have written so much one had forgotten some of it?)

The main text, The Tenth Man, reads as a complete novella - there is certainly nothing undeveloped there. But the introduction sets out how the novella began as a few sentences outlining an idea. The two film sketches, which are incomplete, provide a bridge to Greene's process from a few sentences to a complete story.

As for the story, the cover blurb says it all: a rich man in a German prison draws lots to see who will die. (The Germans are going to execute 1 in 10 prisoners, and the prisoners have to decide who it will be.) The rich man loses, but offers all of his wealth to stay alive. Another prisoner, thinking of his family, takes up the rich man's offer.

I recall from reading Hemingway's letters and various articles how he developed a story out of a simple idea. For example, The Sun Also Rises is a story to answer the question, What would happen if your penis was shot off during the war? Greene's story follows a similar process: What would it be like to pay somebody else to die for you, if you gave up everything to live?

The story isn't so much Faustian, for the poor prisoner insists that the rich man sticks to the deal (after the rich man has an attack of conscience), and there is much more to the story after that.

In many ways, it addresses questions of life and death, and whether we control our fate or whether it matters or not. Or indeed, if we think we can thwart destiny, think again. Maybe the moral of the story is amor fati?

I've been reading and thinking a lot about death lately, especially the idea that all fear can be reduced to a fear of death, and, because we all die, there is nothing to be afraid of - it is a given. Perhaps it is not a topic Australians discuss in any philosophical sense, unlike what I have read by the Stoics, Albert Camus or what is explored in Mexico's Festival of the Dead. 

I think this aversion to thinking about death is philosophically limiting. But rather than Camus, which might be a little confronting for the uninitiated, Graham Greene deals with the topic in a way that makes it hard not to reflect on one's values, the purpose of life, and, I suppose, that death accompanies life.

It is certainly macabre, but there is much to learn from this novella. The story was made into a TV movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins in 1988.

Logocentrism and Deconstruction: What's the Différance?

Jacques Derrida on Writing and Difference.

Introducing Derrida by Jeff Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a copy of Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference sitting on my bookshelf waiting for me to get to it. I also had this introductory text laying around. I am glad I went for the easy option first, as this text saved me from learning the hard way. I am not ready for Derrida - I have to start with Hegel and work my way through to Heidegger first.

I am not averse to reading introductory texts, but this one is a little different, in that it is more like a comic book. Or, indeed, it is very similar to the style Alain de Botton has adopted for The School of Life (but this book predates the YouTube series).

But the book is not too basic. Even after reading this introductory text, I am little the wiser.

I see Derrida's idea of "deconstruction" as an attempt to critique logo-centrism, where Western philosophy tends to privilege one thing over another in a binary either/or paradigm. For example, speech tends to be privileged over writing; philosophy over literature, men over women (traditionally), and so on.

Deconstruction is helpfully explained using the example of a zombie. Zombies are neither dead nor alive - their status is "undecidable" (see also the pharmakon, p. 73):

To embrace the curious logic of this writing, we have to be willing to sign up to it, to subscribe to it the task it takes on: the creation of destabilizing movements in metaphysical thinking.

Had I set out to read Writing and Difference, I would have been lost in Derrida's writing, which this text suggests can be "puzzling, infuriating, and exasperating"(p. 73). It would be better to tackle his three major works on "structuralism and phenomenology" in order: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, then Of Grammatology.

However, the reading list at the end of the text sets out a reading plan to ease into Derrida's work gradually, beginning with Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader: Between the Lines. Sound advice.

It would seem that I must also go right back to Plato for a closer reading of his work so I can engage with Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy.

What all this means is that I am completely out of my depth! Whereas with Albert Camus and even Nietzsche I was able to struggle through, with Derrida I will have to tackle post-modernism (Derrida didn't necessarily think of his work as "post-modern"). I suppose it is time.

This text was a good place to start. I also found the School of Life's video (below) useful. I must admit to being pleased to find an area of my knowledge that is so completely lacking as to require considerable thought - especially in approaching Derrida. At the same time, the task is quite daunting and it may have to wait until some time later next year if I am to do it any justice.

Learning About Values from a Potty Mouth

Echo and Narcissus, 1903, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the end of the year approaches and I am on track to achieve my reading goals, I have been reading some pop psychology books. I do like Mark Manson's work, even though its crassness makes it somewhat less scholarly than most of the books I have read thus far.

Manson writes how I sometimes speak, so I am not taking the moral high ground here, but it does mean that I tend to take his content less seriously. As I approach 50 I can reflect on my own experiences from my twenties and early thirties, and I must say I am impressed by the depth of reading of the likes of Mark Manson, Ryan Holiday, and Paul Colaianni and their ability to explain how they think about values, virtues, and finding the logic to guide their daily practice and actions.

But I have some concerns about what I call "literary entrepreneurship", and whether my time would be better spent on the classics.

I have recently been thinking about the idea of "endlessness". During my long service leave last year, I experienced a sense of endlessness where there were no deadlines (at least until the next semester of teaching began) and I could do whatever I wanted each day. I chose to journal, read, and blog, and this enabled me to establish a daily routine which I maintain to this day. I started with Homer, and I have been slowly working through the great books and works by the likes of Camus, Calvino,  and Nietzsche. I often get nervous about wasting time on contemporary books when I have so much to learn from the past.

Because of my own reading program, Manson's examples from literature were all familiar, including Bukowski, Buddha, Tina Gilbertson's idea of "constructive wallowing", the Milgram experiment, and so on. But I wonder whether these pop psychology books (for want of a better term) have sufficient depth?

Many of the self-improvement books I have read refer to historical and personal examples, and there is much to learn from how others think about the same problems I face. For example, Manson's approach to determining one's values fits well with what I gained from my reading of Paul Colaianni and Tina Gilbertson.

But I also see how these books are commercial products with a particular aim in mind. I often get the feeling that the authors are reading as a form of "mining" for information, much like the approach I might take when writing an academic paper (sans the referencing). 

From my own experience, a complete, cover-to-cover, slow reading of each work brings to light much which is lost through simply mining the content. So I wonder how much value I gain from reading Manson, compared to, say, reading Benjamin Franklin? (Of course, Franklin had his own financial reasons for lecturing and writing.) But when I read Franklin, for example, there was much that escaped me in the detail, and further reading revealed much of what I could not gain from the original text.

When I reflect on my reading of the likes of Manson, I often wonder how much I can gain from such literary entrepreneurs. Not that I don't like the book, but I wonder if I gain as much from this book as I might if I had prioritised my reading of Plato's The Laws, for example. 

So when I sum up the lessons learnt from Manson, much of these are in the reiteration of things I already know: if in doubt, act (p. 157); achieving meaning in one's life requires the rejection of alternatives (p. 165); excess is not good for me (p. 165); but establishing boundaries is good for me (p. 174).

One part I enjoyed is where Manson discusses the idea of endless values (p. 151) and mentions the "honest expression" of Pablo Picasso. The idea of honest expression is to provide a metric (p. 74), or a way to measure the implementation of one's values, in a way that does not "end'. For example, if one wanted to achieve "freedom" through work, once a job that provided such "freedom" had been achieved, then there is a sense that the value is "accomplished" and there is no sense of motivation. An "endless" value such as honest expression  is something that can be achieved repeatedly - it never ends.

However, as I know for a fact that I don't know everything, I did learn some key lessons about defining personal values and better ways to measure (metrics) these values; the paradox of choice (and how this promises the good life, but leads to inconsistency and confusion); and a better relationship with the idea of death (Quoting Mark Twain, p. 202):

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I also have a better understanding of "unconscious resistance", which often gets in the way of me doing things I believe I actually want to do.

My "struggle" (see "suffering" p. 208) with my reading is best summed up by Harold Bloom (How to Read and Why, p. 21):

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest... but eventually you will read against the clock... One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change is universal.

When I read the work of the present generation of literary entrepreneurs, I really feel that clock ticking. But after reading Manson, and despite my "unconscious resistance",  I think there is some value in reading about how others think about philosophy, and then applying that approach to my own thinking. Even if it is an exercise in thinking, rather than a definite plan for action.

La Chute: Albert Camus on the consequences of not learning to live

The Fall of Phaeton by Peter Paul Rubens, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Fall by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last of Camus' works completed before his death in 1960. First published in 1956, the work is presented as a monologue by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Parisian lawyer who has moved to Amsterdam to become a "judge-penitent". I will return to this term later. 

Clamence has become bitterly cynical about judges, law, and justice, and has taken to womanising, drinking, and generally driving himself into the ground through hard living. I've read other reviews suggesting the work is Clamence's "confession", for others it is his "self-accusation". The story (it is clearly a philosophical work, rather than a novella) incorporates the stolen panel "The Just Judges" of the Van Eyck painting, The Mythical Lamb (also known as the Ghent altarpiece). The panel was actually stolen in 1934 and is missing to this day. 

There are a few other historical references which I found fascinating, including Girolamo Savonarola (a Florentine precursor to the Reformation and mentioned in Machiavelli's The Prince); Bertrand du Guesclin (a Breton knight and French commander during the 100 Years War); Johannes Vermeer (Dutch painter famous for Girl with a Pearl Earring); and the "Little Ease" (1.2 metre square torture cell in the Tower of London's White Tower where one can neither stand nor lie down); Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (and an earlier reference to Iseult, an alternative name for Isolde in the Arthurian story); and François Achille Bazaine (who rose from the ranks under Louis-Philippe and later Napoleon III, and held every rank from Fusilier to Marshal of France).

I was surprised by how others had interpreted the work. Scott Horton (2009) in Harper's Magazine Blog sees Clamence's fall as the fall of society after the Second World War, and draws parallels with the recent past. He also suggests that the The Just Judges symbolises that while the panel is fake, there is an original, and we can live in hope that the just judges will return some time in the future. I find it interesting that this echoes Girolamo Savonarola's prediction of a prophet from the north who would come to remove the corruption of the church. 

Tony Judt (1994) in the New York Review of Books goes so far as to say that Camus was already in decline before his death, and that he was only "moderately gifted" at philosophy. (Judt also wrote that The Myth of Sisyphus "has not worn well".) I am inclined to make my own interpretation of the work, based on a few things that others (as far as I know) have not mentioned. 

First, Clamence mentions frequently how he despises the dark, underground, and cramped spaces (like the "little ease") and prefers the heights and mountain-tops. Maybe his work as a lawyer frustrates his desire to be a philosopher? 

Second, there are several references to the problems with altruism. For example (p. 8):

...he wrote over the door of his house: 'Wherever you come from welcome and enter'. And who do you suppose welcomed his invitation? Why, militiamen, who marched in, made themselves at home and disembowelled him.

And (p. 72):

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in practising charity.

From these, I see the work is much more about the individual. 

Third, the work addresses the challenge of living a virtuous life. Virtues and vices make numerous appearances, including jealousy (p. 66), cowardice (p. 34), shrinking from responsibility (p. 24), being so self-centred as to not take anyone else seriously (p. 54), and a raft of other issues that resonate with me. For example (p. 52):

...we would like at the same time to be no longer guilty and not to make the effort to purify ourselves. Not enough cynicism, not enough virtue.

I could go on. For me, the work addresses all of the issues of the self-centred person coming to terms with self-respect, and dealing with the guilt and shame that replays itself in the mind. In particular (p. 70):

Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.

And avoiding self-reflection has its own price (p. 50):

I received all the wounds at once and lost my strength at a single blow. Then the whole universe began to laugh around me.

I have written previously about self-respect and how we suffer what Joan Didion referred to as our own home movie, but Clamence refers to as a film (p. 50):

I ran this little film a hundred times, with odd variations, in my imagination. But it was too late and for a few days I would suffer from a feeling of bitter resentment.

Clearly, Clamence is not happy with his past choices and has no idea of his purpose in life. In assessing his life (he is aged 40 by this time), he laments (p. 55):

I measured the years that separated me from my end. I looked out at examples of men of my age who were dead already. And I was tormented by the idea that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I don't know.

All Clamence can do is judge himself (the judge-penitent) (p. 53):

Some mornings, I would conduct my trial to the very end and reach the conclusion that what I excelled in above all was contempt.

Clamence is not free, but wishes to be so (p. 58):

I wanted to break up the mannequin I presented to the world wherever I went, and lay open to scrutiny what was in its belly.

For me, the fall is not about the fall of society or humankind, but the inevitable residue that greets he who does not learn to live (p. 90):

These nights, or rather these mornings, because the fall occurs at dawn, I go out and walk briskly along the canals.

Camus presents to us, through Clamence, what it is like to live without philosophy, what it is like to live without self-respect (p. 90):

Yes, we've lost the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of the man who forgives himself.

Clamence is happy to die, not because of some reconciliation of the self, but because he knows himself, yet is incapable of conquering himself.

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Lessons from Camus' The Plague: or, Doing one's duty in the present moment

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain at Tate Modern. [Public Domain, photo by David Shankbone, London].

The Plague by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This literary work by Albert Camus might be rewarding if read simply as a novel. But to comprehend the work in the context of his philosophical "book-length essays", The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel (which I am yet to read), and his other famous novel, The Stranger, requires an understanding of Camus' philosophy of the absurd. While Camus refused the label of existentialist philosopher, it is clear that he develops a philosophy of the absurd in the three of the above works I have read thus far. 

I suspect that a reading of The Rebel and also Nuptials will provide further insight into his ideas, but much like reading Nietzsche, I think one could develop a sense of Camus' ideas no matter where one starts. I enjoy referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy when trying to comprehend philosophical works, but I follow Mortimer Adler's advice to read the work first, so as to form my own impression, before immersing myself in the interpretations of others'. This particular edition of the novel is helpful in that it contains an afterword, rather than an introduction, by the late Professor Tony Judt.

Whenever I think of absurdity, I tend to think of the Dada Movement. But the ridiculousness of Dada served the purpose of mocking the bourgeois, so it does not relate so much to the absurd in the philosophical sense as it does "absurd" in the sense of "ridiculous". What I gather from my reading is that the absurd relates to the absence of any meaning of life. It is irrational in that you cannot reach, by reason, the meaning of life other than that you live and then you die. 

There is an element of Nietzsche's "God is dead", too, in that Camus attacks religion, no, challenges religion, in its attempt to provide meaning to life (or the after-life). As the title suggests, this novel is a fictional story about the plague striking Oran, Algeria, and the lives of a group of men who are caught up by the inevitable quarantining of the city. In his afterword, Tony Judt tells of how Camus relied on his personal experience of Nazi-occupied France (Camus was a reluctant hero of the French Resistance) as a basis for his story, and how as soon as the tragedy is over, people simply pick up from where they left off and seem to forget the lessons learnt from the trauma.

Without giving too much of the plot away, nor the interesting use of the narrator, the non-religious protagonist simply does his duty. In doing so, we see a human Sisyphus at work. It probably didn't help being sick myself while reading this, and wondering if each time one of the pets scratched themselves I might be in for a dose of the plague, but like all of Camus' work I have read thus far, it leaves me with a strange sense of resignation. I was going to say hope, but this is where Camus disagreed with Sartre and the existentialists: he saw them as "deifying" the knowledge that there was no god (or God or gods), and turning existentialism into its own form of religion, much like the anti-religionist non-scientist science-lovers do on social media these days.

Something that strikes me with Camus is the absence of hope. If one doesn't like it, then one can always end it. And here I draw parallels with the Stoics. There is always that macabre option. But if we choose to live, we can only live for the present moment. What appears again and again in The Plague is a sense of duty. Not so much for a cause, but to do what one does because that is what one does. To live in the present moment, for the future is death, and the past is beyond our control.

Yet this doesn't mean we adopt a hedonistic approach to life, but rather that we do our duty, in accordance with our nature. Of course, these ideas are difficult to comprehend without a thorough reading of Camus, Nietzsche, and the Stoics; even so, it is still difficult to articulate the concept. Camus' use of the novel to explain these concepts is powerful, in that through metaphor, we can come to understand his non-philosophical philosophy.

Rather than attempting to find meaning in life (which is absurd because there is none), we can exist in the present moment and do our duty. And while this may sound nihilistic, there is a sense of peace one can gain by acknowledging that all we can control are our impressions of external events, and then how we react to the things we cannot control. As Camus observed in The Myth of Sisyphus (p. 64):

...integrity has no need of rules.

It would seem that there is some relation to Stoicism, in that personal decision and choice is a central theme. 

But that is just my take on it. If you would rather just read an excellent novel, then this is it. If, of course, you can not wonder about the absurdity of it all after reading it.

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I am convinced that Leo Sayer was channelling Nietzsche in 1974!

Leo Sayer in 1974. I say he was channelling Nietzsche! [Image via YouTube]

The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This work is where most of Nietzsche's ideas begin. The poetry was unexpected, even though poetry is "the gay science". I routinely reflect on La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, and The Gay Science follows a similar structure. Based on my own reading, I also see elements of Voltaire's style. La Rochefoucauld's influence on Nietzsche has been acknowledged by numerous scholars, such as Brendan Donnellan, but also to Voltaire. 

Writing in the New Republic, Jacob Soll includes Nietzsche as an extension of Voltaire in terms of the critique of religion, which interestingly extends into a critique of socialism. (In the Marxian tradition, religion is the "opiate of the masses".) Borrowing from Mortimer Adler, my approach to reading Nietzsche is to read it myself, and later to look toward critiques of his work, so I am pleased that my connections between La Rochefoucauld and Voltaire do not stray from the mark. Nevertheless, my comparison was based purely on Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique and La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, rather than an in-depth study of either. 

In many ways, Nietzsche sets out the work as a dictionary of his ideas, not so much in the style of aphorisms, but certainly as a form of developing his own ideas in the style of a list of definitions, ideas, critiques, and polemics. Having said that, Nietzsche points out so many things that remain relevant today, including working for the sake of work, the "non-voluntariness in forming opinions" in academia, and even Rousseau's idea (apparently Nietzsche disliked Rousseau's work) of experience being "dearly bought and hardly worth the cost", nationalism, and the idea that science is not rational but merely a form of metaphysics where we attempt to measure things that are for the most part immeasurable, just to name a few. I also noticed echoes of Nietzsche in the work of Anton Chekhov and Albert Camus. 

But to return to Jacob Soll, who suggests that, in the US, the Enlightenment has been more or less abandoned, provides an interesting counter-point to what routinely appears in political debates in Australia. For example, the Enlightenment is often reified as the benchmark for all things good, yet, much like the US, there seems to be a disconnect with the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. (Soll, in effect, includes Nietzsche as an extension of the Enlightenment heavy-weights.) What this indicates to me is a weakness in my own understanding based on the glossed-over ideas of the Enlightenment that are too often taken-for-granted. I need to read much more and not just the philosophers, and Nietzsche points out Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer (that "pedantic Englishman") as worthy of further critique. 

Rather than suggesting we do what the social sciences try to do now by emulating the natural sciences, Nietzsche suggests we should, in effect, refer to the social sciences as "the unnatural sciences". Which brings me to an interesting observation. The Delphic Oracle's motto, "Know thyself" is based on the idea that knowledge (as Nietzsche suggests) is simply about attaching something we do not know to something we already know. So rather than seeking to understand, we seek to know. This subtle yet powerful difference seems to link to the Dionysian approach that Nietzsche develops in his later works. In many ways, it is also a critique of the natural sciences, especially Newton ("If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of giants"). In the current era, everything must be measured or it is not valued (and to quote Galileo, "Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so" - see also the Canadian designer, Bruce Mau). 

Nietzsche provides one of the best critiques of these ideas, and in ways I would never have dreamt of in a lifetime of thinking. He also has his usual go at Aristotle, Socrates, the Stoics, yet seems to agree with Epicurus, and introduces Zarathustra, but I think I have only seen the tip of the iceberg. I intend to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra for my next Nietzsche reading, but I can only imagine how much I am missing as I have not the complete grasp (is it even possible?) of the many influences that Nietzsche draws on. 

It would seem logical that to read Nietzsche, one might begin at the beginning and work through in chronological order. Then again, I would have lost so much had I read this book early on, as many of Nietzsche's ideas remain largely undeveloped, at least in terms of how he converses with the reader. Interestingly, Nietzsche suggests that we only know something when we are able to discuss it. But this is simply the herd instinct monopolising our intellect. If we seek rather to understand than to "know", we may well not be able to communicate it at all. 

I think this is what Nietzsche captures best in this work, and I would hazard a guess that his poems pick up on this theme, and his epilogue (mirrored in the final poem) invites us to "dance". It doesn't matter if you do not understand the Minstrel, but the more you can hear the music and the melody, so much better can you... dance. I can dance!

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On Creativity and Liberalism: Albert Camus

Allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts by Maerten de Vos (1590). Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Create Dangerously by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short work consists of three speeches: Create Dangerously, delivered in 1957 a few days after Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; Bread and Freedom in 1953; and Defence of Intelligence in 1945. For Camus, there are two kinds of intelligence: "intelligent intelligence, and stupid intelligence" (p. 7). Camus searches for the authentic liberty, rather than the society of signs, the artificial liberty that "inscribes the words 'liberty' and 'equality' on its prisons as well as on its temples of finance" (p. 7). Artists struggle with liberty, in that, to be regarded as great, they must be popular, but in being popular, they cannot be great. Asserting one's freedom is an act of establishing order over chaos:

The free artist is one who, with great effort, creates his own order (p. 27)... [and assumes] all the risks and labours of freedom (p. 28).

Art, then, is the "enemy marked out by every form of oppression" (p. 29). It is here that I start to see parallels between Camus' time (the time of mutually assured destruction) and our own era of incremental tyranny. Camus surprises me by a desire to defend the West, and it would seem specifically the defence of the liberal tradition. But he is not pessimistic; rather, the artist's "ordeal contributes meanwhile to our chances of authenticity" (p. 31). Rather than seeking solitude, the paradox is that the artist must not be popular, but must find peace "in the heat of combat". This reminds me of Jordan B. Peterson and the criticism he is facing at the moment. I must suspend my criticism here as I have only read parts of his work as it relates to Stoicism, but Peterson is surely in the heat of combat in his attempt to make order out of chaos. This connection with the Stoics and Peterson is interesting and appears in Defence of Intelligence, in that:

...the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will turn our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice (p. 36).

And the comparison with our present doesn't end there. For Camus, who fought against the Nazis as part of the French Resistance, attacks against intelligence were part and parcel, not just of Nazi Germany, but of greater Europe:

Goering gave a fair idea of their philosophy by declaring: "When anyone talks to me of intelligence, I take out my revolver". And that philosophy was not limited to Germany. At the same time throughout civilised Europe the excesses of intelligence and the faults of the intellectual were being pointed out" (p. 37).

Now tell me that doesn't resonate with your daily news feed? Artists (experts?) should not "give in when they are told that intelligence is always unwelcome or that it is permissible to lie in order to succeed". Is that what is happening in academia? The collection concludes with Bread and Freedom, where Camus tells us that justice and freedom go hand in hand: we cannot have one without the other, and we cannot allow the few democratic liberties we have now be "taken from us without a protest" (p. 48). If the first concern of any dictatorship is to "subjugate labour and culture", then it is clear we are well-advanced on the path to tyranny. Like all great works of the liberal tradition, Camus' final words ring true:

[F]reedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all (p. 54).

And while for years we have focused on the state and society more generally, and for all our "individualism", I cannot help but think that we have lost the idea of liberty. The words of James Allen (As A Man Thinketh, p. 91) (and certainly the Stoics would agree) mirror Camus' view:

Where the calm mind is there is strength and rest, there is love and wisdom; there is one who has fought successfully innumerable battles against self, who, after long toil in secret against his own failings, has triumphed at last.

For Camus, the problem is more complex than just the artist fighting against or capitulating to the state: it is insidious. It is like the screaming echo chambers of social media, where we protest. But we cannot tell whether we are the martyr or the lion (p. 4); the artist is not faithful to her own genius (p. 5). To put it simply, there is no comfort in freedom, and the free artist is no more comfortable than the free man. Camus seems to be telling us that in the life of the artist, and this encompasses all of "the arts", wisdom only declines when it involves no risk and "belongs to a few humanists buried in libraries" (p. 31). Rather than condemn, the artist must absolve (p. 25). If I were to capture the big problem in higher education in a short sentence, it would be students' constant search for the "right" answer. If wisdom and learning is hard won, and there is no right answer, then this becomes a recipe for burn-out, or at least a jaded fatigue. Camus reminds us that this is because we look for good and evil (see also Nietzsche), rather than to understand. And so, to absolve rather than condemn, to take on the risks and the labours of freedom. Were it only so simple.

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Stranger than Fiction? Indeed, Absurd!

Harbouring the Stranger (circa 1649) by Michiel Sweerts. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Upon finishing this book, I found it difficult to shake the images it left behind. Coupled with Guy de Maupassant's powerfully class conscious Bel Ami, I felt like the chips on my own shoulders now had Maupassant and Camus sitting on them, haunting me like spectres and no way to shake them off. Not as if the books had been absorbed into my identity, which most good books seem to do, but as if they were somehow added on and would require surgery to be removed. One sleep after finishing the book, I feel like John Nash's character in A Beautiful Mind, I know they are there, but they do not bother me too much if I don't engage with them. I have had the urge, since reading The Myth of Sisyphus, to read all of Camus' work, as I did with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I had purchased The Plague and The Outsider to read, not realising at the time that The Outsider is actually a different translation of L’Étranger, the latter translated by Sandra Smith. I was annoyed that I had purchased the same book, but a quick perusal of Smith's translation shows some differences that will be worth exploring. Nonetheless, with these two spectres haunting enough as it is, I was not ready to read the same story again - it is much too vivid still. On the back cover of Sandra Smith's translation, a quote by William Boyd says it more eloquently than I:

One of those books that marks a reader's life indelibly.

I'll say. When I went in search of William Boyd, I discovered a review in The Guardian that seemed to be somewhat sour grapes. In a review entitled "Bamboozled", Adam Mars-Jones says:

It's a mystery how some of William Boyd's journalism was published the first time, let alone reprinted in Bamboo.

Very clever! But maybe not as clever as the New York Times review by David Haglund:

It’s difficult, in fact, to argue with any of Boyd’s conclusions. But if one can’t argue with a review, why bother with it at all? One would rather — at least, I would rather — read a striking if ultimately dubious argument about a book or a movie than the level-headed evaluations provided in these pages. It is more important for a critic to be interesting than to be right.

The artist as critic. But Boyd says what I felt about Camus:

...one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer's imagination impinging irrevocably on your own... the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer's allure.

Camus died at age 46. For some reason his James Dean-like cover photo and his candid discussion of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus had me thinking he had suffered the same fate as other literary greats. But it wasn't the case, he was killed in a car crash while holding a train ticket - he had caught a lift rather than catch the train. And in this example of life imitating art, we find Camus' idea of the absurd (apparently he didn't like being called an existentialist) neatly captured in The Stranger:

Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

When Meursault, the protagonist, is attempting to accept "the machine" (I couldn't help thinking of the term "machinery of government"), the idea of the system and indeed the guillotine all occupy one's imagination in a swirling confusion of "absurdity". I was perplexed by the idea of the guillotine in a novel written in 1942, so I did a little research. The last use of the guillotine in France, and the last official "beheading" in the West was in Paris in 1977, when I was seven years old. In my lifetime. Just over forty years ago, in France. I am still flabbergasted. Yet the last public execution by guillotine was in 1939, only three years before Camus published the novel, so the terror of that machine was very much still in the public memory. (It makes me shudder to think of the guillotine simulation at Questacon - I don't think I could put my head in there nowadays.) Marcel Chevalier was the last Chief Executioner (the position was informally known as Monsieur de Paris) of France - can you imagine a public service position with that title in Australia? And yet, there it was in France in my own lifetime. Now that is absurd! The bottom line is that I don't know what to think, and Camus' absurd philosophy suggests that there is no point anyway. Having said that, the second part of Camus' philosophy deals with rebellion, and so the absurd and the rebel provide some understanding of the "why". I will have to reserve judgement for now, but if I do find I am actually in The Matrix, at this point I would be wishing I had told Morpheus to shove that red pill up his butt! For Aristotle, the root of education may be bitter and the fruit may be sweet, but he never said that once you were planted, you would grow until you die and you could never cut off those nasty philosophical roots, no matter what you did, ever again. How absurd!

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