Vichara 0: Rebirth
Auspicious Solstice!
If you are receiving this in your email inbox you may be perplexed by the title of this post. This is, after all, not the first newsletter I have sent under the ‘Vichara’ title. Indeed, I had inaugurated Vichara in October 2021 with a post titled ‘Vichara 1: Civilization Is to Be Optimized for Beauty and Dynamism’. The implicit message of this title was either that Beauty and Dynamism are the best or only forms of the Highest Good, or that they are the best or only ways to get to the Highest Good. A theme of this project since then has been the primacy of aesthetics, both as an orienting disposition and way of life that leads to the best world and individual existence within it, and as being how the Good truly exists in this phenomenal realm.
The reason I have been silent on this project the last few months is because I have had to rethink both the content that has come to me and that I’ve conveyed, and the form in which I’ve done so. I have had to do so for both theoretical reasons and practical, rather personal reasons. In short, my inability to account for the fullness of individual experience and existence in my account of the Good has held me back myself in terms of living the life I want to, in existing in fidelity to whatever Good I have conceived of or am trying to conceive of—and at the same time, my inability to live the life that I want to and realize the excellence that I want to realize in and of my own person—and my exclusion of such wants into my conception of the Good—has prevented me from being able to reflect on matters well enough to see it as well as possible.
After much consideration in the face of such immovable circularity, then, the best course of action seems to be to wipe the slate clean, and go for it de novo. While I still believe the domain of aesthetics is very important, and hold to the correctness of many other things that I’ve written about, too much that was given as being central to my overall project was not baked well enough, or at least integrated well enough with other questions I’d been blind to, to justify the conclusiveness with which I often presented things. It is now time to pursue the whole enterprise in a more circumspect fashion, without feigning having come to “the final word”, which I may have unfortunately done in the past, as well as with a wider incorporation of important questions, all of which have to be answered together to offer anything approximating a “final word”. (There were some things that I had published here, especially about society and culture, politics and geopolitics, that I think were truly very good works of thought and writing that still stand for their own value, if not validity, and there will soon be a place where they are up again.)
Today I will only put forth these other important questions that have come to haunt me and which have motivated this recontextualization of my overall knowledge of things. But before I do so, it would be useful to state plainly what the ultimate objective of this project (and my general enterprise in and of existence, at least for a while) is, and why that objective is relevant.
In a word, the objective is to determine what the Good is. This matters because if there is Good—i.e., that which can legitimately be seen an ultimate end, something that is of value intrinsically and not because its useful or good for something else—then a civilizational order should be oriented around and for that. If there is one solid, confident position I want to have staked for today, that is it: If there is Good, that is what a civilizational order should be oriented around.
This follows from the very concept of what an ultimate or Highest Good is. If something is indeed a Highest Good, then that is what is best to try to realize, by definition. This would be true even to the extent that a ruling order should exist for the (instrumental) end of realizing this Highest Good. On top of individual human agents existing for the Highest Good in their own way, the role of the system of institutions, infrastructures and ideas that is sovereign over the social field would also be to till this field in such a way that the organisms in it tend toward realizing the Highest Good—because, again, it’s the Highest Good we’re talking about. It follows from that that the purpose of such a ruling order would be to ensure the happiness or well-being of individual humans only to the extent that a) such happiness is itself the Highest Good, or b) such happiness is necessary for realizing the Highest Good. A ruling order, an agent-complex with the fortune of great potency, can’t just leave the realization of the Highest Good up to whether or not individual human organisms want to act toward the Good—it is the charge of the order, by fiat of the very fact of the Good, to take charge as to actualize that.
For years, with ups and downs in dedication and productivity, I have been trying to answer this question. Everything that I have come to so far, however, has been colored by proceeding from one entry point from which this question becomes pertinent, that of existential risk, while ignoring all others. I was groomed young into caring about the end of the world; one of my earlier memories is that of my father having me join him to watch a 60 Minutes special on global warming—the exact year eludes me, but it was not earlier than 1996 and not later than 2002. I was of a single-digit age at the time, but in my twenties, my purview expanded to other ways we could all be wiped out: badly made artificial intelligence, pandemics, war, etc. For most people, it is enough to just sense that it would be bad if civilization collapsed—or worse—because of such factors, and so to act to prevent that. Along with action, though, I was possessed by the question(s): Why would it be so bad if the world ended? What is so good about the world’s existence that we should even care?
That is effectively an inquiry into the Ultimate Good. I was interested in what is an end-in-itself for which we want there to be a world. The answers that I came up with were of the domain of aesthetics: We want there to be a world so that there can be general aesthetic quality, or beauty, to apply a term that speaks to most people. Whether it’s the marvels of the “natural world” or the marvels of the “human world” or the simpler things about our lives that we consider beautiful in a deep sense—people that we love, our homes, etc.—I found that it was ultimately out of an aesthetic orientation that we find joy in and about the world. I saw connections between this orientation and a deeper, truer joy and purpose to individual being—ultimately leading beyond individuated being—than what is considered to make for a happy existence in modern life. I also found a way of explaining aesthetic quality at a metaphysical or ontological level that I do believe has big philosophical potential, and I found a way of explaining the Good via the prior connections about the subject that exists with an aesthetic orientation and the ontology of aesthetics. Such an orientation could also be a structuring principle for a different way of doing “politics” and organizing society as a whole, and spelling out the implications led to normative stances I’ve taken regarding governance and culture.
However, through all of this, I ignored some things, both theoretically or transindividually, and practically, for my own self, the one that I couldn’t help but keeping calling “me” and identifying with. I wasn’t taking seriously the reality that I have an itch. Or a thirst. “Thirst,” which is the literal translation of trishna, rather than “desire,” which it is more commonly translated as in the context in which it most comes up: As the central factor, in Indian philosophy, underlying suffering (dukha). I kept on writing about how an existence that wills the existence of a world of great beauty is the best existence and makes for the best world, but with my prior conceptual armamentarium, I was not able to square this desire with the insight, which I had also felt for myself, that worldly investment is also the best (and maybe only) way to suffer in life.
And suffer I have, because I couldn’t get rid of my own thirst—including for what I want to do with my work with ideas, both in terms of developing them and in terms of facilitating their having an impact. This is a very human, even all-too-human, thirst to have, and if it comes across as jejune or uncouth to specify it so plainly, it is because we have all been complicit in denying what Nietzsche would call our innate, definitive will-to-power. I certainly had. I would write about how the best existence is one in which one does things exclusively for their own sake (as something separate from one’s own sake)—and the more I wrote about these things, the more I would deny the part of my psyche that wanted things (also) as a matter of “me”—for the agency, comfort and “success” that they would hopefully bring me. Indeed, I had rendered such egocentric desires in pretty much pathological terms so far in my writings! Whatever the theoretical shortcoming this may or may not have brought to my ideas, the most significant effect of this was that I avoided honestly and fully feeling the comprehensive fire that I may have for this work, and as such, simply not being doing it as well as I would have liked. Ironically, my own inability to give my 100% to my philosophical work—i.e., with consistent vigor, intense dedication and sober, strategic prioritization of options—has led me to see shortcomings in that work itself. Now I am thinking a lot about the thirst for worldly success, and integrating it into a conception of the Good—if only because it may be impossible for this conception to be come to for an individual agent such as myself without giving space to it as a lived phenomenon, as something that I want. If it does have a place, though, that would have immense implications on all the rest that I have thought; hence, again, this blank slate.
The matter of the thirst for worldly success and happiness for “me” relates to the second great conundrum that I have been possessed by in the last few months, rendering me silent here for the most part: This is the issue of what kind of personal, private (in the sense of unrelated to one’s worldly or societal aspirations) existence is best, specifically in the context of figuring out how to orient oneself to pleasure, happiness, flourishing and excellence. This is another area that had no good treatment in the framework I’d built so far. Two things I had come to: That pleasure wasn’t in-itself related to the Good, and that an individual existence of excellence was an aesthetic phenomenon, and thus related to the Good. But this was disembodied thought, and it was largely meaningless until integrated with the question shrieking at the back of my mind that I yet ignored for years: “What about me!?”
That is, what about how I experience, in my actual life, giving into some indulgences on one hand, or living a disciplined and virtuous life on the other? The nature of that experience, does it not matter? It hadn’t in my framework so far; what mattered there was what could be appreciated for some quality from a third-person point-of-view; so while an excellent individual had a part in my framework, it was only as an aesthetic object; whatever there may be felt in and as that existence was of no interest or significance to me. So insofar as I have tried to live with integrity to my mission, to refuse to while away time and energy and rot my brain with all the sundry forms of masturbation, cheap dopamine, empty pleasure that are offered to us today, I haven’t done so because I like the experience of being better than that. It’s likely that my not having done as well as I perhaps can with my life and “career” is related to my segmenting away my own desire for the feeling of flourishing. I take my ideas very, very seriously after all. Not (necessarily) in a stuck-up sense, but at least in the sense that I really have believed in them, and have tried to live in accordance with them. As you may imagine, however, based on how I’ve now described things above, living in accordance with what I had come believe in basically entailed living a life without taking seriously my experience at the level of first-person existence, i.e., for what it actually felt like to me—in other words, an unintegrated and disintegrating, an ever-divided existence.
Things cannot go on like that forever, and so I have been compelled also to integrate subjective experience—what it feels like to live one way or another way—into my full picture of what the Good is and what a world oriented around it may be like. I have found—to what will perhaps be a great surprise only to me—that it may be impossible to meaningfully talk about that hunger, that animating zeal to do something amazing in and of the world—which I have discussed in terms of vitality or passion—without accounting for one’s own personal mission involved in and inseparable from the hunger for and toward that objective. It may not be possible to fully realize what is Good in an objective or “out there” sense without also realizing it “in here”, and realizing it “in here” may involve a process of learning how to live in truth and excellence.
Still, such integration is also complicated. There are two inherited philosophical problems that loom particularly large for me, both coming from the Indian tradition; I bring them up because they will likely color a lot of what gets published here in the short-to-medium term.
The first is related to the question of living a life of hedonism versus a life devoted to higher or valuable pursuits. One way in which I still think that pleasure pursued for its own sake is of no value, and even bad, is that by definition, it does nothing really for out-there reality, which for me is still a necessary component to a phenomenon of the Good. Its value is solely in the experience of it, in the positive feeling you get from it. Fairly pure forms of empty pleasure are (non-metaphorical) masturbation and sugar-binging, but the contemporary example that is most suited to this point is that of video games: Say you attain some victory in a video game; how does it matter? A lot of mental health problems that surround (excessive) gaming may have a lot to do with the fact that it’s a fantasy or illusion that comprises the scope of achievement, and once that inevitably ends, as it does, it all just feels empty. But that raises the question: How is achievement in this realm not empty? Isn’t phenomenal reality all just maya, illusion? What makes work done here more meaningful? And if there isn’t more fundamental meaning or an actual connection to the Good for works in this realm, what can legitimately stop one from choosing a masturbatory, fantasy life? What is bad about indulging in hollow pleasures?
The second question is that I’m not sure if and how worldly ambition and success is actually good. Or rather, I’ve now come to think about these things such that they are tentatively integrated into my conception of the Good, but now I’m just grating against the preponderance of ancient thought in a different way. Whereas first I ascribed Good to objective elements of phenomenal reality, which would be considered maya or illusion in Indian thought, I now have incorporated into this conception of the Good the state and the existence of striving for certain things whose ultimate nature may lack fundamental truth. How can that be good?
But it seems even the Indian tradition is not so sure whether such striving is in fact to be repudiated. All the Dharmic religions—“Hinduism”, Buddhism and Jainism—are united in asserting that it’s that deep-lying itch of some or the other kind that is at the root of our typical given state of suffering, and that coming out of the error of knowledge that worldly objects of our striving really matter is the way to come out of suffering. However, there is also a lot of valorization of this worldly realm that features throughout Indian culture. “Jay” and “Vijay” are common first names, both meaning “success.” Frits Staal notes that so much of the Rigveda is devoted to asking the gods for “long life, riches, sons, cattle and victory in battle” (Discovering the Vedas, Ch. 1). That didn’t end as Vedic society passed over into “Hindu” society; one of the mainstays of contemporary Hinduism, the Hanuman Chalisa, written in the 1500s but sung or listened to by millions and millions of people to this day, contains lines such as:
Aur Manorath Jo Koi Laave, Soi Amit Jivan Phal Paave.
One who comes to You with any longing or a sincere desire obtains the abundance of the manifested fruit, which remains undying throughout life.
(I’m using the Art of Living translation, which isn’t poetically well-done at all, but gets the message across.)
Ashta Siddhi Nau Nidhi Ke Daata, As Var Deen Janaki Mata.
You have been blessed by Mother Janaki to give boon further, to the deserving ones, wherein You can grant the siddhis (eight different powers) and the nidhis (nine different kinds of wealth).
Aur Devta Chitta Na Dharai, Hanumat Sei Sarva Sukh Karai.
Sankat Kate, Mite Sab Peera, Jo Sumire Hanumat Balbeera.
It is not needed to serve any other Deity or God. Service to Lord Hanuman gives all the comforts.
All troubles cease for the one who remembers the powerful lord, Lord Hanuman and all his pains also come to an end.
But then it also enforces the idea that wealth and comforts aren’t really the point, and what’s of ultimate value is liberation from worldly bondages and the realization of the divine:
Tumhare Bhajan Ram Ko Paave, Janam Janam Ke Dukh Bisraave.
When one sings Your praise, Your name, He gets to meet Lord Rama and finds relief from the sorrows of many lifetimes.
Jo Sat Baar Paath Kar Koi, Chutahi Bandhi Maha Sukh Hoyi.
One who recites this Chalisa a hundred times is released from all bondages and will attain great bliss.
So what gives? Should we seek to have our worldly desires fulfilled? Is it worthwhile to flail about in our bondage? Or should our one and only desire be to be freed from desire altogether? This dialectic—between expressions of thought and culture that grant a place to or even valorize material striving for what it does for ego-selves, and those that simply and purely encourage letting go of or praying for liberation from all ego-centric attachment or aversion—is also something I hope to explore a lot more.
But here is the situation as it stands anew: I want to figure out what the Good is and then do things with that figuring-out. I aspire to have a certain life as I do so and need to strategically and dynamically design that life. I also really don’t like being someone for whom immediate and/or meaningless gratification is a regular part of life. These are three problems—the first can be called the purely theoretical or philosophical problem, the second the personal-worldly and the third the personal-private. It took me far too long to realize this, but I can’t figure out what’s True or Right or Good purely theoretically without figuring out a plan for my life integrated with that pursuit, and without figuring out how to be True or Right or Good in my private existence and experience; I can’t figure out the practical steps I should take in my own life without knowing what is True or Good, and without figuring out what is the best way to live regardless of my specific passions and path; and, I can’t figure out how to just be a good person without figuring out how I should go about the remaining years in the world and without figuring out what is Good. In other words, all three have to be taken on together. The task is no less than to figure out what the Good is and what a sovereign order oriented around it would be, while figuring out what I will do to realize that, while figuring out what thirsts, hungers and itches are worthy and how to acquire the strength to direct energy to only those that are worthy.
Starting next week, I will be sharing some results of this process. Prior ideas that were central to the conceptual system I have been building, such as vitality, nobility, beauty, etc., will be reintroduced, but connected to a wider terrain of other ideas, with the implication such connection will bear on their core. It will be a slow labor, and I more than anyone will have to learn to be patient and refrain from trying to wrap everything up too soon. As you will see, there will be a new method of delivery I will inaugurate next week, one through which I can develop this edifice of ideas and words with circumspection, rigor and effectiveness. From what I have already done behind the scenes, I am fairly confident that it will yield a conception of the Good that accounts for a broader and deeper swathe of existence than what I had so far, which was limiting my own engagement with my work and my personal growth. As such, I hope it will not just be correct theoretically and useful personally, but also practically valuable for all those reading this—which for a project of philosophy is both the ultimate feat to accomplish, and, you would think, the bare minimum it could do.
Addendum (2023-07-02): I am also starting a YouTube channel in which I will be presenting the ideas given in each Vichara in distilled form, giving an overview of the major points I’m making in a particular installment to the overall framework ideas and conveying the gist of that installment. I’ve made a video introducing the project—both the project in general, going along with this post, and the video-project—here:
If you like this and future videos, please do (also) subscribe to the YouTube channel.