Amy's Folly: I Think, Maybe, It Isn’t
My route into philosophy was more orthodox and gradual than my beginnings in farming. Even so, I can in hindsight see in it the seeds of my present discontent. In my first philosophy class, when I was but nineteen or so, we began with Parmenides. Parmenides is among those earliest of Greek philosophers and only spare fragments of his work survive. My professor explained Parmenides’ claim that “It is,” a deceptively simple bit of language meant to indicate an entire view of reality. By Parmenides’ reckoning, reality is a singular one, a unified totality, an “it” – a view philosophers would come to call monism. Understanding this, according to Parmenides, would constitute real knowledge, for it is only our fallible and mistaken senses that lead us to think the world a place of change, flux, and transformation.
It is hard for me to be certain now, but I think at nineteen, I did understand the view Parmenides was after. However, I was not easy with it. I had been a high school dropout and then a college dropout, and was just then finding my way back to formal learning. I had never yet spoken out loud in any college class, but this business of Parmenides ruptured, finally, my silence. “How did he live?” I asked. My professor responded, with admirable patience but some confusion, that Parmenides taught, debated, and dialogued with other philosophers. I interrupted, “Yes, but how did he live?” The professor next made some remarks that showed his patience wearing thin, gesturing at all we do not know and the likelihood that Parmenides lived like any other Greek. I did not ask again, and soon learned that this is not really the sort of question well-suited to the academic study of philosophy.
When I first began at it, I expected that philosophy should do something to you, that if you labor after ideas, those ideas should, somehow, make an alteration – whether that be to help one thrive, to endure life’s travails, to see and understand more, or even just to appreciate our mortal human limits and develop some sense about where and what those are. I wanted Parmenides to have some mode and manner of life vouchsafed by “It is.” I wanted to know what thinking this did to him. Not much, I gather, but that’s about what I suspected. His did not seem to be a view that could change much, given that it denied the reality of change itself. Even so, back then I had the naïve sense that once a philosopher arrived at his conclusion – his Big Idea, so to speak – that would then govern all for him, transform his life into whatever wisdom is. Even as I have stayed with philosophy for years and never asked it again out loud, the question stuck around. How does one live? Now that my days as an academic philosopher are numbered, I have come back to ask it one last time.
Asking how a philosopher will live is asking about many things, and many things at once. One is asking, implicitly, about the power of ideas, about the will of one who seeks to wield them, about the nature of any contact between life and the sense we seek to make of it. As I asked it at nineteen, the question presupposed that there is something kin to wisdom that can make one different than the rest. Many of the ancients looked for this, or something like. From the Hellenistic Epicureans and Stoics to the Indian Vedic philosophers to the early Chinese Daoists and then to Buddhists of all sorts, philosophers sought ways to make a life that might better suit the one who lives it. All different in their particulars and the Big Ideas that they offer, all nonetheless promise their practitioners ways to tame and calm the upheavals of experience. One need not live as others do, hurled chaotically about by events that set one’s emotions and psychology careening. Wisdom come through study, practice, and reflection can confer the peace that so much of life would deny us. The models of this differ – some would have us lodging in a mental still point set apart from the roiling storms of experience, while others recommend the flex to flow along with whatever waves of change arise. Yet for all, the turmoil of emotions that beset others do not afflict the wise. Experience is tamed by insight, the wise guarded by the Big Idea. This was what many of the ancients promised, but few philosophers openly seek it now.
Contemporary philosophy has largely given up the hunt for Big Ideas of the sort the ancients sought. As human knowledge has increased, the scope of philosophy has contracted. Philosophy long ago gave up to the sciences, both natural and social, a lot of what it once addressed, and this is largely for the better. (It is far more useful to consult a biologist than Aristotle if you want to understand animals or, for that matter, women.) As our subject matter has contracted, so too have our methods and techniques, and the results that we expect. Rather than hunt for the Big Idea, far less wisdom, we seek lesser forms of sense – that is, to make some sense of a world now carved into far smaller pieces. Progress in this style is marked in small increments and there is good that can be said of this. At least we philosophers now see more of just how vexing a place the world can be. Rather than sum it up with any Big Idea, we chip away at it and do not try to tame it all once. How do philosophers who practice philosophy in this way live? This is a question I can answer well enough since I have been one.
There is of course an entire specialized domain of human inquiry, sociology, devoted to assessing how particular human populations live, so if we want a reliable and informed account of the philosophers, we’d have to ask a sociologist. But if I wanted to answer the question in the spirit that I asked it at nineteen, I think I’d tell my younger self that the philosophers nowadays live akin to those who are passionate scrapbookers. Hobby and craft stores feature aisles upon aisles of material for creating fantastically elaborate scrapbooks. No more sticking your family photographs into a shoebox or gluing them onto stiff paper pages in a dime store photo book. Now there are special papers, stickers, labels, stamps, and all manner of embellishments. Avid scrapbookers can produce a family record of events bearing excruciatingly detailed decoration and flourish, each page distinct in theme or motif, each a collage of different colors, scripts, and textures. Of course, even the most avid scrapbooker isn’t always at it. They pursue their passion alongside all the rest of life, making meals, running errands, or idling on the couch. So it is for philosophers.
All human beings have and value both memory and reason. Some just take this having and valuing well past what is usual. Scrapbookers turn memory into a special project; philosophers do the same with reason. Both can naturally be obnoxious with it, as, say, when a scrapbooker eyes a present, living scene for how she might turn it to account upon a page or when a philosopher can’t enjoy a casual banter because he’s too busy unearthing and announcing banter’s unstated premises. Such is to say that for both, the passion and its special preoccupations may overtake one’s capacity to enjoy other of life’s goods. Both also share a kind of taming impulse. Both seek to lend an uncommon order to things, to what we want to keep in recollection or what we want to understand. And both construct the order that they seek in quite small increments, the scrapbooker capturing life page by slow page, the contemporary philosopher “contributing to the literature” likewise. Like a scrapbooker, a contemporary philosopher lives with a devotion to something broad and general in a way that is quite specific and intricate, even perhaps baroque. And for the most part, the wider contours of life beyond this devotion go on for him as they go on for others. This at least is how I have come to think of my profession. It has settled into something less like questing after wisdom and more like a reliably rational, if sometimes neurotic, routine for making small sense.
Of these modes of philosophy, the ancient and the new, I am most tempted by the ancient. But I have grown skeptical of an impulse that they in common share, the impulse to tame and order. I oppose neither wisdom nor the more modest effort to make some sense. Yet my only Big Idea is that there is, for me at least, no Big Idea that makes an alteration, no singular way to tame the biggest troubles. My own smaller form of progress making sense amounts to knowing when some sense cannot be made or, put more precisely, when the effort to divide a problem into smallest parts will miss the problem altogether.
The most striking element in philosophy that speaks to bereavement, and the one I count most useless, is that it is written mostly by those for whom the mess of loss has passed, if mess it ever was for them. It operates at best in a kind of retrospective, with all the aching turmoil now dissipated into order. Any confusions or agonies that might appear pose but as problems described because a “solution” will be soon delivered. The philosophers who write on loss do so mostly when they have an answer in the offing. Philosophy about loss is not unique in this – philosophy gets written when, and seemingly only when, the philosopher has worked things out, when the problem has been tamed. To find philosophers visibly uneasy in their sorrows, you have to look where biography can rupture up the “wisdom” – to Confucius, say, cursing heaven and collapsing into weeping when his beloved, best student dies; to Zhuangzi interrupting all his clever insight to cry over his dead wife; to Lucretius seeming just to lose his mind as he describes the horrors of a plague; to Montaigne melancholically aching for a friend, Cicero for a daughter, Seneca briefly for a friend. These are the bits of the philosophers that I most like, but they don’t much pass for what we lately call “philosophy,” if they ever did. They rarely receive any notice, but if they do, they’re taken as but some fragmentary chaos, oddities one passes on the way to cleaner wisdoms, that tidy stuff to offer up some hope that we have worked things out.
Seeking to wrest sense from confusion is, as a general matter, a human art we rightly prize. It is helpful and important to tame the wilds, to map ways to pass through danger, to chart with reason ways to not get lost. Yet clarity and answers can also be a kind of vice. This happens when our answers are too facile or too fluid. It happens when our answers are abstruse, lifted out into abstractions not enough like life, or intricate in arcane mental “moves” that the stiff joints of real experience cannot make. These are vices well attested and often recognized, even by we who likely make them most. But another sort might be more basic still, trying to solve what maybe we cannot. Or, perhaps more exactly still, it might be the case that the richest of confusions are things to live alongside, not to solve.
During the first year and half of the pandemic, I lived on my farm, helping out my parents, teaching my students online, and retreating to the woods when I needed most just to escape. In all of this, I was joined by a stray dog who had some years prior been dumped at a homeplace up the way. For reasons only he would know, he took me up as his. Dog – for so a neighbor named him and in a way that stuck – became my nearest companion for weeks stretched into months and then well out beyond a year. When I was outdoors, he was always with me; when I was indoors, he waited sentry on the porch. Some mix of Great Pyrenees and a bit of Saint Bernard, Dog was an enormous creature. He was a companion of an order I have never found before, nor am I like to do again – he, my shadow and protector, my familiar and my sometime muse. But despite our long acquaintance and companionship, he was also always, and ever would be, a creature of the wild. As my husband aptly put it, it was as if I had been befriended by wolf. For a dog that has lived by its wits as long as Dog had by then done is not a one that may be tamed.
However mild Dog might sometimes pose or even be, the feral never left him. I saw him kill armadillos, beavers, rabbits, groundhogs, and once, a grown coyote. In case it is not clear, a dog that can kill a coyote is a fearsome wonder of a beast – one who has not just an uncommon potency of jaw and muscle, but instinct and courage to inspire awe. What such a dog is not, however, is a creature one can make entirely one’s own. You may befriend and keep company, but to domesticate him, if indeed it could be done, would be to betray some ineluctable brute, raw beauty that is his. More to the point, should you somehow come to think you’d pulled this off, you would almost certainly be wrong, and perhaps dangerously so. The wild can be subdued for a time, but wild will out.
In the pandemic months I spent with Dog, I could not do philosophy. Life entire seemed to have gone wild. So I did instead whatever else was near to hand, and that mostly amounted to retreating for long hours in the woods with Dog. I have never yet drawn any firm conclusions from this time, but I have come to suspect that some of what is best in thinking, and in living, comes not out of, but inside a fundamental chaos, when you give up forcing things to take a shape and let them be just as they are. Not all that is wild wants sorting out.
I am still, at least officially and on paper, a philosopher. How do I live? By the seat of my pants and in sometimes roaring confusion. My confusions are feral. They are not a thing to tame without a cost, without some reduction of their nature, so brute yet finely fierce that nature be. This is why I find no consolation in most philosophies that seek to offer some. I can’t help but think that they mistake the wild for the tame, or seek to tame the wild where they ought not. As if death is yet another animal to bring to heel with reason, they seek to put a collar on the neck of loss, to contain raw sorrow with a leash, to make a pet of grief. They treat as problem something that I come to think is not. If I were really going to write a book on grief – one that really talked of grief and not about the concept – I would need to set the dog of loss off leash, try to make philosophy not fix, but live alongside what is feral. If you will want some wisdom, don’t believe that stuff about ponderous, bearded men in togas deep in concentrated reflection. Sometimes it can just as easily be a wild dog that follows you around.[1]
[1] Apologies to Hemingway and his bicycle policemen.
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