Category Archives: philosophy

The End

I started this blog in April 2007, on Blogger, titled “A Writer Reads.” Over the last five years, among a lot of extraneous posts, I’ve written some 50K words about several hundred books, mainly fiction, approaching each as a writer—what is the book about? Why is it interesting, craft-wise? Where does it fit in the literary tradition?

But now the blog’s purpose has come to an end, both this blog for me as a writer and the blog in general as a cultural technology. I appreciate the readers who have stopped by over the years, and invite anyone who likes to keep in touch with me via email: jonsealy [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Blogging as social media

Things happen fast online. In 2007, Web 2.0 was a new phenomenon. Blogs were on the rise at an exponential rate. Social media existed (Facebook’s NewsFeed was launched in 2006), but connecting online was still novel. Blogs served a kind of social media function.

Jumping on the bandwagon, a number of graduate school friends and I created our blogs and posted our thoughts and commented on each other’s pages. It was a network, and we were linked by the  “blogroll.”

Since then, several things have happened. Twitter (launched in 2006) became mainstream; Facebook granted more control over your wall so that your Facebook page could serve the same function as blogs had in 2007; and a number of other social media sites emerged, including Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Each of these forums offers a better way to connect, socially, than a blogroll or an RSS feed.

Perhaps most importantly, mainstream media got on board the bandwagon. Sites such as Forbes and The Atlantic have great blog content, to say nothing of all-online forums like The Millions and The Rumpus. Online content has exploded to the point where we need filters. The role of mainstream media is to filter out us masses. Individual blogs, now, are like sparks firing in a wide and lonesome universe.

‘A Writer Reads’

Back on Blogger, I titled this blog “A Writer Reads.” I was in graduate school, in my apprenticeship years, and all the best writers I talked to said the same thing, that the secret to being a good writer was to read a lot and write a lot. In those years, I’d set a regimen to read 100 pages and write 1,000 words each day, at least five days a week.

Having a blog to report to was a way to keep me on task, and over the years I’ve thought of it as being my version of Henry James’s Notebooks. Now I’ve got a library of books in my living room, and since starting this blog, I’ve completed three novels, one novella, and a book’s worth of short stories. Some of the stories have been published, and I’m shopping around one of the novels.

In short, reading and writing have become habit for me, and I think I’ve graduated from my apprenticeship years, at least as much as any writer ever does. If you follow blogs regularly, you know that unless the focus is current events, blog-writers eventually run out of content. I could keep writing about books I’m reading, but it would be more of the same, and I feel my time is better spent elsewhere.

Contact

One reason I moved from Blogger to this website is because an editor once left me a comment saying she liked one of my stories she’d read elsewhere. I stumbled on that comment by chance many months later and sent her a story and an apology for not responding sooner.

Her magazine took my story, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any other opportunities. I’m building my freelance business now, and I’m in still in what I’m calling the “look at me” phase. I’m marketing myself and trying to land clients. Right now I have some weeks of 75% work and 25% marketing, and other weeks of 25% work and 75% marketing. I suspect I’ll eventually be doing mostly work and occasional marketing.

So too as a fiction writer. I’m sending “look at me” letters to agents, trying to sell a book, but if all goes according to plan I’ll eventually be on the bookshelves rather than in my cyber-sandbox. But until then, my plan is to create a static home page for this site and archive the blog for the search engines until I have a book coming out.

Final comments

Check out this article in The Atlantic about Facebook making us lonely. The writer starts with an anecdote about a B movie star who died and wasn’t found for nearly a year. Her network had grown wide and shallow.

On Facebook, we accumulate friends from all the nooks and crannies of our lives, but with several hundred connections, I believe it’s impossible to sustain anything meaningful. My recent posts there mainly have been links to interesting articles elsewhere, and when I log in I mostly do so to find some interesting meme, such as Texts From Hillary. A wide network, shallow connections.

The internet is full of such trends, sparks that flare briefly and fade just as fast—a Tweet, an infograph, a blog post. Trying to create a more sustained fire might be anachronistic, but in response, I’d quote the epilogue to Blood Meridian, which seems to be about a Gnostic hero carrying the fire in the face of an indifferent world:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

My wife says I’m a pessimist about humanity’s future, though I might argue it’s an act of radical optimism to attempt to make lasting art in today’s culture. With that thought, I’m off to the desert to try to make fire.

Kierkegaard: An Introduction

This book by C. Stephen Evans does a good job of introducing Kierkegaard’s life and philosophy in clear terms to someone who doesn’t have a deep background in philosophy. Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher from the 19th century, is important for his contributions as a theological thinker and a philosopher, and one reason I’m interested in him because he combines two philosophic strands that interest me: Naturalism (the idea that we’re determined by forces beyond our control, especially biology) and Existentialism (the idea that we are defined by and responsible for our actions). As a Christian philosopher, Kierkegaard’s central idea is that we’re created by God as a species (subject to certain biological roles) but that we’re endowed with the freedom to create our individual selves. Furthermore, we have a duty to develop our selves in a certain way, according to our natures. Some key takeaways:

  • Spheres of Existence: As I wrote below, Kierkegaard has this idea that we live in three separate stages or spheres — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic sphere is characterized by the “here and now,” by sensory satisfactions and immediate desires. In the ethical sphere, we attain consciousness of a higher purpose, a duty to develop our selves. In the religious sphere, we progress even further and recognize our distance from God and seek to close that gap. I’m not totally clear on the difference between the ethical and religious spheres.
  • Subjectivity: One of Kierkegaard’s key lines is, “Truth is subjectivity.” It seems like he does believe in an objective Truth, but that for Truth to have any meaning it requires a subject to acknowledge it. Because I’m cooking up some connection between Kierkegaard and the Internet, a way I’m understanding this is that the Internet exists objectively, but a subject has to connect before it has any meaning. A converse idea from Kierkegaard is that “Subjectivity is Untruth,” meaning, I think, that there is an objective Truth. You have to dial into the Internet, rather than just say, “I’m online.” Truth exists outside of the subject, but Truth requires a subject to have any meaning. As I’ll go into in another bullet, Kierkegaard is big on the individual, and one way to move from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere is to step away from the pack, rather than simply following others. (Think about inane “sophisticates” who pass off as their own opinions they read in the news, rather than having original thoughts of their own. Kierkegaard would encourage them to get a life.)
  • Faith: Because Kierkegaard’s thought is rooted in Christianity, his is a philosophy of faith. He tends to believe that we learn the way Socrates teaches, by being shown what we already know. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but it seems like he believes the source of faith is ultimately divine, i.e. not something we can be taught. From Evans’ book, it seems faith is linked to the idea of moving from the aesthetic sphere to the religious sphere, of becoming an individual self. Also woven into the mix is the idea of God incarnate as man, which Kierkegaard calls the Absolute Paradox (another thing to accept on divinely inspired faith).
  • Despair: I’m on more familiar terrain here. For Kierkegaard, there seems to be two kinds of despair — a weak, passive despair in which an individual is not trying to develop as an individual. This is the most common kind of despair, the despair of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. It’s also the despair that comes from consumer distraction, and from being a societal follower rather than an individual, or from being a copy rather than an original. I think Kierkegaard would have a field day with Facebook, which is one giant community where the object is to participate and blend in. In many ways, I think, Facebook is epitome of the aesthetic sphere, whose purpose is to keep us in despair. I’m not the only one who thinks this. A second type of despair, according to Kierkegaard, is a despair from defiance, from willing yourself into becoming a false self. I’m not totally clear on how this despair works, though I can see it might have an influence on Camus. Evans is firm in the view that Kierkegaard does not believe in “radical choice,” as the Existentialists do, but we do apparently have the ability to defy our true selves. Someone should write a paper about the despair from defiance and Milton’s Satan.

Walker Percy and despair

I’ve been doing some reading Walker Percy. Last night I read Linda Whitney Hobson’s Understanding Walker Percy, a great place to gain some basic biographical details and an introduction to Percy’s philosophical framework. I’ve been meaning to read up on Kierkegaard for a few months now, and may have to after this book. From Hobson’s book, Kierkegaard had this idea for three spheres of being — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In the aesthetic sphere, we’re in despair because of the meaninglessness of everything, but we might not realize we’re in despair. In the ethical sphere, we understand the meaninglessness but strive to live an ethical life anyway, stoically accepting it. In the religious sphere, we’re knights of faith striving to overcome the despair. (I’m not totally clear, but I think that’s the gist of Hobson’s synopsis.)

In terms of Percy, Binx Bolling is living in the aesthetic sphere. He’s a consumerist, and he moves from one secretary to the next, and he drives an MG, all in an effort to stave of the “malaise” of the “everyday.” These moves are a series of “rotations,” to use Kierkegaard’s term, an effort to avoid confronting the despair. But he is jolted out of his complacency and renews his efforts at “the search,” in which he becomes the knight of faith. He knows he’s been participating in rotations and now is willing to confront the truth.

The reason Percy speaks to us today is that our world has many more rotations to keep us from confronting the everydayness, the malaise, the despair: Facebook, blogs, cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle, video games, political histrionics, email surveys, retail VIP memberships, iPads, etc. So much stuff! And all of it keeps us distracted from any kind of spiritual questioning. Is it any wonder religion is an endangered species, carried on primarily by fringe lunatics with financial or political stakes? The real danger is that if we’re buried in the aesthetic sphere, what happens when the rug gets pulled out from under us? When the stocks crash or the housing bubble bursts? Then we see the facade for what it is, we get a glimpse of how fragile our worlds are and how we’ve been living in despair, and to deal with it we go crazy. That’s how the tea party forms. That’s why people blow up abortion clinics or have affairs or embezzle money from their employers. We perform risky behavior to serve some end, some manufactured meaning (to restore our nation’s finances or to restore morality or to get rich and pay off bills). Manufacturing some end, some meaning, is another rotation.

In many ways, the worldview of Percy shows up in DeLillo. Speaking about White Noise, DeLillo said he was trying to capture a “radiance in dailiness,” which seems very similar to this idea of rotations. The characters in DeLillo are distracted by the radiating media to the point where they become spiritual vacuums. It takes a disaster — an end-of-the-world-type scenario — for them to lift out of the malaise and rediscover life.

Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity

This book, published in the mid-’80s, is an analysis of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. I’m not sure how best to articulate Megill’s overall thesis, but he argues these thinkers constitute a direct line of thought in the way they respond to a cultural crisis, essentially the crisis of Modernism and Postmodernism. Megill posits that two ways of responding to crisis are nostalgia and futurism, both responses looking for a kind of utopia (either in the past or the future).

I didn’t really what the specific crisis was; rather, Megill points to a number of crises, including the expanding role of scientific determinism (and how that role poses a crisis to individual freedom?), the historical crisis (economic stagnation, wars, the downfall of religion), and, finally, the aesthetic and phenomenological crisis of the world-as-representation.

Megill argues that all four thinkers have a kind of aestheticism; they’re interested in art, and the constructed nature of art. Art creates a world, and Megill traces how in their writings, we have variations of the world-as-representation — art, language, discourse, text — and how the project of Modernism searches for the underlying reality, whereas the project of Postmodernism embraces the notion that there isn’t an underlying reality.

I have a limited, undergraduate exposure to these thinkers, so I can’t speak to the precision of Megill’s reading of these thinkers. He acknowledges at times that he’s reading them against the grain, and his presentation is rather logical, even though he says their philosophies at times defy logical cohesion. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in these thinkers, or in the projects of Modernism and Postmodernism. It’s a good book for artists, I think, because it gets you thinking about what exactly you’re doing with your art, which we don’t always do enough.

Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

If you’ve never read this book, it’s worth picking up. If you have read it, it’s worth picking up the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation so you can read Richard Pevear’s introduction. He positions Notes from the Underground as Dostoevsky’s answer to his idealogical rival, Chernyshevsky, a utilitarian socialist who supposedly inspired Lenin to become a revolutionary. Pevear reads Notes as both an idealogical answer to a rational utopia (people are passionate, and don’t always do what’s rationally best for them) as well as an artistic answer. For Chernyshevsky, the form of a novel is merely a vehicle for expressing content, whereas for Dostoevsky the content emerges from the form. Hence, the formal oddness of Notes: the reverse chronological structure, etc. The commentary about form and content brings to mind O’Connor’s thoughts on being a Catholic novelist. In Mystery and Manners, she argues the Catholic novelist shouldn’t use a novel as a mere vehicle to present Catholic content. Rather, whatever worldview you have (Catholic or otherwise) will emerge from the form, and your job as the artist is to get the form right. In her case, form meant close observation.

Notes is organized into two sections: (1) The narrator in the present, middle aged and disillusioned, and (2) the narrator in his 20s, awkward and idealistic. While the second part reminds me of myself at 18, the first part of the novel is more interesting. One of the more interesting passages is the anecdote of the toothache. The narrator explains he might enjoy having a toothache, and that people enjoy toothaches because it gives them something to gripe about. The anecdote illustrates our satisfaction with our discontents. You might think of Frank in Revolutionary Road, unhappy with his job but strangely satisfied with the status quo. His wife offers him a chance to get out, and he can’t take it. World literature, and human beings at large, are plagued by this condition, and that small anecdote is a great psychological insight on Dostoevsky’s part.

Brothers Karamazov: from the comments

Reader Caroline writes:

Would be very interested in unpacking issues of the center from existentialism through post-structuralism.

It’s been a while since I read about the post-structuralist life on a “decentered” planet, and I don’t know enough about existentialism to make too many claims, but there do seem to be a couple of whopping contradiction in an existentialist worldview. The nutshell version of Sartre’s philosophy seems to be this: “Existence precedes essence, therefore there is no story (such as God) that can take accountability for our actions. We are 100 percent responsible for ourselves and our actions, and to deny responsibility is philosophical cowardice.”

The contradiction is that Sartre wrote narratives — stories in the form of novels and plays — to dramatize this philosophy. I don’t really know what to make of that. I’d argue people are hard-wired to understand things in terms of narrative — be it a morality tale you tell your kid (“the boy cried wolf”) or a myth to explain God. So one existential project is to use a story to explain why stories should be suspect (and that’s one branch of the postmodern novel). Maybe that’s not a contradiction; maybe it’s more like offering someone McDonald’s and, while they eat, showing them graphic images of clogged arteries and obese flesh.

A second contradiction, that maybe isn’t inherent in the philosophy itself (because I’m not sure there is a coherent, fully-realized version of existential philosophy), is that the worldview that emerged in the 1940s was godless — there is no story, and there is no god to explain existence. But the emphasis on personal responsibility is very Republican, very conservative of them. A liberal Democrat’s job is to provide a story — “I was talking to a woman in South Carolina, who has three kids and her husband lost her job…” — to justify a social program, such as extending unemployment benefits. Sartre, certainly, must object to that.

Dostoevsky, while offering many contradicting dialogues, seems at his core a man who wants to believe in God, and a man who believes a Christian state is the only way to hold that center together. It would be interesting to pair him with Edmund Burke: Burke was mistrustful of the French Revolution because he felt once you broke the old guard, there would be nothing to prevent the new guard from being broken. Only by holding true to the old aristocratic mores, with backing by the church, could a state succeed.

It’s also interesting to consider this material in light of the current tea party movement. I was more concerned about them a few months ago, because I wouldn’t have put it past someone, during the height of the health care legislation, to take a shot at Obama. Part of it was media — the media was showing us images of tea party rage. But were they voices calling for reform or revolution? I wrote about that a while back, but it bears repeating under the Dostoevsky discussion because the past two years in American politics feel Dostoevskian.