14 Water

The Fourteenth Chapter,

in which you ask yourself

What should I do? 

Preparation

Required Reading: Baillie, “We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?” (Aeon)

Optional Reading: Kaag, “The greatest use of life” (Aeon)

Writing:

1. Baille talks about the “outside” versus the “inside” views. He also talks about “existential shock.”  What does he mean by these three terms? Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
2. An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Baillie’s thesis? What reason(s) does he provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
3. What is your immediate reaction to Baillie’s argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
4. Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: Should you spend more time thinking about your own death, or is that counterproductive to the pursuit of happiness and/or freedom? 

Introduction

“It is unimaginably hard to do this.” That’s what the author of this last reading says. It’s unimaginably hard to do what you’ve been trying to do here: to think about your thoughts, to engage with the thoughts of others, and to do it all in that special posture of the mind where you’re trying hard to get it right but staying relaxed about getting it wrong, and where you can’t even be sure that it matters whether you do this “unimaginably hard thing.” (After all, you might be happier if you just accepted life under the rules of Normal World, where the steak is delicious even if it’s not real.)

Of course it’s not “unimaginably hard” to read this book, to do these assignments, to complete this course. That’s just a Normal World challenge. That’s just philosophy as an academic exercise. Easier for some, harder for others. The real difficulty is to do philosophy as a way of life — “day in and day out.” To do philosophy outside the classroom, inside the real world (but the classroom is part of the real world: don’t forget that!).

And you know what? The people who are really good at doing their homework are sometimes really bad at living philosophically. And the people who are not so good at doing their homework often have the more philosophical attitude.

David Foster Wallace — the author you’re about to read — was extremely good at doing his homework. He was an extremely good philosopher. But really he was an essayist and a novelist. He liked stories better than arguments. Stories of lives, where people make choices, and do or don’t take responsibility for them; lives where people are thinking, or not thinking, paying attention or not paying attention; lives where people are more or less awake. But this piece isn’t a story, or an essay really. It’s a commencement speech. He’s talking to people who are finishing up their college degree. And what he’s talking about is — his words — “the real, no bullshit-value of your liberal arts education.” The point of it all. And you’ll see that the point of it all, in his view, is just to learn how to live like this — to live in this way that’s “unimaginably hard.”

Lots of things he talks about here should be familiar to you already. The idea of escaping normal world, getting out of your cave. The idea of aiming for freedom, or happiness, or both, and trying to understand what those words mean. The idea of freely choosing, and being responsible for your choices. The idea of paying attention. The problem of putting others in boxes, of being put in boxes, of how to get out of that cycle. The idea of slowing down your thinking, opening up the space between stimulus and response. It’s all here. Think of this piece as a conclusion, a capstone, a summary of the whole semester — and as an introduction to whatever comes next for you.

Discussion

What matters most is what’s hardest to see. That’s the point of the fish story — and the cave story, and the matrix story, and pretty much everything you’ve read and talked about so far. What matters most is what’s hardest to see. The water you swim in. The judgments you make in that split-second between the stimulus and the response. The assumptions behind your answers to the Big Questions. The shadows on your cave wall, box you’ve been put in, the slander that keeps you there. The ways you’ve been “nurtured,” disguised as your “nature,” to make you think you have no choice. The very things you want, the ideas you have about what will make you happy. All things that are hard to see. But not just to “see,” like it’s a one-time thing. Things that are hard to keep seeing, hard to keep in mind as you go about your day in Normal World. Maybe two young fish have some moment of insight. Philosophy can give you those kinds of moments. But then they probably go on swimming and forget about it. Insights are actually pretty easy to come by. There are lots of insights in this book. But a way of life informed by insight? A way of life in which you wake up every day and work hard to see what’s right in front of you, to keep it in your field of vision? That’s hard. Unimaginably hard.

Learning how to “think differently,” how to do philosophy — Wallace says it’s not about “virtue.” What he means is, it’s not about checking a box that makes you look like a good person, a happy person, a free person. That’s easy. (It’s also a matter of putting yourself in a box!) You can’t just accept the right argument, hold the right beliefs, follow the right rules, and voila, you’re thinking differently. If you do that — if you think philosophy is just about finding the Correct Answer and then accepting it — well then you’re not thinking differently at all, and you’re not doing philosophy. No: learning how to think differently is hard work. Forever. For the rest of your life.

This kind of hard work isn’t really “intellectual,” at least not if you use the term like it’s usually used. Weird to say, in a philosophy class, isn’t it? It’s not really about logic; it’s not really about reading a lot of hard books; it’s not about big words and technical terms and complicated ideas. It’s hard work; it’s not homework. Wallace says it’s actually just about paying attention. Philosophy can help you do that; it can “wake you up” with questions that shake your assumptions. But actually paying attention — well, lots of people who have never read any philosophy, or taken a philosophy course, or been to college at all, pay closer attention to the world than lots of professional philosophers and college graduates.

Paying attention is about choosing what you think about. If you don’t make a choice about which “features of the situation” to see, then your assumptions will kick in, you’ll make your judgment without noticing you did it, and you will react to situations in a way that seems “natural” to you, or in the way that seems “moral” to you — as if you don’t have a choice, but are just “doing what’s right.”

Paying attention is about choosing what you think about. Questions about assumptions can make you think about different things: it can make you see different things. And often the reason you never thought about those things before, the reason you didn’t see them, is because you didn’t want to.

The Israeli Novelist Amos Oz tells a story that makes this point pretty clearly. In Israel, where the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is very fraught, everyone has an opinion. And apparently cab drivers will share their opinions pretty freely. One day, Oz was riding in a taxi with a fellow novelist when the cab driver announced that the solution to the conflict was just to kill all the Palestinians.

Why was the novelist “cruel”? Because he made the taxi driver see. His questions showed him a whole bunch of other “features of the situation” that he didn’t want to see. The novelist didn’t make an argument. He just made the driver pay attention. That’s what philosophy at the root really does. It makes us pay attention.

Now for Wallace, it’s not so much about whether one choice or another is the correct choice — although there are better and worse choices, as the story about the taxi driver seems to show. It’s more about being aware: about being “awake,” like Thoreau talked about. It’s about making a choice, consciously, taking responsibility for your choice, realizing that even when you think you are just “reacting naturally,” you are always choosing, deep down, and that you just prefer to forget that you are choosing, because then you don’t have to take responsibility for it, and you don’t have to do the hard work of choosing. You can pretend that “the choice is made for you.” You can pretend that there’s a Correct Answer to the trolley problem, or to the Palestinian Problem, and that when you pull the lever, you’re not really acting “freely,” you’re just following the rules that some philosopher set up for you. You’d rather pretend, because it’s easier that way. It feels . . . happier. But Wallace wants you to be free. Not happy.

Still, Wallace is really clear that just because you are free too choose, doesn’t mean you are free to decide what will happen to you as a result of your choice. The work of your life, the work of a philosophical life, is to see that you are free, to stop pretending otherwise, to keep you freedom in the front of your mind, to keep paying attention to what’s right in front of you. But once you see that you are free to choose, you also see that all your choosing is a matter of “worshiping,” as he puts it. You’re always choosing for the sake of something. Whatever that is, is what you worship.

So you can choose what to worship; but you can’t choose whether to worship. And that means your choices can be better and worse. Because some of the things it’s possible to worship will “eat you alive,” while others will nourish you, and help you to live a rich, fully life. Think of Simone Weil; you can choose to study for the sake of learning itself, and that helps you to live well; but you can also choose to study for the sake of grades, or jobs, or whatever. And those external incentives, those carrots and sticks — those are the kinds of things that eat you alive, if you worship them.

The thing is, Normal World — the cave you live in — doesn’t care if you “life well.” Normal World wants you to live for the sake of the grades and the jobs. Normal World is a system of incentives; it doesn’t work if people don’t worship the incentives. It doesn’t work if people embrace their freedom to choose what they think about, because that means people might not think about the carrots and sticks. It doesn’t work if people build up their ability to see the hidden features of the situation that make the whole situation what it is — the child in the basement, the “nurture” disguised as “nature,” the manufactured desires disguised as instincts, all the rules that people confuse with “the way things have to be.” Things could be different. We are free to choose, individually and by working together. We can be “co-workers in the kingdom of culture.”

Normal World does work if you confuse getting free from Normal World — where you aren’t even aware of the water, aren’t even aware that you’re in a cave, in a prison — with getting the freedom to do whatever you want, like the shepherd with the ring. That kind of freedom is part of Normal World, part of the cave itself. That’s why Wallace doesn’t stop with the idea of “choosing what you think about,” as if the pure freedom to choose is enough. If all you’ve got is pure freedom to choose (“a world without boundaries, without rules and controls”), then you’re free to jump off a building. That’s a  delusion. This is why the part about “worshiping” is so important. You’re not free to not worship. You’re always worshiping something.

Philosophy doesn’t free you from the need to “worship.” It frees you from the illusions that keep you from seeing what you’re worshiping, that keep you from seeing what else you might worship, and that keep you from choosing that “something else.” That something else that might actually bring real happiness.

Real happiness — whatever that is. Real freedom — whatever that is. (You must define your terms. You must change your life.) That’s what you’re after, as you wander around this Unknown City. That’s what you’re “walking away” toward. That’s what “doing philosophy” — as opposed to learning some philosophical terms, solving some logic problems, reading some books — is really about.

And that’s what’s “unimaginably hard” to do. So here is the kicker, the thing that will drive that point home. This work, the work of paying attention, of choosing what to think about, is so hard to do that even the best fail. Even the ones most committed to the philosophical life get tired and drop out.

Remember what Wallace said, about the mind being a wonderful servant but a terrible master? About how suicides often shoot themselves in the head, because they’re trying to kill the terrible master?

Do you know what happened to David Foster Wallace?

So yeah: this is really hard work. Unimaginably hard work.

Ready?

But wait. Read this poem first. Again.

Reflection

1. Connect at least three ideas from “This is Water” to at least three other texts. Choose any idea except “water,” which serves as the example -“water” obviously connects to “cave” and “matrix.” Write one paragraph for each idea. Write at least 250 words.
2. Follow the link at the end of the chapter and explain here what happened to David Foster Wallace. How did you react to learning this about him?