Tag: Nature

Moon is sun: Storm meditation

Andrew Taggart

An opening revealing moon in morning. Sun is moon and fog is distance. Wind churning, churning world, sun returning as moon. Moonwinds churn, turning earth, returning in thickness, white luminescence.

Sitting, breathing, enveloped, revealed. Revealed? Revealing moon; revealing light, lavender, lavendered light: lightening lavender, paling hill.

A nature walk (An excerpt from Radiance)

Andrew Taggart

A short excerpt from Radiance: An Essay for Unsettled Time. The book is in progress.

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A nature walk is no easy thing. The mind wishes to attach itself to fond or tortured memories, the mouth to rupture solitude or its communion with coursing things. Or thoughts stretch in the direction of a goal for walking or stray in anticipation toward prospects and projects…

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On 3 moments of freedom

Andrew Taggart1 Comment

Let’s examine a few different conceptions of freedom in hopes of arriving, in the end, at where we began.

In his famous essay, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt states, “According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants to do.” This conception of freedom seems to make sense of a child’s experiences in which he does what he wants to do and it would seem that so long as he does what he wants to do he is satisfying his desires. He wants to go outside and play and he does; he wants a treat and he grabs a cookie; he wants to draw and he starts drawing. And it would seem also that he is unfree in cases where what he wants he does not do (e.g., he wants to but does not get to go outside to play in the rain) and in cases where he does not want what he ends up doing (e.g., he does not want to eat vegetables but ends up eating them anyway).

If doing what one wants to do just is freedom, then what are we to make of an adult’s experience of doing what he should do despite the fact that he does not want to do it? It would seem that this is precisely freedom, for in these cases I am not motivated by my desires but by my reasons. I may perform my filial duty to care for my ailing father who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s despite my desire to go out to dinner with my friends. I reason that what I should do takes priority over what I want to do in cases where I am responsible for others, where I ought to fulfill certain duties, and where it would be right for me to restrain my inclinations in the face of higher demands.

The danger in the first conception of freedom is that one never grows up because one is unable to recognize the claims of others. Yet the trouble in this second conception of freedom, it seems, is that I may end up doing typically or only what I should do, never or rarely what I want to do, with the result that I am torn between my duties and my pleasures. It may seem as if I have left, so to speak, my self behind. What now?

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We could regard these first two conceptions of freedom as moments in the itinerary of our spirit. The first conception cues us into what we want. The second conception suggests that what we want may not be ultimate or determinative: that we may need to learn to see other reasons for acting if we want to grow into ourselves. But, by my reckoning, the latter cannot be the final stage of consciousness since it may bring us to exhaustion. Instead, we would need to return to the first conception of freedom and ask: Could it be that freedom just is doing what I really want to do with this “really wanting to do” meaning that I have broadened my set of considerations to such an extent that I am going again along with the way?

To see how this might go, let’s consider an example of someone who thinks in terms of thinness. In the first moment, I might ask, What is it I want?

A: I want to be thin.

I could then live out a conception of freedom in which I was doing what I wanted to do in making myself thin. Later on, I might come to an awareness that I want things that I should not want. Then, in the second moment, I might ask, What should I be doing if what I want is to be thin?

A: I should, e.g., count calories, restrain myself, exercise X many hours, hire a personal trainer and life coach, etc.

In this moment, we have been introduced to the stern voice. The stern voice (the ought) commands the servile voice (desire) to execute certain tasks. This moment of consciousness is crucial because it brings us to an awareness of our self-division, strife, and tiredness. Our freedom according to this conception rests on rejecting or renouncing some part of ourselves, on some stern performance of the will on behalf of something higher.

Out of exhaustion and during a moment of insight, we can ultimately return to the first question, which is now properly reformulated: when I examine myself, what do I really want?

A: What I really want is to be at home in my body when my body is actually flourishing.

Once we can figure out what this means, we will know what it is involved, in a different key, in doing what I want to do or–what is the same thing–in living according to nature.

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The summary of the inquiry could run:

1. What do I want?

2. What should I do when I want the wrong thing?

3. When I say I want…, what do I really, ultimately want?

How many ways have we learned not to awaken? Reflections on the use of metaphors for Superstorm Sandy

Andrew Taggart

A storm is no neutral thing. Can we count the metaphors? Before the later-named Superstorm Sandy struck the eastern seaboard, journalists reported of citizens bracing. As it churned and grinded, cities like New York were summarily bashed, battered, pummeled, punched (as in packing a…), pounded (e.g., into submission). In the aftermath, the city, though burdened, is recovering, with businesses back and running and commuters returning to work. Everyone is slowly return to normal, to business as usual, to their everyday lives.

What, philosophically, is at stake? According to the Kantian philosopher Susan Neiman in her excellent book Evil in Modern Thought, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 marked a passage into modernity. As the earthquake struck and decimated the city, it raised anew and with especial rawness the problem of evil, with some Christian theologians tracing “natural evil” back to “moral evil” and many Enlightenment apologists rejecting this ‘superstition.’ This event, the former said, was the result of man’s sins and hence was a sign of God’s punishment. However, this medieval synthesis between natural and moral evil–or, more generally, between the natural order and the man-made order–was severed when Enlightenment thinkers held more convincingly that the natural order was value-neutral while the human order was value-laden.

This argument ushered in a new way of experiencing. During the rise of mechanism, nature would come to function solely according to physical laws, leaving room only for human beings to be purposive agents. (For more on this line of thought, see my “Following Nature’s Course,” Dark Mountain: Issue 3.) Consequently, events such as Sandy would be figured as “natural disasters” and thus would have no moral significance and, apart from ‘what to do’ and ‘what is to be done in the aftermath,’ would come to bear no relation to the moral life.

The joke about Sandy is that nature is re-animated, only to keep us asleep. (Thoreau: “To be awakened is to be alive.”) The metaphors journalists use to describe Sandy presume that nature has human-like qualities. In this regard, their descriptions are more ‘poetic’ than value-neutral. According to this story, human beings, so often the masters of nature, are here the victims of a massive force that is beyond their control and that inflicts upon them great suffering, possible punishments. Hence, a more animistic account of natural forces returns during such moments.

The joke goes further, however, due to the fact that ‘the technical’ quickly closes most people off from philosophical inquiry into the question of what matters most. By technical, I mean, for instance: whether levies should be built, how the clean-up can be made more efficient, at what point power and subway service will be restored, which insurance companies will cover what, when will the public schools be reopened, etc. These, and others, are  ways of closing us off from–strategies of blinding us to–the individual and communal confrontation with mortality, human fragility, and (in this instance) the contingencies and hubris of industrial civilization. What is a proper relation between humans and the natural world? Of the Buddha Jaspers wrote that “all existence is suffering and the essential is redemption from suffering.”