19/05/25
the need for the spiritual I had never liked Simone Weil much, until I read her letters to Father Perrin. The desperate reaching for an ideal that she feels too inadequate to grasp. The incessant need to talk of herself, even when she feels she mustn't--“it is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.” And yet...

The self-regarding concern is unavoidable. To feel that one is not living as one should, to feel destined for a life that one might never accomplish, to feel so uniquely inadequate. A subtle form of torture inflicted upon the self. It is so easy to look upon others and think that they have that inner force or insight one lacks. 

There are some, Weil says, who possess the natural purity of the soul; “as for me, on the contrary, as I think I told you, I have the germ of all possible crimes, or nearly all, within me.” A reverse egoism that haunts all Dostoevsky protagonists too--the thought of being uniquely troubled, uniquely inadequate, or uniquely evil.

This explains the hold that spiritual surrender has had on our collective imagination. The idea of letting go, of becoming an instrument to one who knows the end goal. “There are times when I am tempted to put myself entirely in your hands and to ask you to decide for me,” Weil writes, “but, when all is said and done, I cannot do this. I have not the right.”

A part of this might be the existentialist insight of taking responsibility for one’s own life. But a part of it is beyond the secular: we are all destined for different things. It is on us to discover our own destiny. This is where spirituality becomes necessary; to feel that one belongs to something greater, to be able to return to that feeling as reassurance in our rituals. The loss of that is the great fear of the believers, that of being forsaken.

18/05/25
samurai and moral ambitionAt the end of Seven Samurai, after the battle is won with great difficulty, the leader of the samurai still declares them defeated. It is the farmers’ victory to celebrate, but they stand before the graves of those who were lost. They lost.

It is unclear what it would have taken for them to win. 

It is naive to think that all of them surviving would be enough for this to be a victory. To rid the village of the bandits would still be the victory of the farmers, more so than the samurai. The farmers are the ones who got to hold onto their way of life, whose lives have been affected. The samurai continue as before, with nothing to show for it. They won in a superficial sense, the way you might win at a game. But the more significant forms of victory are only enabled once your life can actually be touched by what was at stake. The samurai is always too distant, too non-committal. They may be virtuous, but their lives are empty because they have no home, family, community. Their lives are defined by moments of stepping into the lives of others. They might bring about good, but it is always good for another, not for themselves. It is like a doctor who goes from village to village to heal patients. He himself is not been healed in the process.

The relentless saviors often fall into this trap. Imposing oneself on another’s life as a way of gaining meaning. There is something quite cowardly about it: you never bother to pursue meaning for yourself, or to build a life around that amorphous thing that is so impossible to retain. You go for the easier thing: always operating in others’ value frameworks, solving the problems that they have identified for themselves, and getting by on the feeling of mattering that comes from it. Interpersonal meaning can come cheap, when you amass a grateful crowd.

This is, at the same time, a very uncharitable take on the do-gooders in the world. It is not a bad thing to want to help, but if help is all you do, it quickly becomes pathological. And the difference between the hero and the pathological savior might be that the hero is called to action, whereas the latter went out searching for it, one after the other. When people go out of their way to help, there is something genuine about it. When help is all they want to do, there is a question about the selfish gain from the hand they extend.

This is maybe why “moral ambition”, as is being pushed for recently, is different than courage. The courageous person responds to a situation that requires action. What does the morally ambitious one respond to? If it is the desperate situation we see around the world, that might be fine. But when you pursue the life of the secular missionary just so you don’t have to feel bad about your life... That certainly is something else. 

14/05/25
public and politicalHow much does politics have to be a part of our lives? Is it a necessary evil we ideally cast off to elected officials, or something that can actually contribute to our individual lives?

Part of it depends on how we define the political. One straightforward way is to think of the domain of the political as those things about which the state has to make decisions. Taxes, laws, punishments, etc. And then the political community are those who are subject to the same politics. 

In this narrow conception, politics does appear to be a tedious sort of activity. But we could also take a step outward. Politics as not just about decision making, but as allowing certain ways of life. Allowing, namely, both a sense of rootedness in the past (as Weil would emphasize) and a certain engagement with the world beyond ourselves, namely a greater space for the exercise of our agency (which is more Arendtian). In this broad conception, politics is very close to tracking the same thing as the much more ambiguous distinction between public and private.

Private is those things that concern only us, make no demands on anyone else. Public is those things we do or think while keeping others in mind. We exercise our agency in public when part of our goal involves others beyond us or our narrow groups, like the family. Another blurry line.

We could keep public to the very broad and political to the very narrow, and potentially see when the political has to become a part of our lives more generally. The public sphere is essential to us as humans both feeling connected to each other and feeling like we can act in ways that matter, especially since “mattering” so often necessitates acts that extend beyond the narrower confines of the self. The public sphere requires engagement with others. It requires that we recognize and acknowledge each other’s realities. And each of our realities, at least in the nonideal world, involves politics.

When people are affected by politics, they have to be able to speak about it, to not become publicly alienated. They need to know that their concerns have some dominion over the shared world. They need to seek confirmation of those concerns being public. Then, there is a way in which we cannot avoid politics, for our sakes and for the sake of others. As long as there is someone affected by it, that demands our recognition and maybe even the difficult task of incorporating their concerns into our own world. There is something vaguely Murdochian about this. 

13/05/25
wittyWit is a part of the good life--at least, Aristotle thought so, and it is easy to see why. Relaxation and amusement are necessary parts of life, and the witty person shows a certain understanding of that fact. They manage to actually add something valuable to their social interactions, unlike the boor who abstains from humor, and the buffoon who uses everything for the sake of a laugh. 

We often complain that wittiness is a lost art. That might partly be right. Most of our interactions are typically very short, like messaging, and in our hangouts with people we value the deep disclosure of our emotions in a way that maybe was more frowned upon in the past. It might have been more natural for wit to take a central place in day to day interactions when you had a lot of face time with people who you weren’t about to tell your entire life story to. 

But what is often overlooked about wittiness is that it is a choice. (There is, as it turns out, a debate about this in the literature on Aristotle, but I found Rebekah Johnston’s account compelling.) There might be certain skills you have to have as a precondition, like quickness in thinking or just a good sense of humor, but those skills don’t make you witty immediately. There is, first, a choice of when to joke and when not to, which separates the witty person from the buffoon (this is Johnston’s point). But there is also a choice to be witty in the first place.

It’s very easy, after all, to be direct and to the point in our conversations with people. You ask me how I am, I say I’m fine, you say you are fine too. That is a perfectly fine conversation to have. But there is a decision available to both of us, to try to add an element of humor to that discussion. To say something a little wittier than just fine. This is partly why I like watching Gilmore Girls: to see them make that choice over an over again, in the most mundane interactions, in extremely over-the-top ways.

In many ways, I find that wittiness involves resisting your first instinct. It is a game of coming up with something more fun, more unexpected than what your immediate reaction was. It is a way of keeping it interesting. It is a way of realizing and acting on the necessity of relaxation and amusement, especially in the most mundane interactions. 

09/05/25
just jokingWhen we tell a joke, very often what we hope for is a moment of connection. Your (genuine) laugh is based on two things: a shared background that allows you to understand the joke, and a shared sense that whatever I’ve pointed to is in fact funny. It’s because of these factors that a new joke is often told with hesitance. You cannot be completely sure that the other person will get it. But the process is eased, at times, by knowing that the social sanctions are low for a bad joke. A joke, as Thi Nguyen says, is a trust fall. It takes trust to let go, but it also builds trust whenever you are caught. 

I think we can learn a lot about politics from joking. Not the kind of politics that politicians engage in, but the kind that the people engage in routinely. Political discussions, or public deliberation. 

When you express how you feel about a certain thing in the world, you are going out on a limb, like in the case of joking. Your expression is telling of how reality appears to you, and you are trying to test whether it appears the same way to others. Shared understanding has the same two components: do they have the same background (have they seen the same problems, read the same news stories, etc.) and do they agree with your assessment of the situation, like that it is a problem. If what you want to say has already been expressed before, maybe you can say it with less hesitance. If it hasn’t, it is not clear to you yet whether others will agree, or if you are alone in your judgment. You need the same kind of trust, that you won’t be cancelled for saying one wrong thing. And it builds trust: trust in your peers and trust in your own assessment of the world.

Once we see the parallels, I think we can also see what is at stake. A world where we could never tell a joke is a lonely world. Joking is how we test out how connected we are to others, it is how we know, as Ted Cohen says, that we are enough like each other to sense one another. It is how we know we belong to a common world, a shared reality. The same is true in politics. If we just parrot what the popular takes are, we wouldn’t actually be speaking to how the world appears to us, and we wouldn’t know if others see it similarly. We wouldn’t know if we were all alone. (There is a point here about why limiting speech is so important to tyrannical regimes. Discovering shared sentiments is a dangerous game.)

But, in the political realm, there are additional stakes. If slavery is a common practice, for example, you need some people to come out and say that it seems wrong to them. If you don’t have the trust, you might never discover the mistakes in popular beliefs, and also the mistakes in your own beliefs. When you say that things appear to you differently than has been discussed in the political realm, you are opening up the possibility that one of you or the society at large is wrong. It is how we make progress.

We have to examine more carefully how we build a world where people feel comfortable joking. It might tell us how we build a world with good politics. And both, at the end of the day, will show us that we are a part of a larger community that looks onto a shared reality. It is the only way to get over our dreary solipsism. 

08/05/25
battle of opinions“Whenever in political questions sound human reason fails or gives up the attempt to supply answers we are faced by a crisis; for this kind of reason is really that common sense by virtue of which we and our five individual senses are fitted into a single world common to us all and by the aid of which we move about in it. The disappearance of the common sense in the present day is the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed. The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place where such cave-in has occurred.” (The Crisis in Education, Arendt)

Being able to look out into the same world as others, or at least get the sense that we look onto a shared reality, is more important than we recognize. And it’s more fragile. 

I think about 1984, Winston’s doubts of who the other heretics are. In a world where opinions can’t be voiced, you can’t know what others are thinking, and therefore that there are others who are having the same thoughts. The only thing that will be voiced is what already belongs to the popular discourse. 

There is a sense in which opening public discourse can only do good. For the majority, there won’t be any difference, since they can already say what they want to say. For the minority, there will now be a platform for their ideas to be taken up if others see the merit in them. And if there is no merit, there will be a platform for those ideas to get dispelled. 

If that is the case, if it is such a simple matter, then our worries point to an ugly reality. When we begin to worry about freedom of expression in public platforms, or just too many opinions being voiced, it might be because we are trying to mask a reality we don’t want to accept. The opinions that are voiced are in our favor, but the majority isn’t. If those who think they are the minority begin to voice their opinions, they might just realize there are a lot more of them. Worry about opinions might be the desperate clinging to the power--power that is perpetuated only by unvoiced opinions.

07/05/25

• privately public
  

There is some thing we try to track with the public private distinction. From the outside, the line between tracks boundaries. You can interfere with what is public, but not with what is private. Private, in this case, sometimes means within a private sphere (home, personal space, or even a person’s own mind) and sometimes means outside the realm of rights that concern the public (murder in your home is still murder). 

From the inside, it’s hard to know what the distinction tracks. That is, for a person stepping between the public and private spheres, what marks the difference? A certain sense of privacy in the private sphere, and a feeling of being seen in the public one? Trivially, that might be true. But the problem of “judgment” seems to point to something more.

One might think that our judgments have a different character when they relate to things in the private sphere as opposed to the public one. We might have two back to back discussions, one about the swing set I should get for my background, the other about the one the government should get for the public park, and presumably I would think about the two in completely distinct ways. When I choose the best swing set for me, I don’t care about how accomodating it will be to those I will never invite into my home. When I make a judge what the local government should choose, I am speaking not only in my own voice. I’m saying something about what we should all think.

This kind of distinction is just an extension of questions about judgment in the aesthetic realm. When we say a painting beautiful, what exactly do we mean by it? Presumably not just that I find it beautiful--to delimit it in this way would not be true to the experience of it. To find something beautiful is to think that whatever response I am having is appropriate to have for that thing. I am finding it beautiful because it is, and implicit in my judgment is the thought that you should find it beautiful too. Or, at least, it is an invitation. There is something there that is deserving of being called beautiful, and I invite you to attend to it too.

There is a sense, then, that judgments of beauty are not exactly private. They are not private in the sense that they are not just for us, or mere opinions. And in the sense that we expect them to be shared with others. We expect others to see what we see in it. In fact, that is the reason we say the thing is beautiful full stop, as opposed to beautiful for us.

Judgments in the public sphere have a similarity. They are not qualified with “for me”. When I discuss what the local government should do, in a sense I’m claiming that it would be best for all of us. I am taking (what Arendt calls) an enlarged perspective. But the basis of this enlarged perspective is just my own judgment. A judgment of what is good that presumes others should be on board. It feels almost circular.

In both cases, private and public, I make judgments. Sometimes those judgments come in the form of decisions (when I decide to buy X or do Y, I’m judging them to be “choiceworthy”, at least implcitly). Sometimes they are assertions, like when I talk about what the government should do. In the private case, my judgments only concern me. I don’t take them to impose standards upon others, or get them on the hook for certain acts. The fact that I got a red swing set doesn’t mean anything about what my neighbor should get (unless I’m a tremendous snob, of course). In the public case, however, especially if I take into consideration the public nature, what it is to judge is to judge from the enlarged perspective. It is to make a claim about what we should all think. (Other than, perhaps, mere preferences that we already qualify, like saying that we prefer benches with hand rests, rather than asserting those should be the kinds of benches the park has.) 

Moral and aesthetic claims might be special in always having this public nature. And political judgment might fall naturally in this bucket too.

Why is this important? 

Partly because it tells us what to look for in public deliberations. It makes clear the kind of claim others are making. And it also makes clear what exactly is at stake.

I think about the outrage we feel when someone profoundly disagrees with us. There is an almost indescribable madness to those moments, like feeling someone is playing a prank on you, or like you’ve been tricked by Descartes’ evil demon. That feeling is similar to when you show someone your favorite movie, song, or painting, and they just don’t seem to get it. What you doubt in those moments is whether you are looking out into the same reality at all. And if you begin to doubt that so often, the shared reality, you might see that your judgments lose their force too. If you see that you are alone (as an individual, or within your group) in finding a particular thing beautiful, you might abstain from the “objectivity” of the judgment. You might start qualifying more often. This thing is beautiful, for us. 

A similar thing can happen in the political sphere. Too many disagreements and it might feel like you no longer inhabit the same world. You might just give up. You might think that the worlds are irreconcilable. And then you’d give up the full-throatedness of your political judgments. But what that would come to is less involvement in the political sphere. Enough doubt and you might become detached. Enough doubt and your political community might crumble. 

A part of me suspects this is the reason we have to care about having a “common world”. The desperate need that we are enough like each other to sense each other, like Ted Cohen says about joking--but it relates to so much more. Because only when we have that sense do we go out on a limb and say something that feels true to us, with the hopes that it is true for others. 

06/05/25

• eat the culture
  

The line between art and entertainment is collapsing. In fact, it is too soft to express the situation in terms of a spectrum. Entertainment is devouring art. Soon, there might be very little left.

This is a future Arendt prophesizes in “The Crisis in Culture”. The concern, at least partly, is about the appropriation of art. First it is appropriated by the newly rich who cling onto it for the status it brings--Arendt calls them the cultural philistine. Their misunderstanding is in thinking that art is for their self-perfection, when what sets apart art is that it is not for any function. And then, the second concern is that mass culture will come to ruin what’s left of it. This, according to Arendt, is a bad misunderstanding.

Here is when the distinction between art, as belonging to culture, and entertainment becomes important. Culture is defined by permanence--one swallow does not make a culture. Entertainment is for consumption. It is meant for the moment, for “left-over” time from labor and sleep. It is a sign, perhaps, of improving economic conditions: there is now time left-over that needs to be utilized in some way, and that’s what entertainment does. It fills in vacant time, as opposed to leisure time. 

Vacant time is time that is necessary for the human’s functioning. “Panis and circenses [bread and circus] truly belong together; both are necessary for life, for its preservation and recuperation, and both vanish in the course of the life process--that is, both must contantly be produced anew and offered anew.” In short, you need time to recover. That’s what vacant time is. And entertainment, or amusement in some form, is a necessary part of it.

Leisure time comes when your needs are satisfied. “Time, that is, in which we are free from all cares and activities necessitated by the life process and therefore free for the world and its culture.” It is not our fault that we want to watch Netflix when we get home from a long day of work. Before those needs for relaxation are met, we cannot have leisure time, when we are truly free to appreciate whatever niche Scandinavian movie is on Mubi that day.

The problem is this: we all do have more left-over time than in the past. But with that, there is greater need for the production of entertainment, which is used up (bingingly) fast. The entertainment industry needs content, and begins to take it from art. But it doesn’t just replicate it. Art on its own would be too hard to digest for true entertainment. So it begins to alter it. Soften it. “Rewritten, condensed, digested, reproduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies.” It loses its form. It loses its elevated status above those things we simply consume. “Culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.”

Nowadays, it might be so thoroughly destroyed that it’s hard to tell where entertainment ends and art begins. Is everything on Netflix entertainment? Is everything you can access on your phone? What remains art, deserving of reverence and awe, rather than greedy consumption? And can art ever be retrieved from its reduced form?

05/05/25

• one bad day
  

It’s hard to appreciate how fragile we all are—how much our daily functioning depends on things going right, or at least nothing going very wrong. A balance that is easily tipped off, a spiral that is hard to climb up from. 

When my uncle got married, when I was only around thirteen or so, we used to talk about the family of the bride, soon to be our family too. She had an older sister whose story I had only overheard. The kind of story you don’t talk about too loudly.

The sister was, for a long time, the most successful of them all. She had gone to the UK for school before it was a simple matter, on a scholarship. And then she returned two or three years later. She had given up speaking. She would sit in her room all day, watching the TV and hoarding newspapers. The family never knew what had happened, even after taking her to many therapists. She just refused. For all I know, she still sits in her room.

It had seemed like the strangest thing in the world to me, at the time. A great mystery. I spent many days trying to imagine what must have happened to trap her in her mind like that, unable to utter any of it, to lift some of the weight off. Now, it just doesn’t seem that surprising. There are so many statistically mundane things after which I can imagine someone giving up. I can imagine me giving up, too. In fact, it is incredible we don’t give up more often.

Something bad happening doesn’t really seem like the scary thing anymore. What’s scary is that we might not find the will to recover, or try again, once it happens. Fragility is a scary thing. As much as we like to believe in our individual strengths, we don’t really know how much, or how little, it would take. We don’t know how much leeway we have.

Youngbin tells me of one of his favorite Batman series, where Joker claims that all it takes is one bad day. Maybe that is right, for some of us. And I don’t know what differentiates the rest. 

04/05/25

• head hurters

When my head hurts like this I’m always so tempted to give up. Most days I do. 

I’ve been staring at the same page for hours, enough to forget what it was I wanted to say and why I wanted to say it. Philosophy papers have a way of obscuring the initial inspiration, but day three is too soon to give up on a newly made commitment. 

In hopes of being inspired, I’ve been watching chef’s table legends. First day was Jamie Oliver, then José Andrés. Left each episode wanting to do something but unable to know what I could do.

Both stories have a familiar pattern. A hero’s call to adventure, and both take it on. A show, a restaurant, or a travel offer, and then things snowball from there. Both are the kind of people who seize opportunities, who (seem to) have tremendous vitality, who can keep tirelessly pursuing the next thing. I admire it greatly.

A life with books is not quite the same thing. Writing is a craft, but the way the philosophers do it, it is a rather useless craft. I struggle to see what a call to adventure could be for a modern day philosopher. But maybe no “hero” knows what the adventure will be. And many heroes have skills that are ill-fitted for the task, who nonetheless rise up to the occasion.

The trick seems to be to focus on what you have to do in that moment, and do it well. I still think of the Murakami quote from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, an old favorite.

“The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you're supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.”
It seems simple, if you can know when you are supposed to do something or another. Rather elusive advice. But then again, I am in a Ph.D. program, so maybe it’s not so hard to know what I’m supposed to do for the next few years.