How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life

in Graduation Speech, Philosophy, Religion | June 26th, 2015

There is a certain kind of thinking that the Buddha called “monkey mind,” a state in which our nervous habits become compulsions, hauling us around this way and that, forcing us to jump and shriek at every sound. It was exactly this neurotic state of mind that Leonard Cohen sought to quell when in 1994 he joined Mt. Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles and became a monk: “I was interested in surrendering to that kind of routine,” Cohen told The Guardian in 2001, “If you surrender to the schedule, and get used to its demands, it is a great luxury not to have to think about what you are doing next.”

There at Mt. Baldy the journalist and cosmopolitan raconteur Pico Iyer met Cohen, unaware at first that it was even him. In his short Baccalaureate speech above to the 2015 graduating class of the University of Southern California, Iyer describes the meeting: After showing him fond hospitality and settling him into the community, Iyer says, Cohen told him that “just sitting still, being unplugged, looking after his friends was… the real deep entertainment that the world had to offer.”

At the time, Iyer was disappointed. He had admired Cohen for exactly the opposite qualities—for traveling the world, being plugged into the culture, and living a rock star life of self-indulgence. It was this outward manifestation of Cohen that Iyer found alluring, but the poet and songwriter’s inward life, what Iyer calls the “invisible ledger on which we tabulate our lives,” was given to something else, something that eventually brought Cohen out of a lifelong depression. Iyer’s thesis, drawn from his encounter with Leonard Cohen, Zen monk, is that “it is really on the mind that our happiness depends.”

Iyer refers not to that perpetually wheeling monkey mind but what Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi called “beginner’s mind” or “big mind.” In such a meditatively absorbed state, we forget ourselves, “which to me,” Iyer says, “is almost the definition of happiness.” Cohen said as much of his own personal enlightenment: “When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you.” After his time at Mt. Baldy, he says, “there was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself.” Iyer’s short speech, filled with example after example, gives us and his newly graduating audience several ways to think about how we might find that sense of repose—in the midst of busy, demanding lives—through little more than “just sitting still, being unplugged” and looking after each other.

Note: You can watch a European documentary on Cohen’s stint as a buddhist monk here.

via BoingBoing

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

in Economics, Education, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology | June 24th, 2015

Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer “yes” to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. Though it may seem like we’re all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they’re wrong they’re still well worth reading.

Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification.

That’s so far, at least, as de Botton’s very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life’s program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton’s own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives.

De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses.

Note: For those interested, Yale has a free open course on Sociology called “Foundations of Modern Social Theory,” which covers most of the figures listed above. You can always find it in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act

in Philosophy, Religion | June 17th, 2015

Many of us in the West live in some of the most fragmented religious landscapes in the world, but in the midst of deepening levels of conflict over policies of birth and death, these two issues that divide us also join us together. More than at any time in history, people live in expectation of similar spans of life; we all lament the loss of loved ones who die at any age; and most of us live with some fear of death, or at least violent, untimely death like the kind Alan Watts describes above.

Watts, English Zen guru of sorts (though he would not like the label) lectured more on death than perhaps any other philosophical or religious teacher since the Buddha, but he did so in a way that illuminates our ideas about the inevitable end, even if it should come upon us all of the sudden.

You heard a bomb coming at you, you could hear it whistle and you knew it was right above you and heading straight at you, and that you were finished.

This is no abstract thought experiment, of course, but the historical experience of millions of people, from Dresden to Iraq. But despite the terrifying example, Watts describes achieving in that moment absolute clarity and universality. The dreaded bomb whistles toward you, “and you accepted it,” he says.

How exactly does one achieve that acceptance? Without dogmatizing or mysticism, Watts offers some wisdom in another excerpt from a lecture above. This video’s use of melodramatic film clips and cinematic music may be a little schmaltzy, but his matter of fact talk isn’t lessened by it. Though not everyone passes on their genes to a next generation, an example he discusses in both excerpts, we do all leave the planet to make room for new people, wherever they come from, and this, he says, “is an honorable thing…. It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than it is through the same individual.”

Watts was not at all doctrinaire about death, particularly in his later years. In a conversation with Aldous Huxley’s wife Laura in 1968, he called dying “an art,” though not quite like Sylvia Plath did: “It is also,” he said, “an adventure.” He considered Aldous Huxley’s unorthodox death—on an LSD trip while Laura read to him from the Tibetan Bardo Thodol—a “highly intelligent form of dying.” Nonetheless, Watts, an Episcopal priest become an explainer of Zen Buddhism in America, also had a great deal to say about more formal religious ideas of death.

In the lecture above, from a 1959 American television program, Watts explains a particular Buddhist concept of reincarnation and rebirth through various realms. It’s a picture as fantastic and picturesque as Dante’s, and like his creative act, one that can be read with some literal and much profoundly philosophical significance. These conceptions help demonstrate that far from fearful, our puzzling over the inevitability and mystery of death can be, as it was for Watts, “one of the most creative thoughts I ever thought in my life.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Classical Piano Compositions: They’re Aphoristic Like His Philosophy

in Music, Philosophy | June 11th, 2015

In March, we featured 43 original tracks of classical music by philosopher and self-taught composer Friedrich Nietzsche, better known as the author of books like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Despite the enduring importance of his textual output, Josh Jones noted that “what Nietzsche loved most was music.” He “found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.”

Today we offer more of the eccentric, highly opinionated 19th-century German philosopher’s musical side. In the playlist just above, you can hear his piano compositions as collected on Michael Krücker’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Complete Solo Piano Works. “Most of the works on this album date from the 1860s, when [Nietzsche] was a celebrated young professor and philosopher,” writes AllMusic’s James Manheim. “The music is light, often quasi-improvisatory, and some of it resembles the keyboard music of the composer whom Nietzsche extolled later in life, Georges Bizet. The most substantial piece, the 20-minute Hymnus an die Freundschaft, was essentially his last composition, but he later reworked it with texts by his then-love interest, Lou Andreas-Salomé; that version was later arranged for chorus and orchestra by another composer.”

Manheim also notes that this selection of piano pieces, in their brevity, suggest that “the aphoristic style of Nietzsche’s late writings was anticipated by his musical thinking.” Enthusiasts of Nietzsche’s life and career will certainly find themselves making even more connections between his musical and philosophical work than that. But those looking for his motivation to work in this purest of all arts perhaps need look no further than this typically unequivocal pronouncement: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”

You can find more Nietzschean piano compositions below, these performed by Dorothea Klotz. To hear the music, you will need to download Spotify’s free software, if you haven’t already.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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An Animated Ayn Rand Dispenses Terrible Love Advice to Mike Wallace (1959)

in Animation, Philosophy | June 9th, 2015

In the past, the good folks over at Blank on Blank have turned rarely-seen interviews with the likes of Ray Bradbury and John Coltrane into brilliant little animated shorts. This week, their latest installment is on Ayn Rand.

Rand, of course, is the mind behind Objectivism, the patron saint of laissez faire capitalism, and the author of such unwieldy tomes as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Among Wall Street bankers, Washington conservatives and insufferable college sophomores, Rand is a revered figure. Former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and presidential candidate Rand Paul are both acknowledged followers. Former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan was Rand’s protégé. To a lot of other people, of course, her theories are little more than a shrill justification of sociopathy, an empathy-challenged vision of social interaction that flies in the face of basic ideas of human decency.

The interview dates back to a 1959 interview by Mike Wallace (see the original here) who grills Rand on her concept of love and happiness, which leads to this exchange:

Ayn Rand: I say that man is entitled to his own happiness. And that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. And nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others. I hold that man should have self-esteem.

Mike Wallace: And cannot man have self-esteem if he loves his fellow man? Christ, every important moral leader in man’s history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?

Ayn Rand: It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it’s impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

Watching the piece, I kept hearing the title of Raymond Carver’s brilliant short story run through my mind, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” (Hear Carver read that story here.) My sense is that her version of love is very different from mine. Watch the full animated video above.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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The Absurd Philosophy of Albert Camus Presented in a Short Animated Film by Alain De Botton

in Philosophy | May 28th, 2015

What is the meaning of life? This may sound simplistic or naïve, especially in relation to much contemporary philosophy, which assumes the question is incoherent and reserves its focus for smaller and smaller slices of experience. And, of course, prior to the rise of secular modernity, the question was answered for us—and still is for a great many people—by religion. One either believed the answer, through coercion or otherwise, or kept quiet about it. But at least since Søren Kierkegaard, philosophers in the West have taken the question very seriously, and found all of the answers wanting. By the mid-twentieth century, there seemed to thinkers like Albert Camus to be no answer. Life has no meaning. It is inherently absurd and purposeless.

This Camus concluded in challenging essays like “The Myth of Sisyphus” and novels like L’Etranger, a book most of us know as The Stranger but which Alain de Botton, in his School of Life video above on Camus’ philosophy, translates as The Outsider. Reading this book, de Botton observes, “has long been an adolescent rite of passage” since many of its themes “are first tackled at seventeen or so.” Its protagonist, Meursault, an older, more nihilistic version of Holden Caulfield, illustrates Camus’ thesis through his steadfast refusal to identify with any meaning-making institutions or emotions, and through a casual, senseless murder. But while Meursault may see through the pretensions of his society, he has failed to see the world as it is.

Colin Wilson, another author many people read during intellectually formative years—who wrote an existentialist study also called The Outsider—describes Meursault’s indifference to life as a product of “his sense of unreality.” Only the looming prospect of death awakens him from what Meursault calls “a heavy grime of unreality.” Instead of despairing at life’s emptiness, Camus determined that true freedom required engaging fully with life, in the face of futility—with the ultimate prospect of death and the option of suicide always in view. Camus, says de Botton, “writes with exceptional intensity… as a guide for the reasons to live.” De Botton somewhat superficially praises Camus’ sexual prowess, fashion sense, and good looks as more than just “stylistic quirks,” but as markers of his psychological health.

But more than just a ladies man, Camus was a “great champion of the ordinary,” as well as a champion footballer and Nobel prize-winning literary star. He was also a fully committed journalist and political activist for much of his career, who stood by his individual principles even as other leftist intellectuals got swept up in the allure of Soviet communism under Stalin. In the documentary above, we learn important details of many of these qualities, as well of Camus’ troubled early life. Given his background of impoverishment and loss, it is indeed remarkable that Camus—much more so than other, more privileged philosophers—lived such a rich, fully engaged life.

In a rare television interview above, Camus answers questions about his theatrical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, another novel that confronts head on the question of life’s meaning. He speaks of the novel’s “nihilism,” now “the reality that we have to face.” Camus does not mention that Dostoyevsky, like the existentialist Kierkegaard, managed to salvage a kind of religious faith in the face of emptiness; the French philosopher and writer was convinced of the impossibility of such a thing. But whether one draws Dostoevsky or Camus’ conclusions, both would suggest that to live authentically, one must seriously grapple with the problem of meaninglessness and the reality of death.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Rare Video: Georges Bataille Talks About Literature & Evil in His Only TV Interview (1958)

in Literature, Philosophy, Television | May 26th, 2015

“Where other transgressive figures of the past have mostly been tamed,” wrote Josh Jones in a post here last year, “[Georges] Bataille, I submit, is still quite dangerous.” You can get a sense of that in the documentary featured there, À perte de vue, which introduces the transgressive French intellectual’s life and thought, which from the 1920s to the 1960s produced books like The Solar Anus, The Hatred of Poetry, and The Tears of Eros, all part of a body of work that captivated the likes of Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

At the top of this post, you can enjoy another, straighter shot of Bataille through his 1958 appearance opposite interviewer Pierre Dumayet — the only television interview he ever did. The occasion: the publication of his book Literature and Evil, a title that, Bataille says, refers to “two opposite kinds of evil: the first one is related to the necessity of human activity going well and having the desired results, and the other consists of deliberately violating some fundamental taboos — like, for example, the taboo against murder, or against some sexual possibilities.”

Bataille’s fans expect from him a certain amount of taboo violation, though executed in a specific literary form — not just prose, but the distinctive sort of prose, whether spoken or written, brought to perfection by midcentury French intellectuals. In this ten-minute clip, Bataille elaborates on his conviction that we can’t separate literature from evil: if the former stays away from the latter, “it rapidly becomes boring.” He also gets into a discussion of Baudelaire, Kafka (“both of them knew they were on the side of evil”), Shakespeare, the importance of eroticism and childishness in literature, and the inherently anti-work nature of writing. However relevant you find Bataille’s ideas today, you have to give the man this: he never gets boring.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

in Philosophy, Politics | May 18th, 2015

“It may come as a surprise to some academics,” writes leftist political theorist Michael Parenti in his sprawling textbook Democracy for the Few, “but there is a marked relationship between economic power and political power.” Parenti exaggerates—I have never met such an academic in a humanities department, though it may be true in the worlds of political philosophy and political science.

Yet in centuries past, philosophers and scholars had no trouble drawing conclusions about the intertwining of the political and the economic. One may immediately think of Karl Marx, who—according to the above video from a new School of Life series on famous political theorists—was “capitalism’s most famous and ambitious critic.” The practical effects of Marx’s political ideas may be anathema for good reason, Alain de Botton admits, but his economic analysis deserves continued attention.

“Capitalism is going to have to be reformed,” de Botton says, “and Marx’s analyses are going to be part of any answer.” One might imagine many academics objecting to his certainty. Marx’s relevance is in question across the political spectrum, in part because the kind of capitalism he so painstakingly documented is hardly recognizable to us now.

70 years before Marx diagnosed the social and economic ills of Victorian capitalism, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith made similar observations of its 18th century precursor. Regularly cited in defense of so-called free market principles, Smith’s Wealth of Nations as often shows how little freedom actually exists in capitalist societies because of the undue influence of “the masters” and the hyper-specialization of the work force, who were unable in Smith’s time, and often in ours, to organize for their mutual interests.

Smith may not have gone as far as Marx in his conclusions, but he did advocate progressive taxation and a robust welfare state. In the 20th century, John Rawls argued for a stricter standard of political and economic equality than Smith’s appeal to sympathy. Rawls’ 1971 Theory of Justice introduced a “simple, economical, and polemical way to show people how their societies were unfair”: the “veil of ignorance.”

This thought experiment asks us to eliminate unfairness by presuming we might potentially have been born into the circumstances of any other living person on earth. Though it may not be particularly apparent, Rawls’ ideas have had some influence on policy. As de Botton points out above, he dined regularly at the Clinton White House. But his principles haven’t much changed the way we live our economic lives, in part because of his critique of the rags-to-riches story, almost a sacred myth in American society.

Like Adam Smith, Henry David Thoreau’s politics seem a little harder to pin down. A contemporary of Marx, Thoreau thought in terms of the individual, penning perhaps a founding text for both hippie homesteaders and survivalists. In Walden—written while he lived alone in a cabin on land owned by his friend and patron Ralph Waldo Emerson—Thoreau makes the case for near total self-reliance. In his Civil Disobedience, he writes, “I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least.’”

Thoreau also believed “That government is best which governs not at all.” Yet, despite its author’s fierce libertarian bent (he refused to pay his taxes on principle), Civil Disobedience has served a founding text of progressive social and environmental movements worldwide. Speaking “practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men,” Thoreau went on, “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

De Botton’s series on political theory profiles two more Victorian-era thinkers—poet and writer on political economy William Morris, above, and art and literary critic John Ruskin, below. Both thinkers—with rarified focus on craft and aesthetics—made their own critiques of capitalism from positions of relative luxury. Though the School of Life series doesn’t say so directly, it seems as though the six philosophers it surveys—very cursorily, I should add—were chosen as historical counterexamples to the idea that political theorists don’t observe the relationship between the political and the economic. It may be the case today in certain academic departments, but it certainly was not for over the first two hundred years of capitalism’s existence.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life

Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act

Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Classical Piano Compositions: They’re Aphoristic Like His Philosophy

An Animated Ayn Rand Dispenses Terrible Love Advice to Mike Wallace (1959)

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