Unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says in line 38a of the Apology. How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions and begin then to become a different kind of person? So, do you have to go to school to be a philosopher?
Oh, God, no. Thank God you don't have to go to school. No. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom.
It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. That's a Socratic imperative of examining. yourself requires courage.
You know, William Butler Yeats used to say, it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Courage to think critically. You can't talk.
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope. Plato says philosophers are meditation on and a preparation for death.
And by death what he means is not an event, but a death in life. Because there's no rebirth, there's no change, there's no transformation without death. And therefore the question becomes, how do you learn how to die? Of course Montaigne talks about that in his famous essay, to philosophize is to learn how to die. You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
I believe that Theodor Adorno was right when he says that the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. That gives it an existential emphasis, you see. So that we're really talking about truth as a way of life as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.
Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on truth capital T. We might have access to truth small t, but they're fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong. We have to be open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of...
mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many of the existential thinkers, be they religious like Meister Eckhart or Paul Tillich, or be they secular like Camus and Sartre, that they're accenting our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature, reality, the truth about things. And therefore there you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth. Because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, you're going to talk about what are the ways in which I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a journey, a path toward truth, the way to truth?
So the truth talk goes hand in hand with the talk about the way to truth. And scientists could talk about this in terms of, you know, deducing evidence and drawing reliable conclusions and so forth and so on. Our religious folk could talk about this in terms of surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you. But they're all ways of acknowledging our finitude and our fallibility.
I want all of the rich historical colorations to be manifest in talking about our finitude. Being born of a woman in stank and stench. I call funk, being introduced to the funk of life in the womb and the love push that gets you out.
And then your body is not just death, but the way Vico talks about it. Here, Vico is so much better than Heidegger. Vico talks about it in terms of being being a corpse.
See, Heidegger doesn't talk about corpses. He talks about death. It's still too abstract.
Absolutely. Read the poetry of John Donne. He'll tell you about corpses that decompose. Well, see, that's history. That's the raw, funky, stanky stuff of life.
That's what bluesmen do. That's what jazzmen do. See, I'm a blues man in the life of the mind.
I'm a jazz man in the world of ideas. Therefore, for me, music is central. So when you're talking about poetry, for the most part, Plato was talking primarily about words.
Whereas I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about temper, I talk about rhythms. See, for me, music is fundamental. Philosophy must go to school not only with the poets.
Philosophy needs to go to school with the musicians. Keep in mind, Plato bans the flute in the Republic, but not the lyre. Why?
Because the flute appeals to all of these various sides of who we are, given his tripartite conception of the soul, the rational and the spirited and the appetitive. And the flute appeals to all three of those. Where he thinks the lyre on one string only appeals to one and therefore is permissible.
Now of course the irony is when Plato was on his deathbed, what did he do? Well he requested the Thracian girl to play music on the flute. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a Puritan. I believe in pleasure. And ogiastic pleasure has its place.
Intellectual pleasure has its place. Social pleasure has its place. Televisual pleasure has its place. I like certain TV shows. My God, when it comes to music, Beethoven's 32nd Sonata, Opus 111, unbelievable aesthetic pleasure.
Same would be true for Curtis Mayfield or The Beatles or what have you. There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're in the library at home and so on, but you're intensely alive.
In fact, you're much more alive than these folks. walking these streets of New York in crowds, which is no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all. But if you read, you know, John Ruskin, or you read a Mark Twain, or, oh my God, Herman. Herman Melville, you almost had to throw the book against the wall because you were almost so intensely alive that you need a break. You're electrified.
Exactly. It's time to take a break and get a little dullness in your life, you know? Take Moby Dick, throw it against the wall the way Goethe threw von Gleis'work against the wall.
It was just too much. It made Goethe, it reminded Goethe of the darkness that he was escaping after he overcame the suicidal impulses we saw as a young brother in the 1770s. and made his move toward neoclassicism and Weimar. There are certain things that make us too alive, almost. It's almost like being too intensely in love.
You can't do anything. It's hard to get back to Kronos, and hard to get back to everyday life, you know what I mean? That chaotic dimension of being in love with another person.
Everything is so meaningful, you want to sustain it. You just can't do it, you know? You got to go to the bathroom, have a drink of water, shit. Romanticism thoroughly saturated the discourse of modern thinkers.
Can you totalize? Can you make things whole? Can you create harmony? If you can't, disappointment. Disappointment is always at the center.
Failure is always at the center. But where did romanticism come from? Why begin with romanticism? See, I don't begin with romanticism.
Oh, you remember what Beethoven said on his deathbed, you know? He said, I've learned to look at the world in all of its darkness and evil and still love it. And that's not romantic Beethoven.
This is the Beethoven of the string quartets, the 131, the greatest. the greatest string quartet ever written, not just in classical music, but of course it's European forms. Beethoven is the grand master.
But string quartets, you go back to those movements, there's no romantic wholeness to be shattered as in the early Beethoven. He's given up on that, you see. This is where Chekhov begins. This is where the blues starts. It's where jazz starts.
You think Charlie Parker's upset because he can't sustain the harmony? He doesn't care about the harmony. He's trying to completely ride on the dissonance, ride on the blue notes.
Of course, he's got harmony in terms of interventions here and there. But why start with this obsession with wholeness? And if you can't have it, then you're disappointed and want to have a drink and melancholia and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No. You see, the blues, my kind of blues, begins with catastrophe. It begins with the angel of history in Benjamin's thesis. You see, it begins with the pile of wreckage on one pile on another. That's the starting point.
The blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. And black people in America and in the modern world, given these vicious legacies of white supremacy, it is how do you generate... generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic and the calamitous and the horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous. See, part of the problem, though, is that, see, when you have a romantic project, you're so obsessed with time as loss and time as a taker.
Whereas as a Jacobian Christian, I want to stress as well, time as a gift and time as a giver. So that, yes, it's failure, but, you know, how good is a failure? You've done some wonderful things. Now, Beckett could say, you know... try again, fail again, fail better.
But why call it failure? I mean, why not say you have a sense of gratitude that you're able to do as much as you did? You're able to love as much and think as much and play as much.
Why think you needed the whole thing? You see what I mean? This is even disturbing about America.
And of course, America is a romantic project. It's pure diesel, city on the hill and all this other mess and lies and so on. I said, no, no, man. America is a very fragile democratic experiment predicated on the disposition of the lands of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples and the subjugation of women, the marginalization of gays and lesbians.
That it has great potential, but this notion that somehow, you know, we had it all or ever will have it all, it's got to go. You got to push it to the side. And once you push all that to the side, then it tends to evacuate the language of disappointment and the language of failure. And you say, OK, well, how much have we done?
How have we done? been able to do it. Can we do more?
We're in certain situations you can't do more. It's like trying to break dance at 75. You can't do it anymore. You are a master at 16. It's over. You can't make love at 80 the way you did at 20. So what?
Time is real. One question that keeps coming up, or a phrase, is this idea of the meaningful life. Do you think it is philosophy's duty to speak on this? A meaningful life?
How to live a meaningful life. Is that even an appropriate question for a philosopher? No, I think it is.
No, I think the problem of meaning is very important. Nihilism is a serious challenge. Meaninglessness is a serious challenge.
Even making sense of meaninglessness is itself a kind of discipline and achievement. The problem is, of course, you never reach it, you know. It's not a static stationary telos or end or aim. It's a process that one never reaches. It's Sisyphean.
You're going up the hill looking for better meanings or grander, more nobling, enabling meanings, but you never reach it. You know, in that sense, you die without being able to have the whole in the language of romantic discourse. Let me just jump out here in the corner.
Okay, you all. Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Take good care now. You too.