Culture

An Act of Kindness

“An Act of Kindness” was inspired by two long stretches of time I spent in South Africa helping a township community start a papermaking business using the residual fiber leftover from the sugar cane press. The people there were so kind and appreciative.

She is one of the women
who travels daily from her township
Singing in the back of a pick-up truck
with a chorus of others
Come to clean the rooms
in my B & B bordering Kruger Park

She sees me walking a path
parallel to the Crocodile River
I see her running toward me
Watch her fall to her knees before me
Close the lowest five button holes
that fashion the front of my
ankle-length straight skirt

She says something in Swati
Looks up at me as a lilac-blue blossom
drops from a jacaranda tree
And under the kindness of shade
she pats my calves

I can’t interpret the words
but I can read her body language
There my dear
I’ve closed the open invitation
The accident that wrote itself
across your womanhood
I know this because here no woman
would walk aware of bare thighs winking
between the weave of khaki

I help her up
Hold her hardened hands
Thank her by returning
the sunshine of her smile
And waddle like a knob-billed duck
back to my room where I segregate
the unbefitting skirt to a suitcase

The Daily News

by Pepper Trail

This poem was written during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, a time when the country felt deeply broken. Now, that appears to be a permanent condition.

All day I drove north through the smoke
the turkey vultures rising from the trees
circling, forming into loose black clouds
flowing past me, south, away

All day on the radio, talk of truth and lies
anger and tears, what was said, by whom
and why, all the different kinds of fear
all the roles being played, like in a game

Everything must be consumed, the rotten
and the dead, that is what the vultures
and the radio tell us, there being no choice
but to attend to every foul offering

Hands at 10 and 2, facing America
and the littered road, I cannot
bring anything to an end, the drive
the vultures the radio the smoke

Somewhere ahead is the ocean
Salt, deep, cold, disinterested
My hope is to reach there before
night falls, before it is too dark to see

The No-Money Work

by Pete Najarian

One day years ago, when I was out of work and feeling low, my friend Lenny Silverberg was about to teach a six-week, six-hour-a-day summer life study at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and I asked if I could join without paying.

I had by then learned how to contour in pencil from Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw and, after Lenny’s okay, I went to the first class in the carriage house, where a young model reclined on the platform only a few feet from where I sat on my drawing horse. When Lenny saw me struggle with my pencil, he said:

“Why don’t you try charcoal? It may be easier for you.”

“I don’t know how to use charcoal,” I said. I read only the beginning of Nicolaides and not about drawing in mass.

“It’s very easy,” Lenny said. “Here, let me show you.”

Then breaking in half a stick of compressed charcoal and holding it sideways, he formed the curve of the model’s breast as if he were caressing it.

She had full and luscious breasts that glowed in the natural light, and Nicolaides had said the natural way to draw was to feel what you see.

“Here,” Lenny said as he stood up, “you try it.”

So, returning to my drawing horse with the half of the charcoal stick, I too palmed the model’s breast as if feeling it and, when it suddenly appeared on my paper, it was Eureka! (with an exclamation point)!

And the rest is history, as the saying goes, since it was not just a drawing horse I was sitting on, or the kundalini up my spine from the model’s areola, it was the horse in me who would cure my blues. And in the following days the charcoal led to pastels, until I returned for the next six weeks, like a Percival who had just discovered the meaning of the Holy Grail.

Came the Fall I enrolled in an oil painting class at Laney Community College, taught by the late June Steingart (who was my mother’s age). Like a mother she showed me not only how to use a brush and a palette and palette knife, but opened the door to the rest of my life.

Then moving my bed to the side of the kitchen and turning my bedroom into a studio, I lived on the dole until my friend Leo Litwak found me a part-time writing workshop to teach at San Francisco State, and I painted day and night. Until one weekend when I visited my mother, she watched me at my easel in her garage and said sadly in English:

“You turned from one no-money work to another no-money work, and now no woman will want you and you’ll never have a family.”

But there was no turning back. I was now forty-three, yet as if still in puberty with so much to learn, I hurried to work as if pushed by a force that was alien to the wife and family my mother said I wouldn’t have, and I kept painting whether the model was a sexy young woman or an old man with fungal toenails.

I was of course not just learning the art of painting, but what it meant. I knew what art meant in writing, with the sound and sense of words, and now I would learn it in space and light, while the years passed with models in life-study and still-life in my cottage, until one day a decade later, my painter friend Henry Brandon mentioned painting plein air and I asked if I could join him.

He said he would have to ask his painting partner, Terry St. John, and when Terry said sure, I joined them with my easel and oils in the trunk of my ancient Honda. They were seven years older than I and friends since Berkeley High. They had become painters when Henry studied with Richard Diebenkorn at C.C.A.C. and Terry with James Weeks at the San Francisco Art Institute; yet they didn’t paint plein air until Terry curated the landscapes of Lou Siegrist with The Society of Six at the Oakland Museum.

Lou was around eighty then and Terry would drive him to the hills of Mt. Diablo State Park, and when Lou’s son Lundy came, Terry and Lundy would drive to the other sites around the East Bay that were everywhere then and so scarce nowadays.

“Lou would say landscape painting separates the men from the boys,” quoted Terry when I first arrived on the scene, and it was true. The years of life-study and still-life were my apprenticeship and now I would journey to where the vanishing point opened the horizon to the sky and the light flowered into an infinity of colors.

But it cost money, not only for paint and canvas, but to pay the rent and the mechanic. Terry and Henry had adequate pensions but I would have to live I as cheap as I could, and though I had found the grail in Lenny’s workshop, it vanished as soon as I faced what I was up against.

“Can’t you paint part-time,” my mother said, “and have a family too?”

After surviving the death march and my father’s stroke, she didn’t struggle to raise me so I would be miserable. All right, paint if it makes you happy, she said. I was back in my woman-story of why I never married, while facing what I was up against in art — an even a bigger story.

Terry and Henry did have families whose kids were now grown, but they too faced what every artist was up against. Even back in the caves where facing the wall was as vital as food and shelter. Even Michelangelo himself had to face, in his own cave, what art was really all about.

We painted outside only part of the week and then with models in between, Terry with those he could afford in his studio while Henry and I painted them in different groups. And though we lived our other lives in the meantime, facing a blank canvas was always most important.

We painted under the old Carquinez Bridge in Crockett before the new one was built, and we painted in the old Presidio in San Francisco before it was developed, and in the old Safeway parking lot in Alameda by the estuary until it too was developed, and by the old Armory in Benicia and the old naval base in Marin and the marsh in Martinez where Joe DiMaggio was a boy, until we had to leave there as well, always on the lookout for somewhere else.

But Diablo was our favorite, Terry and Henry with their easels by their pick-ups and I, by my Honda facing the hills and the valley, as the cows ambled to their ranches and the coyotes loped in the distance, the turkey vultures gliding above and the wild grass a blaze of yellow in autumn and a glowing green in spring, the light always visionary in the magic hour as the years passed.

Twelve years after my mother died and Terry moved to Thailand, and after Henry stopped painting outdoors, I painted alone by the cove at the Berkeley Marina and on Second Street by the factories.

Terry had been painting for fifty years when he moved to Thailand with his new Thai girlfriend, and he had so many paintings by then he had to dump three truckloads. His gallery did store a bunch and he stored others with friends, but there were still three truckloads left over.

Henry’s house and garage were also full when he was moving to Florida to be near his son, and he too thought of dumping them when I said, “Henry, you can afford to store them in Florida. Don’t think of what will happen to them. Just keep painting.”

When my cottage was being sold and I had to move to this bungalow, it had a garage for my own paintings but I too had to stuff stacks of my works on paper in the recycling bins. And who knows what will happen to the rest when I’m gone? Some Tibetan artists shape their mandalas in sand, like children with castles on a beach that the waves will wash away. Even Shakespeare will disappear, said Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse. “The artist is one who dares to fail,” wrote Beckett.

Yet “the impulse to draw is as natural as the impulse to speak,” said Nicolaides, and my own impulse began when I penciled a horse on the wall by my bed before I could write. And though I stopped when I began to write, the need to draw that horse again stayed inside me until it surfaced in my middle age, when I wrote a novel about a painter imagining his grandmother whose face his mother couldn’t remember.

The grandmother disappeared on a death march with her son. The son’s character was modeled on my mother’s older brother whom she remembered always drawing, and he must have had some talent since she recalled he drew for the church when they lived in town.

My ancestors lived on their vineyard from spring to when they returned to Adana in the rainy season, where they lived in one room in a tenement, so his drawing must have been in that room and wherever he might draw in the vineyard while helping with the garden and the vines.

Who knows what his peasant life may have been like before my mother never saw him again? I’ll never know him, yet I know his need to draw was the same as in the peasant boyhoods of Giotto and Fra Lippo Lippi and even Arshile Gorky, who was his age and held his mother in his arms when she starved to death. “He loved drawing very much,” was all Degas wanted on his grave, and my uncle’s grave is now somewhere in the rubble between Aleppo and Damascus and the bones in the Syrian desert.

I paint it by the meadow at the Berkeley Marina. I’m as old now as old Lou, who said it separates the men from the boys, yet like the mythical Percival who would never find the grail after losing it, I have to keep searching.

The meadow was where we would dump our rubble at the shore of the bay when I lived with a commune fifty years ago. And after a wilderness flourished from the landfill, a generation of nature lovers and U.C. Berkeley botany students would stroll and study the different flora and fauna, until the Santa Fe railroad sold the property to the state. Thanks to a group started by Silvia McLaughlin, for whom it is now named (as if it is a so-called “habitat restoration project”), the “park” has virtually become a private nursery of a special interest group that includes some members of the local Audubon Society, who have surrounded it with a fence to keep the public out.

I protested with Silvia herself before she died, and I was with her when she said to the new group: “I didn’t work so hard to lock people out.”

But she died, and I now have to paint outside the fence, where her name is by the “Keep Out” sign, the flocks of blackbirds and the hovering kestrels all gone, after the special interest group clear-cut the original wilderness. Sometimes I include the fence in my compositions, since art can include anything, even a concentration camp.

Silvia McLauchlin State Park (now closed to the public)

Once again, I stand with my easel facing the earth and sky as if they are my mother and father in the rolling hills and looming clouds, though they are really inside me, as their colors keep changing. Color is light, said Cezanne, but I can never catch its glow, like Apollo failing to rape the Dawn before she hardens into a laurel tree.

I grew up with landscape painting, though I didn’t know until I was grown that it rooted the art of my time when Pollack and deKooning and Kline and Gorky himself were all, in essence, landscape painters descended from Cezanne’s cubes and spheres, where all painting stemmed between an up and a down.

Facing the vanishing point in the horizon between the hills and the meadow, I am what my uncle would have been, while the clouds morph like Zeus in his lust and the hills lie behind the meadow like a nude, all my years of perspective and proportion at play with the luscious oils in memory of Terry with his big pastry spreader knife, spreading his huge canvas in an orgy of colors, while Henry pecked and dabbed in his gluttony for pattern and design.

A passerby stops to chat: “I used to paint,” she says, “but I had to work to raise a family.” She’ll get back into it when she retires; she’s always loved it.

There are millions of her everywhere, but what have I done with my life instead of raising a family? What is the action of my story? The daily news fills with misery and madness, while my painting can’t pay my new rent, and with my annual income only $12,000-a-year, my savings are running out. I’m 78-years-old and my years are running out, too, like the polar bears and the elephants and the planet itself. Where is the grail I lost when I found what I was up against?

My mother was right: I chose a life of no-money work, yet it was with her help. I was her darling who could do whatever I wanted, but I wanted a father and became, like him, a kind of cripple.

I was a healthy child blessed with a great mother, until she had to leave me because of his stroke, and I wandered from her kitchen to a life of loneliness and longing.

The waxing moon rises in a royal blue above the whales of clouds and the meadow glows like the Daphne I can’t catch, the fence my impasse and dead end. Speak, words, in my need to tell my story, like the end of The Horse’s Mouth where a mother nun tells Gulley not to speak because of his stroke — that was like my father’s when I prayed to a God that didn’t exist to make him whole again — the nun telling Gulley he must pray instead of laughing and he says: “Same thing, Mother.”

He was my hero when I moved to Spitalfields near his boat with my portable Underwood instead of a paintbrush. “Artist” meant “painter.” But a writer was also an artist, though twenty years would pass before I could be both, like Gulley’s own hero, Blake.

My need to write was the same as the need for the sky to heal my father like myself and the reason I would never marry and have a family. With my Underwood on a fruit-crate and my stew cooking on a paraffin heater in my Raskolnikov attic, I worked on my first novel about my father and what crippled me.

I had wanted to be an artist since I drew that horse on the wall by my bed and then lost the boat I made in kindergarten when trying to sail it in the sewer beneath the grate by the curb. I dropped the string and it sailed into the underworld like Lawrence’s Ship of Death.

“Artist” meant my longing for the sky and falling in love with Saroyan’s Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze who starved to death like the suicides of Martin Eden and Hart Crane whose Voyages ended with the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

So too did I want to die, yet I kept writing as if words would save me, like Piero’s Baptism in The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, washed clean from my Slough of Despond.

A boy approaches and wants to watch how I butter my sky and meadow with the yellows and blues of my memories. He is my uncle, watching me survey the winter weeds as if they are the history my no-money work.

He is part black and brown and white like the African-American, Hispanic, and Arabic kids I sub in the Oakland public schools.

Where is he from? and he says Berkeley. He’s waiting for his mother who is parked by the road and has gone to the restroom in the Doubletree Hotel. He is the grandchild I never had and, when his mother arrives, she is an attractive woman, wearing earrings like the daughter I never had. And they leave.

The sun is sinking behind the clouds that flame like the apocalypse at the end of Blake’s Jerusalem, only a few minutes left of the golden rays, like the end of my life.

It sinks below the horizon and the clouds darken with deep purples like a bruise so beautiful I want to sink into them and never wake: darker and darker until the darkness swallows them and I must face another night alone, always alone.

Naked in the night we come/ Naked in the night we go/ Come to my arms, naked in the night

Western wind when wilt thou blow/ the small rain down can rain/ Christ if my love were in my arms/ and I in my bed again (anon.)

I can’t paint the night; it would be like trying to paint death: my father dying in a charity ward with his eyes looking at me like pebbles in water; my mother looking at me before she died when I didn’t know if she knew me or not.

Seventy years have I lived/ and never have I danced for joy, wrote Yeats.

There is no joy as long as I am an I. I longed for it since I was a boy, and now I am an old man in a winter’s night, failing again to catch the glow.

Try again, says the ghost of my uncle in the nightmare of history, the artist is one who dares to fail.

Awake, awake, O sleeper in the land of shadows, wake! expand!/ I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. (Blake)

Book Review: The Naked & The Nude

The Existential Nature of Millennial Anxiety

by Maia Miller-Lewis

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, L’âge de raison (The Age of Reason, 1945)

After having an especially anxious month, I started buying a plethora of books and reading voraciously in an attempt to assuage my mental funk. After a few duds, I landed on Sarah Bakewell’s Existentialist Café, partly due to my current obsession with Paris. Judging from the cover alone, I expected a relatively light read, detailing the idiosyncratic personal histories of some of the greatest European philosophers of the 20^th century. What I did not expect was to be confronted with some home truths about my generation and the way we are shaping culture.

At its core, existentialism is both a cultural movement and philosophy that emphasizes personal freedom. Spearheaded in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the theory places responsibility totally in the hands of the individual, giving each and every one of us agency over the decisions we make throughout our lives–“existence precedes essence.” The pressure is enough to give anyone heart palpitations, especially those just entering the adult world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that anxiety among teens and twenty-somethings is on the rise. It is practically impossible to go a single day without reading an article or a news bulletin detailing the latest crises in the mental health of young people, driven by a culture of achievement and a world that threatens individual safety.

Blame for this phenomenon is usually cast onto social media. As almost every aspect of our lives are now being tracked, recorded and turned into data, this argument has some merit. Apps such as Instagram can incite undue stress as a consequence of their compelling comparative nature. “… [S]elf esteem–and worldview–becomes connected to… posts.” Indeed, overexposure frequently leads to hermit-like retreats into duvets and Netflix, shutting out the world.

Yet to accuse social media alone of causing this generational trend is too reductive. Simply pointing the finger neglects to take into account the role played by the individual and their own existentialist freedom in inciting anxiety.

As our society becomes more and more interconnected, ironically, people are being more and more introspective. Rarely does a week go by where I don’t have a conversation with a friend, consoling them as they tell me how stuck they are feeling, how anxious they feel about the fact that their life is not moving forward fast enough. I often catch myself in the same pernicious thought loop. I will be agonizing over the fact that I haven’t achieved anything in the past week or the fact that I am not doing something during every waking moment of everyday.

Social media is a vehicle for these thoughts, but ultimately it the abundance of freedom that is the driver of the subsequent malaise. No one forces an individual to endlessly scroll, to stay up for hours just to stare at a florescent screen. We choose to do so, irrespective of the fact that we risk coming across a picture or tweet that will elicit deep-seated feelings of envious desire, thoughts of, “Why not me?”

“It is sometimes suggested,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “That existentialism… is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position.” It’s no wonder that the term “existential crisis” has entered popular culture as a punchline, a flippant way for individuals to explain why they have been in a funny mood all day. However, the generational misunderstanding of the tenets of existentialism are at play in 21st-century anxiety experienced by my generation.

What the term really highlights is the inability of people to put the phone down and just take a breath without explaining what they are doing and why. Even those individuals who do manage to remove themselves from the digital social sphere have to occupy themselves with something else to justify their absence.

The anxiety charging this dynamic is beginning to define our culture. Everything has to have a greater meaning beyond its mere existence. Everyone seems desperate to label themselves and define their actions by something more than simply what they are. Our understanding of “freedom” is inadvertently constraining us, overwhelming us with choice. Bringing wave after wave of exasperation and stress, we are constantly worried about making the wrong decision, fatalistic about the repercussions our decisions will have on the rest of our lives.

When I share my thoughts with those of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I find that they rarely had these concerns at my age – or were at least able to compartmentalize them. Life for them was a set of milestones, predetermined by their background and education. They were not blindsided everyday with images of the dramatically romantic lives lived by their “peers”: video and stills screaming, “This is what you should be doing/wearing/eating/watching.” They had a clearly defined structure–the here and now–less influenced by externalities.

My generation seems to have done the exact opposite, blaming ourselves for every perceived failure, every apparent lack, when the idea of freedom is the recognition that you are the sum of your choices and that you can start fresh with a new perspective.

If we fail to recognize and reawaken the tenets of existentialism, we are setting ourselves up to fail in dramatic style. If we ever hope to re-orientate ourselves, we must take control of our freedom. Choice can be a burden, but it is a fundamentally positive one. No one gets to choose the world, but everyone gets choose how they fit into it. Such a task, whatever way you look at it, cannot be undertaken behind a screen.

Editor’s Notes

by Heidi Varian

Change CHānj/noun

the act or instance of making or becoming different.

Change: what is normal and what is not?

Climate and extreme weather. Sea levels. Melting polar ice caps. Disappearing species and jungles and islands. The planet is changing at an accelerating pace. And those changes are driving a divisiveness of social convention unlike anything we have seen in the United States and around the world. We are in a period of great change across the globe affecting economies and social order. Widening income inequality. Brexit. The wild stock market. Gender relations. Race and culture. Standards of truth and behavior. The second Women’s March protesting this not-normal presidency came and went, as well as #MeToo, and March for our Lives, our children challenging our status quo. Each day, people check social media to see if the next change will be worse than the last. Change is natural and inevitable. But there has been a paradigm shift in this 242-year-old democracy. The past year, it seems like there is an alarm bell going off somewhere to which we should be paying attention.

But people are educating themselves about issues, creating grassroots movements of resistance, and being aware about environmental policies because we recognize that we have to stand up so that we have a future.

For this issue, we sought poetry, stories, and essays that recognize and respond to how change—personal, societal, environmental, global—is affecting our perceptions and worldview. We sought writing that starts a conversation about this new world order as we are coming to know it.

There is a love letter to America from an angry patriot, a philosophical treatise that challenges us to reach back into the long dim past of the Roman Empire to address a new societal paradigm, poetry that entices the reader to introspection, short fiction that inspires intimate evaluation, and essays that test boundaries, both literally and figuratively. The authors appreciate your comments, so create a free Sisyphus User ID and keep the conversation going.

Intellectual Honesty

by Thomas Metzinger

“Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself.” T.M.

I recently encountered Thomas Metzinger’s work in a podcast debate between the German philosopher and author Sam Harris (Waking Up) and became interested in his ideas. In finding out more about Metzinger, I ran across the essay excerpted below, which seems to be critical for understanding the nature of the current debates in the U.S. and world politics, e.g. the nature of truth, honesty, and spirituality; the debate raging around climate change and whether the human species will be able to grasp the nature of the problem soon enough to mitigate global catastrophe. Metzinger offers us some perspicacious insights and intellectual tools as a foundation for the problems and coming to grips with what the future holds, which, to my way of thinking, can help anyone who is interested in pursuing these matters (everyone should be pursuing these matters).—Ed.

Preliminary Remarks

We are currently undergoing the beginnings of a historical period of transition that will have a deep impact on our image of ourselves, and on many different levels at the same time. This accelerating development presents us with a profound challenge. A question of central importance is whether a “secularized spirituality” is possible (or even conceivable). Could a modern and spiritual self-conception do justice to this historical change in our image of ourselves and the desire (not just important to professional philosophers) for intellectual honesty at the same time?

In the external world, climate change poses a new and historically unique threat to humanity as a whole. As I write these words, this objective danger is barely perceptible. But today we already know for certain that even in a best-case scenario, it will last for several centuries. Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time in a single media-space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings. We will experience ourselves as beings who collectively and stubbornly act against better knowledge, who even under great time-pressure are unable, for psychological reasons, to act jointly and efficiently and to put the necessary formation of political will into effect. The collective self-image of the species Homo sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […]

Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of “inner decency”. Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. But intellectual honesty might at the same time also be exactly what representatives of organized religions and theologians of any type simply cannot have, even if they would like to make claims to the contrary. Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even to be able to know the unknowable while still having an unconditional will to truth and knowledge, even where self-knowledge is involved and even where self-knowledge is not accompanied by pleasant feelings or is not in accordance with the received doctrine.

Some philosophers conceptualize intellectual honesty as a virtue, as an “intellectual virtue” concerning one’s own thoughts and inner actions, as an ethical stance towards one’s thoughts and beliefs. Again, this involves moral integrity. It means that, as often as possible, one’s actions should be in accordance with the values one has adopted as one’s own—and it concerns the question of what one should believe in the first place. Adopting a belief as one’s own is itself an inner action, and one that it is possible from which to refrain. The spontaneous appearance of a belief is one thing, the active endorsement of this belief by holding on to it another. Aside from emotional self-regulation (the ability to purposefully influence one’s emotional state) and the ability to control the focus of attention, inner self-regulation also exists with respect to what one believes. Interestingly, infants only gradually learn to control their emotional states and the focus of their attention. But the kind of critical self-regulation involved in adopting beliefs as one’s own is something that even many adults are not proficient in and never fully master. Is it possible to enhance one’s autonomy, one’s inner freedom, by practicing and improving this particular type of self-control? This is exactly what is involved in intellectual honesty. And it is interesting to note that meditation aims to increase this very same kind of mental autonomy – namely, by cultivating a specific and effortless form of inner awareness. Meditation cultivates the mental conditions of possibility for rationality. It involves the inner ability to refrain from acting, the gentle but yet precise optimization of impulse control and the gradual development of an awareness of the automatic identification mechanisms on the level of conscious thought. Thinking is not about pleasant feelings. It is about the best-possible agreement between knowledge and opinion; and it is about having only evidence-based beliefs and about cognition not serving emotional needs. Have you noticed how the last two points suggest that all of this also involves abstinence, a special form of mental asceticism? And it reveals first points of contact to the spiritual stance. The central insight, however, is that the sincere pursuit of intellectual integrity is an important special case of the pursuit of moral integrity. More about this soon.

Whoever wants to become whole—a person of integrity—by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this principle with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their “epistemic actions,” their action for the sake of knowledge. We act “epistemically” whenever we strive for insight, for knowledge or true belief, for sincerity and also for authentic self-knowledge. As all meditators know, there is more than one form of inner knowledge, and inner epistemic action cannot simply be reduced to the intellect or to thought. This seems to be a first bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy. It is interesting to note that spiritual practice is much deeper, more refined and better developed in Asia than in the West. Occidental cultures, in the spirit of the enlightenment, increasingly developed and focused on the ideal of intellectual honesty. Let us look at four stages in the Western history of ideas in order to see this inner connection more clearly.

For the British philosopher John Locke, the desire for knowledge itself was a religious duty towards God: “He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and error…” If God really is a person, and one with such distinctly human properties as “intentions”, then he cannot want us to simply believe in his existence. He must want us to try to know of his existence. This nicely illustrates the philosophical idea that at the very beginning, intellectual honesty and striving for knowledge themselves still are religious duties towards God. On the other hand, for Locke, this also always involved acknowledging clear awareness of the limits of our knowledge—trying to go beyond these limits (for instance by trying to answer questions about the immortality of the soul) goes beyond our God-given intellectual powers. At the very beginning, philosophical honesty involves modesty. This is what Immanuel Kant would have said about honesty in general: The strict duty of honest comportment is “reason translated into social practice,” because it first creates the preconditions for mutual trust between the members of a society and thereby forms the basis of public order. I think the same could be true for the inner stage, for the protagonists of my inner life (that, as we all know, often resembles a civil war and sometimes even a completely uncivilized natural state, a war of each against all). How could this barbarism in my own consciousness be ended in a peaceful manner? What exactly is required to attain mental civility, an “inner state of civilization”? Maybe we could say that it involves “commitment towards oneself”—the foundation of an inner order for one’s own mind. In 1793, in “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” Immanuel Kant put this point in a completely different, but particularly beautiful manner. What is needed, he says, is the sincere intention of being honest towards oneself. The “sincerity” or “pureness” of the desire for honesty towards oneself is, I think, the central point. This point also provides the second bridge to spirituality: Now, at the very latest, you should begin to sense that a strict and altogether old-fashioned form of rationalism could have a lot to do with spirituality.

Kant even tells us that this form of intellectual honesty is the innermost core of morality in general. It is, as it were, the essence of the desire for ethical integrity. Here is how one put this in 1793: it is “the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity.” In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he put this point concisely and clearly: “. . . man’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being . . . is . . . truthfulness.” At this point, Kant can also explain what intellectual dishonesty is, namely a kind of “inner lie.” For Kant, dishonesty is simply a lack of conscientiousness. Lacking conscientiousness in the ethical sense of inner action is nothing other than a form of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness—a further, interesting connection not only to the spiritual stance, but also to the history of the concept of “consciousness” in the occidental tradition.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “conscience behind the conscience.” In 1883, he wrote in Zarathustra: “Where my honesty ceases I am blind and also want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also want to be honest, namely venomous, rigorous, vigorous, cruel and inexorable.” Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to really write about intellectual honesty, about “conscientiousness of the mind” as an ethics of cognitive action more narrowly conceived. It is interesting to note that, once more, this involves a certain form of asceticism, of letting go. For Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “culmination and ‘last virtue’” of the Greco-Christian history of ideas, because it leads to the self-annihilation of the religious-moral interpretation of the will to truth. What exactly does this mean? In its highest form, the desire for truthfulness allows one to admit to oneself that there is no empirical evidence of God’s existence whatsoever, and that in more than four thousand years of the history of philosophy, no convincing argument for the existence of God has emerged. It allows us to relinquish our search for emotional security and pleasant feelings, which has been hard-wired into our minds and bodies in the course of evolution, and admit that we are radically mortal beings with a tendency towards systematic forms of self-deception. Truthfulness towards ourselves allows us to discover the delusional and systematic denial of finitude, as expressed in our own conscious self-model. More about this point soon.

The philosophical debate in Anglo-Saxon culture has been considerably more profound, and analytically more clear and substantial. Let us look at the fourth example form the history of the concept of “intellectual honesty.” Today, the technical debate is conducted under the title of “The Ethics of Belief”—and this already reveals one of its most important aspects: When is it permissive, from an ethical and moral perspective, to believe in something specific, or to adopt a certain belief “as one’s own”? The British philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford was one of the first thinkers to ask this question, and subsequently became the founding father of this discussion, which is central to the distinction between religion and spirituality. His two main principles are:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
At any time, at any place, and for every person it is wrong to ignore or carelessly reject the relevant evidence for one’s own beliefs.

In academic philosophy, this position is simply called “evidentialism.” This means only believing things for which one actually has arguments and evidence. The philosophical counterpart is something we are all familiar with, namely dogmatism and fideism. Dogmatism is the thesis that “It is legitimate to hold on to a belief simply because one already has it.” In philosophy, fideism is the thesis that it is also completely legitimate to hold on to a belief when there are no good reasons or evidence in its favor, and even when faced with convincing counterarguments. Fideism is the standpoint of pure faith. For a fideist, it is legitimate to hold on to beliefs that not only lack any positive arguments or evidence in their favor, but even in the face of strong counterarguments and strong empirical evidence to the contrary. The interesting point now is that fideism can be described as the refusal to take any ethical stance on one’s inner actions whatsoever. It involves a lack of inner decency. And this is the classical standpoint of organized religion as opposed to spirituality. If one were to interpret these two epistemological positions from a purely psychological perspective, one could say that fideism involves deliberate self-deception, systematic wishful thinking or even paranoia; whereas the psychological goal of the ethics of belief consists in a certain form of mental health. I call this form of mental health “intellectual integrity.”

If you let yourself go and allow yourself to simply hold on to a certain belief in the complete absence of any positive theoretical or practical evidence, then you have already given up on the whole idea of an ethics for inner action. In doing so, you reject the project of intellectual honesty, and on the level of your own mind, you refuse not only rationality, but also morality. This not only changes your own opinions and beliefs, but causes you, the person as a whole, to lose your integrity. And this is what I meant at the beginning, when I said that intellectual honesty is what theologians and representatives of organized religions of any type simply cannot have. This sentence might have sounded like cheap polemics or deliberate provocation just for the sake of it. But it is really about a simple, clear, and objective point, namely the “principle of self-respect”—about how not to lose one’s dignity and mental autonomy. Importantly, this statement not only concerns traditional churches, but also a large part of the so-called “alternative spiritual culture.” Many of the movements that developed in recent decades in Europe and the United States have long lost their progressive impulse. Today, they merely stabilize or conserve the status quo and are characterized by an infantile complacency and crude forms of intellectual dishonesty. Anyone who is seriously interested in our question concerning the possibility of a secularized spirituality has to take all the relevant empirical data and all possible counterarguments into account. In 1877, the philosopher William Clifford claimed the following about anyone who is unwilling to do so by “purposely avoiding the reading of books and the company of men who call in question or discuss” their presuppositions: “The life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”

For the full annotated essay, “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” following the link below:

http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_SIR_2017_English.pdf

Re: One September Evening

by Barbara Joan Tiger Bass

the green tea steeped and a word
came to mind but slid out again
there was steam and dark French
chocolate with an essay, all after lunch

it started with L, if I recall correctly
and had a sense of ease to it unlike
the black hole concept which could rip
someone apart through a time warp

maybe it was languorous but that’s doubtful
because there were too many people to treat
for anything to stretch itself across thought
and despite the steam there wasn’t much heat

lynch doesn’t work in these beheading days
with real time being collapsed and inserted
through electronica which used to be considered
hooey as much as any bedangled medium hum

until the thrust of neuro-juice propels the recall
forward, these meager place holders will have to do
stand-ins all for that one linguistic specificity which
when said, or read, like lust will resonate nature