Living a philosophical life
On the bedroom wall, across from the chair I use for taking off and putting on my socks and shoes, I’ve hung an ink-paint reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
I first saw the famous work about 50 years ago, hanging over the fireplace mantel of a new friend, Ken, one of the most remarkable people I have known. He died two weeks ago, after experiencing sustained physical pain during the end of a singular life of existential suffering, intense sentiments, exalted thoughts and peak experiences.
Ken frequently spoke of “my great teachers”: Nietzsche, Jung, Beethoven, Wittgenstein and Nikos Kazantzakis. I might have gotten that wrong. Herman Hesse also was a powerful influence, and it may have been Hesse who was the fifth. In any case, the artist in Ken—and despite his deep philosophical engagement, he knew himself as an artist—resonated strongly with Kazantzakis.
Kazantzakis’ epitaph—I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free—could easily be Ken’s, but, more appropriately, also his living motto, just as it had become Kazantzakis’s after his immersion in Nietzsche.
We’re talking here about giant travelers striding through and above the fog of life. And here, I include Ken. He looked like Socrates and was the first philosopher who actually lived philosophy whom I have known personally.
His thought and his beyond-thinking were his life. When making a point, he frequently quoted his five great teachers, usually in answer to a question. When sometimes a hearer would say, “Don’t tell me what someone else thinks; tell me what you think,” he would draw up his short barrel chest and say, “It IS what I think.”
And this prompts me to tell the single greatest thing I took from our dialogues. Invariably, when I would ask for his take on something of import to me, he would close his eyes and sit silently for a couple of minutes before saying, “This is what I think. It’s only what I think. It’s just what I think. It’s what I think.”
In time, I grew impatient with its constant resaying, especially in the heat of some seemingly urgent issue. One day, I agitatedly burst out with, “I know it’s what you think! You don’t need to tell me that over and over. Just say it!”
Regretfully, I don’t remember how he responded. My best guess is that he probably opened his eyes, turned his head and gazed at me in mild umbrage. He would typically be seated in his armchair with his arms resting on its arms; while I would be sitting off to his right, under his The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Then he patiently related what he thought.
I don’t remember how much time went by in my own herky-jerk, auto-didactic education, but likely more than a few years passed until one day I shot up in a scalp-sweaty start of recognition: I was seeing that of all the wonderful things he had imparted, the most penetrative and illuminating came in the packaging, not the package:
IT’S JUST WHAT I THINK! IT’S ONLY WHAT I THINK!
The capacity for thought to be constituent of, if not the entire smoke generating machine of the very sea of fog it seeks to penetrate, ran through my awareness like a Times Square illuminated word ribbon.
There’s infinitely more I could say about Ken because his persona was directly wired into the infinite, while momentarily expressing as Ken. Not that that wiring isn’t true for all of us and for every thing and moment, but with Ken the “direct” aspect was his near constant awareness. I have never met a person more completely at home in his experience of self, just as it is, as whole.
Ken wanted it all. As it came. In whatever form. As expressed in Report to Greco by Kazantzakis, the below also could be said at least in part by Ken:
The faith most devoid of hope seemed to me not the truest, perhaps, but surely the most valorous. I considered the metaphysical hope an alluring bait which true [people] do not condescend to nibble. I wanted whatever was most difficult, in other words most worthy of [people], of the [person] who does not whine, entreat, or go about begging. Yes that was what I wanted. Three cheers for Nietzsche, the murderer of God. He it was who gave me the courage to say, that is what I want!
Maybe, out of compassion, we will not leave it there, in all its blunt glory. Our “sophist minds” may not immediately grasp the nuance that accompanies this deicide. For Nietzsche, Kazantzakis, and Ken, the God deserving of murder is a conceptual imposter, an idol propped up as a god, a fantasy conjured to assuage the pains, sorrows and griefs which are acknowledged and subsumed in every wisdom tradition’s most profound expressions.
Ken did, and we can, stand on the shoulders of giants like Nietzsche, Kazantzakis, Beethoven, Wittgenstein, Jung, Hesse, and more. Stand in our full selfhoods, just as we are, with whatever measure of thought and feeling is ours, accepting the whole of us in the whole of it. And that “it,” so much vaster and unbounded that all it-ness blooms into a radical subjectivity, yet also known as Michael, Judy, Mitch, Neil, John, Melinda, Jerry, Frank, Carol, Esther, Rick, Eiko and all the nine billion names of God.
Just as we are, so as it is.