Philosophy Is The Talk On A Cereal Box
Entry 1
"Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule."
--Schopenhauer
I mean. . . I should have read philosophy earlier. I spent a good deal of time reading and not understanding Nietzsche as a teenager and in my early 20s. I had some notion, obviously pretentious, that reading Nietzsche somehow proved I had some intellect. I never once understood it. I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, and God knows what, if anything else. I made sure I had the right translations, but I may as well have been reading Greek. And, given what I
Don't get me wrong, I have read masses of critical theory, more than I care to admit. Everything. Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, a compendium of radical feminist theory, black, latinx and asian feminist thought. I have read Chomsky, Herman and Parenti, Rousseau, Burke and Mill. I immersed myself in Kenneth Arrow and Doug North, Wm. Grieder, Kevin Phillips, and Doug Bartlett. I read the entire oeuvre of bell hooks (all articles and books up to about 1996). I subscribed to magazines and newspapers and read them cover to cover. The Village Voice, where I watched Nat Henthoff turn into a free speech absolutist and read the likes of Gary Indiana and Donna Minkowitz every week for years. I read left wing journals, compendia of world news, learned more about arts and letters independently than I had ever thought to know. I read The Nation every week from 1981 until I was married, and then sporadically thereafter. I read endless tracts in Z Magazine from the time it was founded until I was married. I read everything I could get my hands on. I used to regularly read COVERT ACTION Bulletin, which was sold at the newsstand at the market, to learn about all the covert actions the United States was engaged in. The list goes on. I wanted to know everything.
I was such a voracious reader of theory before I went to college, the reading when I arrived while daunting, was much more easily accomplished. It didn't hurt that I wanted to learn political economy and learn how to end sexism and racism and queer-hating, given my reading predilections. That said, I had read nothing (save Nietzsche) on philosophy qua philosophy.
I told my therapist two years ago, when she asked me to describe what a happy life would look like, that I rejected the notion that the purpose in life is to be happy. I ascribed this belief as rather Russian in outlook. I really mean Dostoevskyish, but you get the idea. I think that, as the title of this blog's first post on the subject of Jenny's cancer states, life really is a cascading series of losses. All that really changes is the size, scale, and timing of the losses. I don't write this feeling pity, but in realization that the idea misfortune is the general rule as Schopenhauer posits, is spectacularly insightful. Jenny embodied this, she would mourn the end of each vacation on the first day of vacation every time we'd go anywhere, sad it would end. It would drive me nuts. But who doesn't feel sad when vacation ends and the dull routine of the day to day makes itself present once again? When we rear children, we recognize that the person they are today will fall away a little bit each day, loss of the irretrievable, loss which inevitably leads us to think of the ultimate loss of self.
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