Developing Personal Principles
Week 26: Experimenting with Absurdsm
Accept the Absurd.
Embrace your freedom.
Live with Passion. (We’re transitioning to here)
Keep fucking going.
I don’t know how you’re feeling on this journey we’ve begun (please tell me), but for me, accepting absurdity was easy. That Step 2 has been a bitch. I struggled for 13 essays (it’s taken me 37 weeks to write them) to tell you how the hell to live, what rules are important, and explored morality through Kant, Mills, Bentham, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Spinoza, de Beauvoir and what I can tell you is most these hoes had no clue. Closest I found was Aristotle’s Ethics, but moreso Nietzsche and Ethics of Ambiguity, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols hit some spots for me. What I’ve learned is that to embrace your freedom you have to explore and identify own guiding principles.
I can’t tell you what your Principles should be. Mine are summarized by saying that I think if most people lived how they wanted, thought good thoughts, accepted absurdity and all it’s consequences, took responsibility for themselves and those in their immediate vicinity with fewer faculties (or broader if you’re a broader thinker/actor), tried to be helpful and loving, considered their species and loved one’s feelings, established their own principles but didn’t get bogged down by them - we’d be aight.
Adherence to said principles isn’t precise because context flavors everything making hard and fast rules very hard to come by. I don’t have a calculator to tell you exactly what situations call for what degree of responsibility or care or unfuckwithability. You gotta wing it mostly, but developing your moral system and applying it is kinda the sauce of life.
I found each day/week my principles manifest with variety and because of my variability, I need regular checkins with myself where I can catalogue my actions and thoughts. I’d say this process has been the primary factor (besides my loving husband and probably some funky genetics) that has driven my “success”. Over time, I’ve identified patterns. I don’t really consider these morals, but rather tenets. The hard part for me is crystalizing these, but I’ve come up with some core ideas that I want to explore a bit more in the next few issues:
Challenge over Comfort (most of the time)
Music and dancing are supreme conduits
Institutions are separate evolutionary layer on top of biology
Ideas are Weapons
Freedom is limited, but still exists
Philosophy must do actual shit
Laughter is Shelter
Production/Consumption should balance (Quality and Quantity)
Virtuous Relativism can help us get closer to the truth
Liberating deposition is the equal and opposite of Marcuse’s Repressive Desublimation and it consists largely of antagonism
Art is a state of being
Guilt is good if it sublimates into remorse, action, recovery, and restitution
She who thinks she touches the asymptote of Truth can be farther away than an unwitting wanderer
Love as feeling follows love as action
Active thinking is the norm in the 21st century.
Demonstrative autodidactism is the current standard pedagogy
A little Experiment: Start a Word doc or notebook the next time an aphoristic thought occurs to you. Don’t worry about if someone’s already said it. Just write it down. For me, these come up when I’m primed with an intriguing piece of media (book, podcast, video, etc) Keep writing them down and more will come and set aside time to think about your actions (maybe a R & R workshop, eh?) and see what patterns emerge.
I’m elated about this next section. I’ve been writing pieces about Art, Science, Love, Learning… and they all fit into the next section because my entire goal will be about living, which is much easier than extracting the principles from the act - what I’ve tried to do over the last 12 editions.
Stay tuned for the next piece (Week 27) about Arendt’s The Human Condition, and tune in for our daily readings as always. We just started Bruno LaTour’s Science in Action today at 4pm on TikTok Live.
My Full Reading List if you’re interested
Not sure what you'll think of this, but my sense is that you've not reached the satisfaction levels you expect in this quest.
I think your number 3. is overwhelmingly taking over the rest of your 4 initial points and somehow trying to compensate for the other 3.
1. If you accept the absurd, it is no longer absurd and does not deserve a mention.
2. Embracing freedom is a necessity, a necessary reason 'à la Spinoza', and should therefore be an enjoyment of sorts not a burden.
3. (Passion) I've already mentioned above and, in my view, is overrated.
And 4. I totally agree with. It is the only one that makes sense to me practically and philosophically.
By the way, the core ideas you've listed in your piece are relevant today and in the future, some of them are groundbreaking, and all are worthy of research benefitting us all. Keep going!!
Apologies for the direct reply but your passion is contagious.
Yeah I totally get it I feel like we clean the garage out every month and it never gets cleaned to my satisfaction because we're so busy doing stuff we should have kept up with all month. But that's our system and if that's all the time we want to dedicate to that then those are the results we get. If I were to dedicate time every weekend to putting things in the rightful place it wouldn't be so bad every month, but that's just not my process. I'm not really about guilt for Guilt sake. guilt when transmuted into action can be useful but it should be changed rather than just sitting stagnant so either you have to change the guilt you feel for Stuff being everywhere or you have to change the stuff being everywhere. You could look at it a little differently and say my creativity comes about from my messy patterns, and then you wouldn't have to change anything, but if there's something that's bothering you then you probably should change some things. It was great to see you today💕