The key challenge and the question life asks from all of us– that religion, philosophy and art treat in their own, arguably complementary ways – is how to live well.Religions are doctrinal support systems for patterning life into an art ofrituals for participation in the sacred time that mirrors a sort of eternitywhere hearts find rest or fulfilment/salvation. Art reconciles us to life by unearthing its beauty while goading us toits riches that we find irresistible. Philosophy provides cognitive resourcesfor clarifying what we really want and living without illusions whileappreciating our limits and interpreting our dreams and myths. It is to thislast task that the slim but provocative and scintillating volume of aphorisms,apothegms and apologues Creative Obsession: Philosophical Life in BroadDaylight invites us. Forcing on us a soum (fast)/hard discipline of the mindwith little regard for our fears and sentiments and daydreams, one is rewardedwith a feast of insights and hard won wisdom of those doctors who treatdiseases of the mind with cathartic and purgative agent of doubt and irony.
Our philosopher of the week, Viator E. O’Leviter, notes that”Phenomenal success, truckloads of money and lots of great sex are nice thingsto have, and so naturally, we want them desperately. But what most peoplereally want, beyond all the obvious trappings, is to have interesting,positively fascinating lives.” Boredomor monotonous routine of life is killing. But “humans are absolutely nuts tohave interesting lives.” What stops us from living with gay abandon,creatively, soulfully and “experience the most engrossing, astonishing events”and “why do so many irrepressible souls grow so amazingly decrepit?”
The plausible answer suggested is that “we succumb to ourfears. We feel it in our bones that an interesting life is a dangerous desire.”How to cultivate this deliberate and consuming engagement is what is, for him,the philo¬sophic life. Cultivating “clarity of thought, courage of choice and acircumspect knowledge” philosophy has offered us “a noble, perilous ethic,where one’s own existence might become one’s own creative obsession.” O’Leviter invites us to take plunge into lifeand dissolve the nagging worries that have been raised by those who have seenlife from a distance and taken refuge in certain abstractions and habits ofmind and body.
The protagonist and narrator of this work is Homer Dogg who is “a hardcore traveler, an honest scholar and aninfatuated artist.” The book is not for everyone but for those who have tradedfame and honour with infamy of love like Hafez and have chosen to be dancersinstead of preachers like Rumi and those who, like the Shakespeare of Keats,have the virtue of negative capability or Khayamian knack for living withuncertainty.
This book of aphorisms is dedicated to “the fearless artistsand epic travelers who got there first” and seeks to wean us away fromcomforting illusions that fail to sustain thorough going analysis. One recallsBuddhist and other great Masters and adventurers of consciousness who haveinvited us to plumb the depths of life by peeling away layer after layer ofcocoons of ego and other “fillers of void” or shams of civilization. However,it doesn’t offer us a classical mystical or other exit out of the abyss andchaos when grandiose system making projects wedded to naïve and prosaicunderstanding of language and reason have seemingly crumbled. “How embarrassing when I catch myselfbelieving that I know the truth of my faith. Just like some fully functioningfanatic, I think in terms of “belief,” “knowledge,” “truth” and “fai¬th” all atthe same time (white noise of the brain), and the gods appear again before melike doting slaves and magic elves. Once again, I have mistaken a moment ofextreme confusion for a moment of crystal clarity. It happens all the time,this wishful thinking.” While one may take exception to the dogma ofreductionism (jarring “white noise of the brain”) as the author himself wouldpropose for the sake of consistency, it is striking to note that sages likeSankara and Ibn Arabi have warned against fixation with absolutes that arelinguistically or textually posited and proposed that our deliverance and truefaith (gnosis) lies in absolute openness to experience and steering clear ofevery interpretation of that which is/which is encountered.
Every aphorism makes a point that compels one to pause and,in most cases, one feels like agreeing and if not agreeing, somehow jolted outof complacent posturing of ideologies and systems. A few shorter aphorisms onemay note for an appreciation of style and method that is ably clarified inlongish “Afterword” by the author.
The first we note (“Last Act”) describes terminal moments ofsomeone facing death while plane crashes.
“‘God forgive me! God save me! Why this, God? Why now? Whymeeeeee!? Oh please, please God forgive me all my sins!’
So screamed and sobbed
the mission’ry,
Who was sitting in 26-D,
While the flaming jet-plane
plummeted down,
Into the icy sea.
Life is strange. The hysterical young man never had thechance to conceive that his pitiful begging was useless in the eyes of God,except to show finally the wanton shallowness of his God-fear¬ing soul, and thebottomless conceits of a mind so willingly mired into blind faith.”
Indeed thiscriticism of feigned or forced piety in the face of death is warranted when Godhas merely a use value as distinct from being our ultimate concern and isinvoked to save one’s concocted projects of ego to resist nothingness/reality.
Our second example is titled “Hero Worship.”
“Every lie, blasphemy, snafu, error and false assumptionever devised by human beings started out as something that was supposed to betrue to somebody.
The Goddess of Truth is a poor and eternally abusedcreature. She is covered in mud, battered and bleeding. Yet once again we willdress her up, unwashed, in new shining armor, then throw her back down into thepit and imagine she’s up on some magnificent pedes¬tal, resplen¬dent andinvulnerable.”
While portraying philosophic life for “thefirstborn of the Third Millennium” Creative Obsession celebrates life ofcreativity and passion that basks in the open sky (of “transcendence”). Itmarshals battery of arguments against those who sell ideologies andinterpretations under the label of truth. Here are a few for consideration ofthose self-righteous people who claim they know (and act as advocates of God orsecretaries of the prophets):
“Surely there must exist, within this finite uni¬verse, anabsolute “epistemological” limit to human understanding and the ultimate”ontological” theory-of-everything. .. But where would such a limit and such atheory be found? (Not in musty passages. Not with our nascent language.) TheHoly Grail lies buried under megatons of ash, in a brutal, terrifyingwilderness, and it’s still a hundred thousand light years away—the ends of theuniverse are all but unexplored, so many genera¬tions are not yet born, and somuch of the human experience remains invisible.” “..all that is out there ispure awesomeness.”
Avoiding airy abstractions and temptation to dream beautifuldreams, the book appropriates resources of human, all too human view toconfront our tragic lot squarely. “We shall rest upon sweet, eternal dreams ofPeace on Earth. Or we recognize the greater challenge and the greater hope—weseek to change the rules of war.” “There is no peace, only peaceful moments, ina life well led.” “There’s no such thing as traveling back. Always take a goodlook. Every look is a last look.” “My personal advice? Avoid the system.” “The cosmos does not need our permis¬sion toexist. The mountain doesn’t care. The climber is truly alone.” Few know thatdreams or hopes often sold to us in the name of exoteric religious heritageare, for mystics/sages, clutches or worse idolatrous fillers of the void we arerequired to transcend to grow spiritually.
The book alerts us tothe role of philosophy as a gadfly that disturbs the given or assumedstructures/interpretations. Philosophy’s sacred task is to bear witness to gapsand absences, to what is new, to unthought and what remains on the margins andresists totalization or pigeon holing in familiar categories. A consistent”skepticism” will be skeptical of its own claim to assume God’s view of thingshuman and divine and leave room, happily, for any discipline or inquiry orconviction that is able to face tribunal of reason/experience and passaesthetic and tests that humans have consensually valued. One emerges healthier– immune for life – after encounter with the virus of doubt.
One may better appreciate the endeavor of “skeptical” trendsin various philosophical cultures to which our philosopher invites us by notingthat sages and poets of all cultures have invited us to ask questions and asVoegelin would note, God/Consciousness/Transcendence may be better taken as aQuestion. The consensus of the dead and the best of living philosophers acrosscultures remains that beneath every ruin of civilizational projects andgrandiose objectives set by certain ambitious minds, man’s unconquerable mind(to recall title of wonderful work of Gilbert Highet) asserts its claim to stayand live singing on the way. In its task to help us navigate dangerouscircuitous bylanes of life, philosophy avoids taking its own positions buthelps to show how credible are the signposts we find erected on the way. Takingcognizance of (post)modern sensibility that is alert to pathologies of humanlyposited absolutes without buying modern and postmodern arguments for a radicallyhistoricist view of conscious experience, we can, with Voegelin, assertthat we are, primordially, ceaselesslyself transcending creatures constituted by the creative “ten¬sion” ofquestioning and that “Consciousness isin essence the Question itself, arising from wondering ignorance and continuingto press beyond every¬thing that comes to be known.” Doubting claim toabsoluteness of every discursive conceptual or linguistic construction, dis-identifying with every thisor that projection/manifestation of consciousness, remaining open to therevelations of being in every experience and embracing only the absolute ofintellection/intelligence that knows/judges/doubts we approach doubts andquestions on the way as artists and consecrate or “justify” life by on aesthetic plane. And it is indeed afascinating life open to wonder and beauty.