Socrates – Make Beautiful Choices

How To Inoculate Yourself Against Ideology

Today I’d like to start by expanding on a theme that came up in last week’s discussion of Faust: you don’t possess capital T truth as much as you divest yourself of expedient lies.

For context, Socrates used to refer to a little voice within himself (dæmon in Greek) that would object when he was about to say something dishonest, facile, or otherwise playing to emotion but lacking in rational substance. We call Socrates wise, and he was, because he obeyed this voice consistently.

What always struck me as the most notable quality of Socrates is the lack of an intuitive sense of rightness: the best he got was an absence of wrongness. No green lights, but either red lights or no lights at all, so to speak.

There is a parallel to this in Michelangelo’s statement that he removed everything that was not David, or Thomas Edison saying that he didn’t fail 10,000 times but rather found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.

The right way is there, and no matter how much marble you remove or methods you have to discard along the way, the one right way just happens to be the one that doesn’t feel wrong.

What you don’t do is invent it. You don’t invent it because you can’t invent its rightness, its efficacy, or its perfect proportionality: that feeling of yes, this is it (the actual lightbulb turning on) is discovered, not created. If it were created, you could have created a “wrong way” that worked, because you would have created a thing that also possessed the feature of “working.”

We all know this is not what happens: why else would it take Edison 10,000 iterations, or Socrates a few moments of reflection, or Michelangelo however many blows of the chisel: we cannot make untrue things true.

What I’ve just done is laid the groundwork to discuss the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching. The book of the way.

I look at the Tao Te Ching as the most effective means by which people can disabuse themselves of wrongheaded ideas, and, specifically, inoculate themselves against ideology. To stop reducing the world and everything in it to dogmas, doctrines, memes, avatars, slogans, and statistics, and start actually seeing the world as the world.

The world is already here, but unlike Michelangelo’s David, it is not latently present in rock and awaiting its liberation by our hands.

Unlike Edison’s lightbulb, we don’t need to go through 10,000 ways that don’t work before we can find the one real world.

It is actually something closer to Socrates: he didn’t say things he knew to be untrue, and we must stop believing in things that we know to be make believe.

The world is what you have left, what you always already have, when you stop ignoring it in favor of make believe.

This will all make a lot more sense after we’ve gone through the entirety of chapter 1 one idea at a time, which starts now.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Analysis:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

To just say the tired cliche once so we can move on: the Tao is beyond words.

What does it mean, then, to start a book with that statement?

There is already an invitation to think, and I can promise you that it goes farther than thinking about the ineffability of some great profound truth. That by itself, while it might feel grandiose or inspiring depending on your temperament, does nothing for you in practice.

What it asks you to consider is that what you are about to read is a book about the Tao. The book itself is not the Tao, the same way a book about apples isn’t an apple and can’t be eaten or planted or used to make pastries.

A book about apples, to someone who has eaten, or farmed, or baked with apples, however, would be quite interesting and valuable in its own way.

Words are words, and things are things. For words to really make sense, and not lead us astray, they must refer back to real things. They must illuminate them in some way, either through analysis, parable, or even something more poetic and abstract.

What words do not do is alter reality. Words are the map, but the world is the real unalterable thing we are trying to map with our words.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Here are two “terms of art” used throughout the text: “heaven and earth” refers to the greater backdrop of nature itself (mountains, the sky, oceans, the elements in general, the world in an inert sense), and “the ten thousand things” refers to the humdrum of activity, the bustling and coming and going of life, human society, the dynamic and demanding perpetual motion of the world.

The above lines are more here for clarification of terms and establishing, pardon me, a proprietary lexicon, rather than make a specific point.

If something is being said here, it is simply that language exists to help us navigate our world, and would be irrelevant and non-existent were we to be without the need to live and move about in it.

Again, words are not real in an absolute sense, but are perspectival in nature.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.

To continue with the theme of perspectivalism, the world looks the way it looks because of the things you want from it. When you’re in the mall and you’re trying to find Zara the other signs only have the meaning of “not Zara.” When you need to find the bathroom the blue and white rectangular sign with the slacks or the dress is the only symbol you see – the rest vanishes.

If our perceptions reflect our motivations, our physiology, our abilities, our societies, our threats and fears, how much does our language reflect those perceptions?

Language describes reality in a way that advances a particular agenda: it is a function of the desires we are actively working to fulfill.

If our desires were as simple as someone trying to find Zara or the bathroom, our language would be that simple (and when that’s truly all that’s at stake, our language is indeed simple).

Consider that people’s agendas are often quite a bit more complex than this, however.

People conceal things from themselves and others, and advance a specific version of themselves through social conditioning,
manners,
self image,
aspirations,
regrets,
the intent to appear
sexually available or unavailable,
interested or uninterested,
in agreement or disagreement,
confused or comprehending,
cooperative or hostile.

What people see in front of their faces has every bit as much to do with what they have or haven’t learned from the past and where they believe they’ll be in the future. What people see before them and what they do and don’t want from it is conditioned by time constraints, mood, social standing, relative familiarity with whatever is around them, and the history of their relationships with whatever they’re interacting with.

This is but the quickest and crudest of hints at what people have going on beneath the surface.

A person is like Omega Centauri: a globular cluster of thousands upon thousands of stars that looks like a single, unified star to the naked eye.

If the appearance of the world varies based on our varying desires, then there are as many worlds as there are people in it.

Well, not as many worlds, but as many maps of the world. Maps tell you how to get from one place to another, but the world itself doesn’t tell you anything.

Change your desires, and the manifestations change. The map of the world changes.

Am I saying that there is such a thing as living entirely in the world, without any reference to the abstraction of a map (a picture of the world made of concepts)?

There may or may not be, but I can tell you that every description of such a life, every church or workshop or online course or YouTube channel or tweet or cult leader or infographic or alien artifact telling you how to achieve it and why would be nothing more than another map.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. Whatever it is you’re saying, it is about the Tao, but does not in itself constitute the Tao.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

Lao Tzu is saying, to stick with my verbal device, that both the map and the terrain “come from the same source, but differ in name.” He then goes on to say that such a thing is confusing and mysterious. Well, I’ll say.

But we can neither claim a full understanding nor be content with our incomprehension: we must strain to grasp the just out of reach knowledge, and not “revel in ignorance as a maggot revels in pus” (thank you, Swami Venkatesananda, for that blinding gem of invective).

The terrain includes you, with your private map. It is a fact that you imagine the world as you do. Your imaginings may be illusions, but there is also the concrete fact that you operate under their sway. That you believe them is a concrete fact, that you act within the framework they create is a fact, and the consequences of those actions are also facts. How could it be otherwise? And so, the dream comes to life. The sleep walking man, whatever he sees in the dream, walks over to a real toilet or refrigerator or staircase or whatever.

And in this way, illusions are real. Both true and untrue, both ephemeral and concrete.

Unless you are willing to say that all illusions,
all delusions,
all forms of make believe,
all beliefs,
some noble and some nihilistic,
murderous and saintly,
are interchangeable solely because they share the quality of perspectival relativism,

then you must admit, at least provisionally,

that they have an unconditional reality to them in one respect: they are specific perspectives.

The line between the two, between mystery and manifestation, conditional and unconditional reality, objective and subjective, is therefore, at some level, not as distinct as we would have it.

These two spring from the same source, but differ in name: truth and illusion differ in name only.

He says it: this is the gate to all mystery, darkness within darkness. If you say you get it, you are lying. If you say you have no idea what he means, you aren’t even trying.

In conclusion, what do we do with the ideas we have just been occupying ourselves with? What is their value? I contend to you that their value is Socratic: they make the inner voice a bit louder and clearer when it seeks to stop us from capitulating to expedient falsehoods. We can temper our inescapable participation in perspectival relativism, in private illusions. In recognizing that illusion is the one universal currency we all traffic in, we can become a bit less bewitched by our own and a bit more interested in another’s.

Not for the sake of being persuaded, co-opted, intimidated or seduced, but for the sake of sanity. For the sake of avoiding a war between competing illusions, and for aiming at what is real and shared rather than what is private and illusory.

Society, civilization, culture – these are shared maps. Shared ways of organizing the world that factor in the realities we can’t escape and the illusions that comfort us in ways the bare terrain simply doesn’t (if you doubt this, show me one group of people who doesn’t participate in invented meaning).

The ever present danger that people pose to one another is the co-opting of public tools by private agendas.

We create something held together by abstractions, which is culture, so our personal impulses can be restrained and sublimated toward an idea of the greater good.

But because those abstractions are just that, abstractions, individuals can put pressure on them in all kinds of ways so that they change into a reflection of their own desires – not inherently a bad thing, but the devil’s in the details: we want more culture, more advancements in quality of life, higher standards of literacy, fitness, purposeful industriousness, research, and so on. What we don’t want, what no decent person wants, is for these collective word games to devolve into ideology.

Ideology is the brutish half wit cousin of culture, of thought. Culture makes life livable, makes life’s mysteries approachable from countless directions and thereby provides outlets and purpose to all temperaments and talents – ideology shrinks life into trite slogans and shuts off the noble impulse toward knowledge and self actualization that defines culture at its best.

Ideology shuts off thinking and drives base instincts toward exploitative ends, all while invoking principles, compassion, empathy, and tolerance. It only unites one group so that they might be mobilized against another.

It speaks the language of guilt, justice, resistance, restoration, oppression, victimhood – never of challenge, achievement, discipline, sacrifice, individual cultivation, skill, or wisdom. It parasitizes culture while animating us with the spirit of barbarism.

It can only be practiced collectively, never privately. Culture, in the sense that it is the opposite of ideology, is a system that creates personal enrichment through collective cooperation.

From one human to another: always be mindful of this difference.

The enduring value, for me, in my life, of remembering that the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, and that mystery and manifestation spring from the same source, is humility. Humility. Stupid, doltish, boorish ideology is what awaits every slob who believes he is gorging himself on the truth, like a pig burying its face in a trough of slop.

Believing that you know, that you own the real and are here to spread it, to lease it at a premium, to bestow it upon the great unwashed masses, is the path over the edge of the cliff, admiring your elegant map all the way down.

A sage bows before reality, no matter how dimly or partially he sees it. And in so doing, saves himself and others from harm. From all the harm that could have been prevented with just a bit more wisdom and a bit less falsehood.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon

Jas

I Read The Tragedy of Faust: Here’s What I Learned

Welcome back.

Earlier yesterday morning I finished reading one of the crowning achievements of western literature, The Tragedy of Faust, written by the German polymath Johan Wolfgang von Goethe between 1730 and 1790.

In today’s article, I’m going to give a brief overview of Goethe as a literary and cultural figure, provide a very general outline of the plot, summarize what the play has to say about the nature of good, evil, and redemption, and conclude with some reflections of my own.

Goethe (pronounced, more or less, Gur-ta) was German novelist, playwright, poet, scientist, critic, statesman, and even theater director.

His career is, therefore, beyond synopsis and not reducible to a single work, or even a single genre of writing. In every area of intellectual life Goethe touched, he is considered a master, and, in some cases, unsurpassed.

His influence on the German language and on the trajectory of the western literary world is hard for an anglophone reader to comprehend or relate to.

Perhaps, if Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, and Mark Twain were combined into one person, this might approximate the stature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

For these reasons, his tragic play Faust holds special significance. It is a life-spanning work, begun early in his life and concluded near its end.

The protagonist, Heinrich Faust, is clearly a representation of Goethe in many ways: a doctor and a scholar, whose studies and achievements have led him to the pinnacle of the European model of enlightenment, has nothing left to conquer.

Alone in his study, his quest for knowledge has alienated him from the world: not only has he not found happiness, fulfillment, or love, but he can think of nowhere else to look. He is experiencing, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”

He has followed the enterprise of truth seeking, as he understands it, to a dead end.

Late into the night, he thinks to turn to occultism. He opens a book of runes and symbols, eventually deciding to summon the Earth Spirit.

Faust may be an impressive scholar, even an authority, but he is out of his depth when the Earth Spirit materializes: he jumps with fright and cowers from it, embarrassing himself and drawing the ire of the apparition who is taken aback and disappointed by Faust’s temerity. He departs, leaving the would-be wizard dejected.

This is Faust’s lowest point: he is in fact contemplating suicide, seeing that he can no more be satisfied with academic knowledge than he can stomach the path of occult knowledge. He has nothing left.

At the last moment, however, he is interrupted by his servant, Wagner. They briefly converse, and his despair is not so much assuaged as it is dissipated. They decide to take a stroll through the town, now that the sun has risen.

It is here that the real plot of the play begins: a black dog approaches them, follows them home, back to Faust’s study, and then reveals his true identity: Mephistopheles, the devil. Or, as he describes himself, “the spirit that negates.”

After some back and forth, the world-weary and disaffected Faust sees in Mephistopheles an opportunity, and strikes a bargain with him: grant my every desire, always at my beck and call, until the moment I say “abide moment, thou art so fair.”

Faust is going to exploit the supernatural powers of Mephistopheles in one final attempt to find that which has eluded him all this time: that magical something that will finally quell his desire for more. If Mephistopheles can satisfy Faust, Faust’s soul belongs to Mephistopheles for eternity: the archetypal Faustian bargain.

The adventures that follow are humorous, grotesque, macabre, and also heartbreaking. He encounters a simple but virtuous peasant woman, Gretchen, with whom he becomes infatuated. Enlisting the dark powers of Mephistopheles, he eventually creates the necessary conditions to seduce her, and they have sex.

Because Faust is searching for the be all and end all of experience itself, however, he is not and cannot be satisfied with this, and abandons her to pursue other strange and dark phenomena with his enabling companion.

When he misses Gretchen and decides to visit her again, however, he finds that she has gone mad, and is awaiting execution. We learn that her encounter with Faust has irreparably destroyed her family, her sanity, and her life.

The sleeping potion that Faust gave to Gretchen’s mother to ensure that she wouldn’t wake up while they were having sex proved fatal.

The man that learned of their illicit rendezvous and died in a duel with Faust in an attempt to defend her honor was her own brother, Valentine.

Gretchen became pregnant with Faust’s baby and, both abandoned by him and left without any family on his account, drowned the baby and went mad. For the crime of infanticide, she is to be put to death.

While Faust is overcome with grief by what has happened to Gretchen, he does not truly love her, and is not prepared to sacrifice anything for her. He cannot save her conscience, but he tries to get her to escape the jail with him (made possible by the help of Mephistopheles). But for Gretchen, it is all over: she cannot live with what has happened, what she has done, and with the total loss of her own innocence and virtue. She stays, and dies. Faust leaves, to continue his quest.

This concludes part 1 of the tragedy. Part 2, heavily abridged in the Walter Kaufmann translation I read, concerns Faust and Mephistopheles traveling through time and to distant regions of the world, interacting with mythological and historical figures.

The play concludes with Faust, now a very old man, with the tragedy of Gretchen far behind him, now engaged in an ambitious project of land development, essentially taking on the work of civilization itself: conquering nature for the sake of human flourishing.

One elderly couple stands in his way, refusing to give up their estate to make room for his designs. He enlists Mephistopheles’ help, but his demonic companion goes too far and burns down their vineyard, killing the old couple.

For the first time, Faust expresses remorse, and is soon thereafter visited by the spirits of Want, Care, Guilt, and Distress. Care alone can reach him, and she immediately takes his eyesight from him.

It is here that Faust undergoes a sudden change: unable to see the results of his actions, he begins to direct the actions of others, not to the fulfillment of his desires, but towards what he intuitively knows to be “right” in a higher sense.

Essentially, he directs the men at his disposal to work at the limits of their ability, even the limits of their safety, in the service of work that is both beneficial and never ending. In the knowledge that men would undertake this task, at his behest, he says at last, verweile doch, du bist so schön! Abide, thou art so fair.

Faust then dies, and, before he can be taken away to hell, the sky opens and the angels remove him to heaven, where his spirit is reunited with the heavenly spirit of Gretchen.

Faust dies a reformed, enlightened man who has attained the true meaning of human life, and has exercised his accumulated power to pass it along. In so doing, his soul is redeemed, and the devil is cheated of his due.

And so the play is concluded.

Analysis

What does Faust get wrong? How does his path lead him from error to enlightenment? In what way does his ultimate realization excuse or redeem his previous errors?

Let’s start with the first glaring error: Faust is mistaken about both the nature of truth seeking and meaning.

Faust sees truth as a thing you can acquire. A commodity or currency that he stockpiles through taking on and mastering various fields of study. This is an incorrect path to truth, and I will now explain why.

The idea of seeking truth, as we understand it, could be said to begin with Socrates. There were pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, but they did not give us methods, only specific ideas – some of them still inspire us today, most are antiquated, but none of them can be called a system of thinking.

What Socrates gave us was a method by which we could inoculate ourselves against falsehood. A method of probing into facile statements that served a kind of scalpel of logic: whatever is unclear, shallow, or contradictory is cut away by the process of inquiry.

For Socrates, truth is whatever remains after untruth has been carved away by inquiry: resistant to paraphrase, summary, or sloganeering, the truth is subtle and dignified. It is not a possession.

The purpose of pursuing truth, from a Socratic standpoint, is to purge oneself of falsehoods, to say and do nothing that you know, deep down, to be flimsy, expedient, or manipulative.

This is not what Faust has done. Faust has lived his life like a kind of academic imperialist – going from one field of study to another in the hope that his lust for conquest will one day be sated.

In other words, what he is really seeking is technical mastery. Expertise. It is fundamentally acquisitive: something is missing in his life, and he believes that once he reaches a certain threshold, or perhaps unlocks one specific secret, that he will finally be at peace.

Why is this the correct understanding of Faust? Because of the terms of his agreement with Mephistopheles. He is willing to pay the ultimate price, the eternal fate of his soul, in exchange for the one experience that will make him say “abide! Thou art so fair!”

It should be said that Faust is intellectually arrogant. He believes himself to be above his fellow man, and believes the world to be incapable of offering him anything up to his standards.

Mephistopheles frequently mocks him for this, and we see that away that the promise of instant and total wish fulfillment is instantly and totally corrupting for Faust: he becomes so infatuated with Gretchen that he begins bossing around Mephistopheles in a way that almost elicits sympathy from the reader.

This poor little devil, made to do the bidding of this petulant and impetuous man, who has lost all sense of proportion of over the prospect of, pardon me, getting laid, and who senselessly lavishes a modest peasant girl with entire treasure chests of gold and jewelry, on a scale that brings her more embarrassment, suspicion, and social alienation than delight.

And, why is Faust so obsessed with Gretchen to begin with? Because Gretchen is good, simple, and pure. She has substance, but is not learned or sophisticated. She has a simple way of life, working with her hands and caring for immediate family.

She has what he lacks: dutiful, honest work and human connection based on love and mutual interdependence. She has a real life and real relationships.

An already enlightened Faust would have met Gretchen recognized this. Would have committed himself to her and gone through the necessary steps of winning her over, and winning the approval of her family.

But Faust wants to have her, not commit himself to her. This is the entirety of the difference between Faust and Gretchen: she has commitments, he has conquests.

If we are to learn anything from what happens to Gretchen, from her sorrow and madness at having been reduced to a vehicle for sexual experience while being left to deal with the real consequences of that – her brother dying in an attempt to vindicate her honor, her mother dying from a sleeping potion, her pregnancy and subsequent act of infanticide, and all of this happening without Faust by her side – it is that the promise of effortless wish fulfillment leads to tragedy and disaster.

What is it that ultimately redeems Faust?

Let’s hear it in his own words:

This is the highest wisdom that I own,
The best that mankind ever knew:
Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.
Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives,
Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives.
At such a throng I would fain stare,
With free men on free ground their freedom share.
Then, to the moment I might say:
Abide, you are so fair!
The traces of my earthly day
No aeons can impair.
As I presage a happiness so high,
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Let’s break down what this isn’t. He doesn’t find faith. He doesn’t commit himself to a woman. He doesn’t find meaning, necessarily, in charity or “selfless service” either.

What he finds is a categorical change in where meaning is sought, rather than in what. There is no longer any what at all, but a how. Not in acquisition, not in knowledge, not in experiences, not even in the nature of the rewards or consequences.

Redemption is found in the process of giving the moment one’s all, one’s total effort, with nothing held back. “Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives.” Real activity, with real stakes. Work that must be renewed daily. The opposite of accumulation, and, actually, the opposite of achievement in the way we think of it.

Faust comes to understand that no single experience or achievement or acquisition relieves the need for daily exertion toward worthy ends: his error, all along, was the belief that there is such a thing as satisfaction, cessation, or arrest.

Oddly enough, his final understanding is an echo of one of his musings early in the play:

It says: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act.

Faust speaks these lines moments before the black dog reveals itself to be Mephistopheles, reinforcing the blasphemous nature of the statement. What Faust’s final speech makes clear is that his emphasis on action was right all along, but not the spirit in which it was undertaken.

The deluded Faust of this early monologue dreams of the power to hold dominion over his world, but the enlightened Faust sees that only in the performance of the action is redemption to be found.

This realization stands outside of any commentary on what one should do, and toward what ends. It leaves the question of ends off the table altogether. And, it must be so: Faust has gone to the ends of the earth, backwards and forwards through time, in search of what, and has found nothing. Nothing real, nothing final.

What he finds is not quite the act, in the sense of cause and effect, in the sense of agency and mastery, but action itself: primal, atemporal, total, immersive, vigorous.

It can be said that this understanding is redemptive because it leaves no room for the corruption of one’s motives, because there is no motive. There is no reward. The total immersion in the action itself is the reward:

Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.

Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.

-Jas

PS – I explore ideas like this because it brings my life into alignment with my ideals. My inner picture of who I am and how I want to live in the world.

I share my thoughts publicly because I want to encourage others to do the same: to make the necessary changes that will bring the outer into harmony with the inner. This is happiness, self respect, and purpose.

To that end, I also create short form content on X/Twitter dealing with psychology of self development, and I’ve recently created a free 5 day educational email course on the same topic, “Self Development Cheat Codes.”

It goes over the 5 biggest mistakes people make when they decide they want to get their lives together, and I provide 15 specific frameworks to guide people along their journey. If you’d like to have more of a concrete method at your disposal, get the free materials here.

Thanks again.