“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Aristotle

When you do philosophy, you’ve got to have two different mindsets in your toolbox because true philosophers have to bring both out at different times. Let’s talk a bit about what the curious and critical mindsets are and why they are so important to philosphers.

Curious Mindset

This is the mindset you must have when you begin thinking about a topic area. It’s the open, trusting, mindset where you don’t judge ideas, but you explore and consider them. As the quote about suggests, the curious mindset is about entertaining an idea. It’s how you would think if you’re best friend came to you and said - “Look, what I’m about to tell you is crazy, but just listen and bear with me while I explain”. While he launches into is outlandish and unbelieveable story, you reserve judgement and let him talk, because you believe that he isn’t crazy and perhaps it could be true.

Critical Mindset

This is the mindset you have when you are analyze and deciding where you fall on an issue or topic. This is where you poke and prode an idea, looking at the assumptions behind it, the implications of it, and the logic that holds it together. This is the mindset you have when you are listening to your teenager tell you why she didn’t get her final project finished on-time or what she was really doing this past Saturday night. You are questioning everything she says, double-checking facts, and making sure the entire story fits together reasonably well.

As you strengthen both these mindsets, you’ll become a stronger philosopher - one who is able to accept somewhat strange conclusions if they come from sound reasoning, and is able to tear apart our most basic beliefs about the world and show them to be false. Success-Driven Philosophy is about using truth to move our lives forwards. With strong critical and curious mindsets, we can better understand what the truth really is.

I picked up an Oxford University Press book called A Very Short Introduction to: THE MEANING OF LIFE.* The first section of the book asked - what are we really asking when we ask “What is the meaning of life?” (Hereafter WML) And is there even a way to answer it?

On this blog, we try to provide practical answers to philosophical questions. The question WML? is at once a practical and impractical one. On one hand, some of the people who ask it are desperate for answer because they think it will give them a reason for living. On the other hand, there is no doubt that some people never give this question a second thought, and wouldn’t want to know the “official” answer even if there was one.

• Let’s consider two other “meaning” questions:
• “What is the meaning of trees?”
• “What is the meaning of that sentence?”

The first question seems more like WML, than the second. The first question is unanswerable - how can trees of meaning?**. The second is answerable - we want to know what the writer intended to communicate when putting those words down. The question of WML assumes that there is some kind of meaning for life. But it seems that meaning requires an intelligent agent who provided the meaning. This may be a no brainer for theists, but for agnostics and atheists like us, the intelligent agent thing isn’t happening.

Perhaps meaning is just the wrong word then. Josh and I both agree that often philosophy boils down to semantics. What if we change meaning to “purpose” or better yet “point”. What is the purpose/point of life? (WPL). I like that better. While meaning is internal, purpose is external. Let’s look at our two sentences again:

• What is the purpose of trees?
• What is the purpose of that sentence?

The first one is now somewhat answerable - one might say the purpose of trees is to absorb water, sunlight and CO2, and release O2. The second one is also answerable - one might say the purpose of the sentence was to transition from the previous topic to the next one. You might debate my answers to the question, but you at least can recognize that they are reasonable.

When we ask WPL - we are inquiring about our function is, about our duty, about our role to play, the person we are to be. It asks outwards instead of inward. Even if I still don’t have answer to WPL for you, we’re asking the right question, and therefore closer to what we were looking for.

*Oxford has published a whole series of VSI’s on various topics, and they generally good primers for the given topic. At least, this one was.

** Unless you are asking it in terms of the metaphorical meaning of trees in a novel in a form of literary analysis. In which case I think what you’re asking doesn’t reallly matter, unless you are trying to get a good grade on your 10th grade english paper.

I’m quite busy at the moment because I’m preparing for final round interviews at a boutique management consulting firm. I’ve realized that doing philosophy and the interview process for consulting are very similiar.

Recruiters at consulting firms employ what’s called “Case Interviews” to evaluate potential applicants. In a case interview, the applicant is given a prompt and asked to analyze the situation. Prompts include

• Your client is a US auto manufacturing firm that has lost profitability. How would you advise them?
• Your client is a consumer products group that is interested in entering the cleaning product market. Should they enter and if so, how?
• If you were to redesign the NYU Public Library System today, how would you do so?

The applicant must then ask clarifying questions, produce and test hypotheses, perform quantitative analysis, and finally provide recommendations about what the client should do and why. All on the spot, in the span of 20-30 minutes.

So how is this like doing philosophy? Consider what we said in our manifesto about the 7-step method about doing philosophy :

Define the question, find, intuit and test your starting point, do logical progression, investigate inconsistencies and revise the starting point. All in the name of action. Consider the similarities between the two processes.

• Both involve asking good questions
• Both involve hypothesis-driven investigation
• Both involve digging deeper into an issue or situation
• Both involve thinking for the sake of doing

Once this is over, I’d like to write a longer post than this, but suffice to say philosophy and case interviews both try to convert fuzzy ideas into clear, logical thinking to drive action.

“A category of philsoophers is on the rise: I shall be so bold as to christen them with a name that is not without its dangers. As I divine them, as they allow themselves to be divined (for it is part of their nature to want to remain a riddle in some respects), these philosophers of the future might rightfully — perhaps also wrongfully — be described as experimenters. And this name too is ultimately only an experiment, and, if you like, a temptation. Are they new friends of ‘truth’, these approaching philosophers?” - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Whether you like it or not, you are an experimenter. You are doing the tests. You are watching society live out both the true and the false. You are a living hypothesis surrounded by tangential theses. The only question is, are you taking notice? Are you learning from it and implementing what you’ve learned? I can think of nothing more useless than a scientist carrying out experiments without analyzing his/her data.

Success-Driven Philosophy in action today…

I’m currently studying somewhere around 9 hours a day for my anatomy final. Its miserable to say the least. If I didn’t have a strongly held SDP, if I hadn’t fully explored my values, I would quit, and I would later regret that decision.

When I watch television or movies, I always consider the fact that it’s art imitating life. Of course it’s exaggeration, but there is some significance to every story. We find in comedy, the humorous parts of life. We are able to take ourselves less seriously. We find in drama, the depth of our being. We find in horror, that there is more to fear than fear itself. We find in romance, the importance of human interaction, and sometimes it’s pitfalls. We find in reality television that, “hey, maybe I am crazy, but at least I’m not as wacked out as New York, Flava, or EVERY cast of Real World.”

I’m not sure what you would classify Grey’s Anatomy as. I do know that I hate every single character on the show. They are all people consumed with their own petty dilemmas. The catch is, they should know better than anyone else how unimportant their problems are, and how unhindered their tasks of living have been. This weeks episode had people with the following disorders: aortic aneurism (often fatal), malignant pancreatic cancer (usually fatal), hepatic cancer with severe metastasis (definitely fatal), severe chronic headache lasting SEVEN YEARS, and I’m sure a couple of others.The bulk of the episode is centered around these things, and the fact that the main character cannot decide whether or not her boyfriend moving in with her means she should tell her roommates to move out of the house. Are you seeing the stark contrast I’m seeing.

My issue, is that these people, surrounded by misery, pain, death, all of the unfair aspects of life, seem completely unable to keep their own petty concerns in perspective. Is this art imitating life? Perhaps. Perhaps it reflects our inability to remain unincumbered by the festering inanities we allow to become human drama. Still, it makes me a little ill.

No matter how bad off you are, no matter what happened to you today, I assure you, somebody had it worse. Stop getting caught up in the drama. It’s not real. It’s fiction, and you are not being paid millions of dollars to act it out. I’m not saying life is always sunshine and rainbows. More often than not, it isn’t, and you absolutely have the right to be upset with the perils of reality. But put your life into perspective, hold it up next to a seven year chronic headache, and I’m sure you’ll find things to be less daunting than they seemed prior.

Optimistic Existentialism (Everything Matters):

A commentary on the meaning of an infinite universe: “Albert, the universe is an infinite sphere. The center is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere.” - Bernard Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman)

Comment on connectivity:

“Stop, look, listen. Throughout infinity your energy recycles into every possible relation to everyone else’s energy, even Brad’s. You’ve been predator and prey with him. Friends. Enemies. Brother. Sister. Mother. Child.” - Bernard Jaffe

“You and me and the air are actually tiny particles that are swirling around together…If you look close enough, you can’t tell where my nose ends and space begins…because they’re unified.” - Bernard

The meaninglessness and paradoxical meaningfulness of human suffering: “Nothing’s okay, so it’s okay.” - Bernard

Nihilism (Nothing Matters):

The pessimistic view of the universe: “Betrayal embodies the universal truth, you see. Cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness.” - Catarine Vauban

This line is particularly pertinent to the formation of a practical philosophy. It highlights the fact that even though we formulate our thoughts and our beliefs, we will inevitably falter from time to time. It’s what you do after that matters: “It is inevitable that you are drawn back into human drama, desire, suffering, everything that exists in this imperfect world….An absurd theatrical we must play out back and forth from pure being to human suffering.” - Catarine

Our connection isn’t our being, but our misery in being:

“Sadness is what you are. Do not deny it. The universe is a lonely place, a painful place. This is what we can share between us. Period.”

I’m just going to accept my loneliness. And I’m gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness from an even farther, more extreme nothingness, on my own. - Tommy

The Middle. Common ground between the two distinct views of infinity.:

“You don’t have to get so threatened. I can mix your thing with their thing.” - Albert

“[It liberated you from the Brad.] Or did it bond me to Brad in the insanity of pain until I saw that I am Brad and he is me?…You’re too dark (to Catarine…nihilism) and you’re not dark enough (to Bernard and Vivian…optimistic existentialism).  You three were close, right. Maybe too close, and then it went sour. And it propelled you into one extreme and you into another extreme. So voila! Two overlapping fractured philosophies were born out of that one pain.”

Albert visits the religious family who houses the Sudanese refugee that spurred his interest in coincidence and his seeking the advice of existential experts.

Mom: Albert, what brought you to the philosophical club?”

Albert: You mean the existential detectives?

Dad: Sounds like a support group.

Daughter: Why can’t he use the church?

Mom: Well, sometimes people have additional questions to be answered.

Daughter: Like what?

Albert: Um, for instance, if the forms of this world die, which is more real the me that dies or the me that’s infinite? Can I trust my habitual mind or do I need to learn to look beneath those things?

Dad: Sounds like we got a philosopher.

Daughter: We don’t have to ask those questions do we Mom?

Mom: No, honey.

Dad: What happened to the cat Albert?…The cat was killed by curiosity.

Albert: Oh.

The End…or is it the Beginning?
Albert Markovski: She used me to teach US about the inevitability of human drama.

Tommy Corn: So, is that where you get off the ride?

Albert Markovski: Hell no.

Tommy Corn: I didn’t think so. Looks like you saw some truth

Albert Markovski: Looks like YOU saw some truth.

Tommy Corn: What’d you see.
Albert Markovski: The interconnection thing is definitely for real.
Tommy Corn: It is! I didn’t think it wasn’t! It is!
Albert Markovski: I know, I can’t believe it, it’s so fantastic!
Tommy Corn: It’s amazing!
Albert Markovski: I know.

Tommy Corn: But it’s also nothing special.

Albert Markovski: Yah, because it grows from the manure of human trouble. See the detectives just wanted to gloss right over that. But in fact, no manure, no magic.

You will find, in creating a practical philosophy, that you have to reconcile several ideas of other stonchly extreme philosophers. Finding your own way, finding middle ground, creating new knowledge of the surrounding world — these are the greatest revolutions of thought to which one can be apartied. It’s a success you can reach as many times as you want. A feat that has no foreseeable end and affords limitless possibilities. The potential is as overwhelming as it is exciting. Don’t be bogged down by the vastness and interconnection of topics. Take it one step at a time. Consider things most pertinent to your current life, the things that will and can actually change you and be the most rewarding. The cat wasn’t killed by curiosity, it was killed by a car. Curiosity is in your nature. Foster it. Use it to your advantage. Grow from it.

“He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking.

I just finished the book The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. It’s a memoir/lessons-learned book of life long learner and peak performer who mastered both the disciplines of chess and tai chi. Josh was the top-ranked chess player in the US from ages 10-18, and won several national and international Tai Chi Push Hands competitions in his twenties. Not only is the book a fascinating account of this incredible person, but it also reveals a number of lessons that he’s learned about competing at an extremely high level.

Beginner’s Mind

Josh became fascinated with chess the first time he saw men playing chess in a nearby park - and spent hours and hours as a young boy playing or watching chess. This open and curious mind helped him become such a dominant player.

After feeling alienated from the high-powered chess world, Josh spent time studying eastern philosophy - especially Taoism - and got interested in practicing tai chi. He fell in love with this totally new discipline in which he was again a complete beginner.

Own the Fundamentals

Unlike many successful younger players, Josh did not memorize intricate opening sequences, but instead studied simple variations of the end-games. King vs King and Rook. King vs King and Knight. Through his mastery of the end-game, he was able to beat many of his opponents because of his mastery of the fundementals.

In Tai Chi, Josh spent two years simply studying basic tai chi manuevers before he was even introduced to the martial art aspect of it. When he began facing off against other fighters, his advantage lay in his extended study of the basic movements and mindset of the tradition.

Nurture Your Gifts

As Josh became a better and better chess player - he was faced with a choice of two chess teachers. One teacher was convinced that Josh needed to adopt a more defensive, “Karpov-esque” style of play. The other felt that Josh was better suited to developing his natural gifts as an aggressive attacking player. After struggling under the unnatural style the first teacher, Josh returned to his roots and began winning more matches.

Overcoming Adversity

In both chess and tai chi, Josh had to put up with a lot of dirty fighting - kicking under the tables, groin and throat attacks, and much more. By learning to channel his anger into focused performance, he was able to overcome these challenges and still win the match.

Involve the Spirit

For Josh, both chess and tai chi were forms of spiritual practice. He poured his soul into his training and his competition. It sounds strange to hear him describe losing chess matches as “having your heart ripped out” but when it was such an integral part of his life, I guess it makes sense.

Tai Chi was first and continues to be a form of physical meditation for him - the movements brought him peace and awareness that he’s been able to bring into most of his waking hours. He suggests several breathing exercises in the book to experience this feeling.

Overall, Josh presents a life philosophy that is based on keeping an open and child-like mind towards all things and mastering the basics of the disciplines you wish to succeed in while harnessing your natural strengths. Through intense and passionate training, you can overcome physical, intellectual and psychological challenges while invigorating your spirit. It’s a great book and I definitely recommend it. It’s one of those books you’ll want to read a few times to fully appreciate it.

I found a website called The Philosopher’s Magazine, which in addition to publishing a philosophy journal (readable online), also hosts a number of games/quizzes relating to philosophy.

Two of my favorite are:

Staying Alive - A 3-part choose-your-own-ending game that asks you to make decisions and analyzes your version of personal identity. I apparently took unnecessary risks, but survived.

Morality Play - A 20-question quiz on various moral questions to determine how morally parsimonious (consistent) you are. I scored slightly above average with a score of 69%.

Take a look. Hell won’t freeze over if you have a little fun with philosophy!

In Israel, I met a man named Avraham, a kabbalist, in the city of Tzfat, a very holy city. Avraham had once been Robert and had graduated with a degree in psychology from the University of Michigan before he went on to study painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He said the word “awesome” more times in a half hour than I thought possible, but he did so in an attempt to impart upon my friends and I just how amazing 4000 years of history and culture truly are. The man seemed completely baked, and though he was speaking passionately about an age-old, mystical study, I could have sworn I had heard the same rantings at four in the morning regarding the greatness of mixing Cocoa Puffs and Cinammon Toast Crunch. In his brief speech on Kabbalah, he mentioned tikkun olam, which roughly approximates to heal the world. He explained a painting with two of the same hebrew letters (hey) in black and white, one above the other, looking like a sort of Jewish yin-yang. He said that at one time man was completely good (the white area), but that somehow we had let parts of that goodness fall away, leaving black behind. Now it is our task to heal the world, by lifting the fallen hey back to the white area, in order to perfect society. “That’s really lovely, Avraham,” I thought, “but how?” Avraham almost eerily responded to my internal query by saying, “all we have to do is wake up in the morning and not think, ‘what can I do to make my life better today?,’ but instead wonder,’what can I do to make the world better today?’”

I recently came across a similar quote from Nietszche:

“The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.” — Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Volume 1

I don’t always agree with Nietzsche’s outward disdain for religion, but can you imagine how awesome the world would be if every person skipped church, synagogue, or mosque and went to do community service instead? What if the money for multi-million dollar worship centers went more directly to doing good (more money for schools, the poor, the elderly, for parks, for research)? What if, like the Dalai Lama says, it really was as simple as making kindness our religion? Wouldn’t a benevolent God be okay with that?

I admire the ideas Avraham espouses, but wouldn’t he be adding more to tikkun olam if he spent his time simply feeding the poor, or more complexly working to break down arab-israeli hostilities, as opposed to using his aliya (emigration to Israel) to study the spiritual origin of his name (which he said you could actually spend a lifetime doing).

Everyday since I met Avraham, I’ve woken up to the quote on my corkboard, “Do something good today.” There are actually several things on the board, but this is the only one I seem to need to remind myself of daily. Nobody taught me to think this way, so I have to work to engrain it, that way I don’t get complacent and forget to contribute things bigger than myself. Most nights I go to bed and ask myself if I achieved that goal, if I did my small part to heal the world. When I have, I sleep easier.

Aside, of course, from how badly you need to mainline a thermos of coffee, what was your waking thought this morning? What will it be tomorrow?