Musashi and Productivity
This week was a bit less productive for me in the sense of the way we use that word. I was travelling much more and I had much more space to contemplate upon things; ‘De Vita Contemplativa’ in the way Hannah Arendt would use this word.
I think this space is necessary. I have lost a lot of faith in one of the gods of our contemporary meaningless late capitalist landscape - continuous, self-flagellating, prescriptive, productivity. It kills the ability for spontaneous creativity or deep contemplative thought taking up the space we need to critically examine our worldview, ensuring almost certainly that we become mediocre.
I found myself watching a lot of old Kapil Gupta and Krishnamurti videos that I had previously watched but this time the truth resonated with me in a different manner. Again, there is an urge to say that I understood them more deeply this time around, to give myself the justification that this was worth it, however I’m not sure if that is the case.
In one of these videos, the questioner asks when was the last time someone was as deeply embedded in the truth as the level envisioned for Siddha performance, and Kapil replied it was Miyamoto Musashi.
This led me to explore the life of Miyamoto Musashi, reading a bit of the Book of Five Rings which I hope to finish this next week and also through a bit of the famous manga ‘Vagabond’ by Takehiko Inoue. I also saw some videos that expanded on his philosophy further that were interesting to me.
Kinetic Marxism
I was looking for a philosophy of movement; where movement in multiple different dimensions is considered the primary ontological substrate (relating to my philosophical rant last week trying to put together philosophies from Deleuze, Ido Portal , Bruce Lee etc.) or lack thereof.
The closest I found was Thomas Nail and his Kinetic philosophy of Marxism. He incorporates ideas from Lucretius, Deleuze, Bergson whitehead etc. into a materialist perspective, explaining a Nietzschean genealogy of the preference of stasis over movement. There is more of a focus on explaining things such as migrant movement and how there is a tendency to consider them intrinsically inferior to citizens, or the philosophical primacy of theories that posit something unmoved. However, I am more interested in how the philosophy may be applied to our bodies and how we move.
One possible criticism I had was that the idea of ‘The Swerve’ which is central to so much of his philosophy substitutes in for the material form of matter something so dynamic and formless that it is for me virtually distinguishable from some qualified forms of idealism e.g. it may be linked to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytical idealism in some senses. Thomas Nail mentioned that in the realm of quantum physics (which his ontology also projects on to, as any ontology worth its weight should),he is inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s ideas and Loop Quantum Gravity. This is something I’m quite interested in exploring next week.
The Promise of Modernity
I randomly found a book by Bhagat Singh at a used book sale that I visited during my travels. The title of the book was ‘Why I am an atheist’. Bhagat Singh is an interesting figure for me due to the cultural conditioning that I grew up in (middle class India).
There were certain aspects of his approach to life that are quite celebrated such as the nationalism, or the inspiration it ignites in us to see such depth of character in someone close to our age. As a generation it is a reminder to us of what the freedom fighters had envisioned for us, and how much they gave up for us to have the material conditions we live in now.
Due to these reasons he is often characterized as someone we should ‘look up to’ as a freedom fighter and as a revolutionary. However, at the same time there are other aspects of his philosophy that are ‘too radical’ for the cultural matrix, such as his atheism or his communist affiliations. So, he is celebrated yet kept at some distance.
The arguments themselves in the book were rather standard atheist arguments, such as ‘why would an omnipotent being create so much suffering’ and trying to point out the irrationality of the justifications religions would come up with to answer that question. There wasn’t too much that was new to me, that would force me to change my position from a mystic type of agnosticism to hard materialist atheism.
What I appreciate about this thought is its revolutionary quality and the continued fight against ignorance, laziness, tiredness (encapsulated by the word tamas in yogic philosophy). What I do not appreciate is the certainty of a meta-narrative that establishes the revolutionary quality in the first place.
Seeing the stalwarts from history, it is easy to fall into a form of self-hatred and an atavism of naive traditionalism; How lofty was the future these people had seen for us, and how badly are we failing them. How are we to ever live up to what they foresaw for us? We look at the weakness and hopelessness that reigns in society and feel rage at the institutions that failed us or the technology that is eating into our potentialities.
However, in a sense this is the postmodern condition; If everyone was living up to the visions our grandfathers foresaw for us, we probably would all be dead by now. We deconstructed the meta narratives that fueled their intensities in the previous generations, but in some respects we have thrown away the baby with the bathwater; It has been replaced by an immense existential vacuum.
We grow more isolated and atomized in our communities everyday due to the nature of the technology we use. Social media hyper accelerates consumerism and commodity fetishism, all the while encouraging us to be narcissistic to optimize its metrics.
Faced with the full brunt of this assault there is something inside of us that gives up . That ignorance is what we must direct our attention towards; That inside of us, which would rather numb itself or give in to an ideology instead of critically thinking through things for ourself.
Our brains are slumbering again. The question then remains, how are we to imbibe that revolutionary quality, the activeness of thought without imbibing the stability of leaning on an image or ideal that produced it. How do we live up to the noble visions of our ancestors in terms of the quality and intensity of life, without letting our imagination be clouded by the same values and ideals that led to destruction in their wake?
In a Nietzschean sense, if every source of meaning (that brought with it its own assumptions to uncritically accept) is dead under our knife, who must we become to be worthy of this deed?
Configuration
I continued fiddling around with Arch this week. Having a “do-it-yourself” distro does make it an incredible time sink, as I continuously need to troubleshoot problems and learn more about the system to ensure that it keeps working correctly, however I would say that its an enriching experience all in all.
I uploaded my dotfiles to this repo and will continue to update this. This is one of the powerful things about linux; once I have completed this configuration, I’ll be able to clone it on any new machine I use linux on and have it working in a way personalized for me exactly. I am also thinking of writing a blog detailing the installation and configuration process at some point in time, to document my learnings.