Reflections on 20

I’ve turned twenty today. As it’s Thanksgiving break, I’m spending my birthday in Redmond, where I grew up, and near Seattle, where I went to undergrad. It’s been a year of big changes: in June I graduated from undergrad; in August I moved to Boston; in September I started my PhD. I’ve spent three months now living and working around people with quite a bit more life experience than me, and I’ve loved it. But it’s also given me some timely comparison and perspective. I wanted to write something for friends, for visitors, for my future self, attempting to express what’s on my mind. I’m sure these thoughts will change, and I feel I should note that many of these thoughts reflect the kind of person I want to be, not the person I claim to be. Thus, I hope that when I read this in five years I’ll see myself in what I write.

Mature Egoism

I participate in a two-person philosophy reading group with my friend Mark. We recently finished Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and after both being somewhat miffed and befuddled, decided to read some interpretive articles. The one we discussed last week was Christine Swanton’s “Nietzsche and the Virtues of Mature Egoism.” Putting aside whether the article is faithful to Nietzsche, I found its central concept of mature egoism exceedingly clarifying. It seems to me that many of my beliefs, values, and aspirations can be understood as stemming from this organizing concept.

What is mature egoism? First, it is an egoism: the view that one’s self—self-interest, self-beliefs, self-values—should be the basis for action. That one should center oneself rather than allowing the self to recede into the background. That one is, unapologetically, the main character in one’s own life. Nietzsche:

Until now man has taken the true sign of a moral act to be its impersonal nature; and it has been shown that in the beginning all impersonal acts were praised and distinguished in respect of the common good … to make a whole person of oneself and keep in mind that person’s greatest good in everything one does—this takes us further than any pitying impulses and actions for the sake of others.

But it is also mature, which Swanton contrasts with two alternatives: the immature egoist, who seeks advantage crudely, out of weakness or insecurity, grasping at momentary comfort; and the self-sacrificing altruist, who has internalized an impersonal morality and dissolved the self into it. Much of what we find ugly in egoism is really immature egoism—an attempt to exercise the self that is rooted in flight from it. Nietzsche’s concern throughout is how to live as a mature egoist, acting from the strength of the self rather than from its weakness.

Swanton provides a schema. One should be assertive, rather than cruel or excessively passive. Just, rather than vengeful or obsessed with equality for its own sake. Objective, rather than egocentric or fixated on hyper-objectivity. Generous, rather than selfishly hoarding or giving oneself away. Independent, rather than destructively isolated or submerged in the collective. Disciplined, rather than ascetic.

I think this is a good list and that you should read Swanton’s original article. But the remaining topics I want to discuss—being interesting, taking pride in oneself, living in the present, connecting with the body—can also be understood under this banner. They are expressions of mature egoism: a self that is secure enough to want things and pursue them, strong enough to allow itself to be shaped by the things it deems important. We should feel the fullness of life and the self we can become. As John the Savage declares in Brave New World: “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

Being Interesting and Pluripotent

We should strive to be interesting, pluripotent people. A pluripotent cell has not yet differentiated into a cell with a specific function it will carry out until it dies. It can become many things. I think we should aspire to the same condition—resistant to premature differentiation, wary of settling into a fixed form before we must.

Sartre articulated this idea in the phrase “existence precedes essence”: that existence, the bare fact of being here, precedes any essence—any template, code, category, or differentiation—that would determine who I am, what I am like, what I can and will do.

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.

The implication is that we should resist the pull to explain our actions in terms of the essences or conditions that determine us—that we can do a truly vast and extraordinary range of things, and we choose to pursue some and choose not to pursue others. It is fine not to pursue something we could do, but this is because we have chosen not to, not because we had no choice in the matter. Hence Sartre’s formulation: “Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”

Of course, Sartre’s injunctions—as beautiful as they are—fall flat on many ears. It simply is the case that, despite all of Sartre’s metaphysical artillery, people’s lives are conditioned by political, economic, cultural, geographic, contingent, … essences. We cannot always do anything. But I think “existence precedes essence” is more true for some people than others. It is truer for those who are financially secure, who live in stable areas with opportunities for work and play—people like myself and many people I know. This idea may never have been more applicable to any group of people at any time in history than it is now, to those of us living amid material abundance, global connectivity, and relative peace. If that is right, then those of us who can heed the injunction should. I want to learn languages, study different fields, visit different parts of the world, connect with different kinds of people, develop my physical body and its capabilities, read many books and deeply know many ideas. I want to remember that most things I do not do, I do not do because I chose not to—not because I could not.

This also means we should be comfortable with—and actively encourage—the bizarre, the cringe, the unhinged. These are expressions of pluripotency. We should push on the borders of what is acceptable so that we understand where they are and how malleable they turn out to be. Deleuze uses the term “deterritorialization”: to remake the map, to expand it, recognizing that though the map guides you, you are also the one drawing it. As he writes:

This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.

Or more succinctly: “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

Pride and Accomplishment

We should want to, and earn the right to, take pride in ourselves. I get the feeling sometimes that our generation can be quite bashful, that we don’t want to be too cringe, too braggadocious, too much of a “tryhard.” There is a kind of ironic detachment that protects us from the embarrassment of having wanted something and failed, or worse, of having wanted something and succeeded while others watched. Better to hang back, to be effortless, to never be caught caring too much.

In response: competence is sexy. Accomplishing difficult things is sexy. Succeeding is sexy. Making smart plans and executing them is sexy. Creating ambitious goals and following through is sexy. Arriving on time is sexy. Caring is sexy. Being visible is sexy. We should be proud of our competence in the domains where we are competent, and strive to expand those domains. We are the things we accomplish, our failures, our in-betweens. We own all of them. Sartre says:

But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art… In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively… What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.

This is a hard teaching. It denies us the comfort of potential—of believing ourselves to be more than what we have done, of treasuring some inner self that circumstances have prevented from flowering. There is no inner self. There is only what we have undertaken, what we have made, what we have lived. If I want to be something, I must do the things that would make me that thing. It means my pride in my self must be earned by what I do.

I think about this particularly in the context of gay pride. Orthodox Christians raise an interesting question: why do gays celebrate pride, when pride is a sin? What are they proud of? Perhaps we may think of pride as pride in an essence—pride in “who you are,” in something you were born with. What is there to be proud of in that? You didn’t choose it. You didn’t make it. Perhaps we should think of pride differently. What we should be proud of is not the bare fact of being gay, but what we have done with it: the perspective we have cultivated, the ways we have come to understand love and intimacy and difference, the self we have constructed in a world that often scorns us. I am not proud that I “am” a gay man, as if this were an achievement. I am proud that I live fully as one—that I am not hidden, that I have made something of this condition, that I have explored romance and intimacy in a unique way. The same goes for other forms of identity. To be proud as an Asian-American, or as anything else, is not to celebrate an accident of birth, but to own the self one has made from the materials one was given.

Youth is Fleeting, the Time is Now

This passage of Schopenhauer’s has stuck with me for years:

The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life—that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.

We find life beautiful only in the abstract—reminiscing about a romanticized past, hoping for a better future—while merely enduring the present, which always seems mundane or ugly or incomplete. But life is nothing other than the accumulation of these presents. The thing we allowed to pass by unnoticed, waiting for something better, was the thing itself. We spend our lives in the waiting room, and then we die.

I think Schopenhauer is identifying something deep and perhaps inescapable about human experience. But I also think we can do better than simply resigning ourselves to it. The answer is not to “live in the present” in the naive sense—to behave recklessly, without consideration for the future or the past that has led to now. The answer is to remember and feel deeply that the time is now. We carry abstractions in our heads about “life” in which the present moment is always unsubstantial, always a waypoint to somewhere else. But the present is literally all we have. If we understood this not just intellectually but viscerally, we might behave differently. We might be more attentive to our experience as it happens. We might arrange our lives so as to actually live them, rather than to prepare indefinitely for a living that never arrives.

What is youth? Part of it, I think, is the feeling that you are on an upswing. That there is more ahead than behind. That there is so much left to explore, time to play, fewer responsibilities to shackle you. But part of youth is also a kind of blindness—not really thinking, or being recurrently reminded of, the finitude of this period of time. Confucius: “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

Many Americans, perhaps most, say that college was the happiest time of their life. This means that for most people, life after college went downhill. The peak came early, and they have been descending ever since, or at best plateauing. Must this be so for us?

Consider some arithmetic. If we take a full life to be eighty years, then at forty there will be more life behind you than ahead. If we take a “functional life”—one relatively free from serious health problems—to be sixty years, this crossover point drops to thirty.

The time to take seriously what I want, to pursue it without embarrassment or deferral, is now. Not after I finish my PhD. Not after I “get settled”. Not after “things calm down.”—but now.

Performance, Authenticity, Responsibility

Something I have become keenly conscious of is the role of performance in social interaction. It seems that everything we do or say has a double meaning, another thing it wants to accomplish besides just what it is. We express an opinion not primarily because we believe it, but because we heard it somewhere and want to signal that we are in the know. We laugh at a joke not because it was funny but because we want to seem agreeable, or because everyone else is laughing. We dress a certain way not because we like the clothes but because we want to be seen as the kind of person who would wear them. We drop a reference to a book or a film not to discuss it but to indicate that we have read or watched it. We perform exasperation with popular things to signal sophistication, or enthusiasm for obscure things to signal taste. Almost nothing we do in the presence of others is simply what it appears to be.

Such behavior is common among children and adolescents. I have done my fair share of it. I see it less and less as I get older, and virtually none in my circles in Boston. But it sticks with me as something to understand.

The important point is that performativity is not in itself bad. Performance is the way we express who we would like to be, and our relationship to the environments we find ourselves in. We are all actors on different people’s stages. The question is not whether to perform—we cannot help performing—but how to perform well, and for whom, and why.

I think it is fine to act as someone you “are not” but rather as someone you want to become, because performing in this way is how you become that kind of person. There is no authentic self hiding behind the performance, waiting to be discovered or revealed. There is only the performance, and what it accumulates into over time. This means that every interaction is a possibility: to work on myself, to reinvent myself, to put forth a version of myself that I might want to develop further. I can try out the different kinds of person I could be on different people, in different contexts, and see what fits. Authenticity, on this view, is not about finding and expressing some inner truth. It is about performing for yourself rather than for an audience—experimenting in a way you own and puppeteer. I perform authentically when I do not confine myself to a single role, when I recognize that I am my performances and take responsibility for choosing them.

Sartre captures the discomfort this view provokes:

Hence we can well understand why some people are horrified by our teaching. For many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. I admit I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so; or, if I have had no children to whom I could devote myself it is because I did not find the man I could have lived with. So there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but perfectly viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions.”

This is the comfort that Sartre’s view—and the view I am articulating—takes away. There is no hidden reserve of potential that excuses the poverty of what we have actually done. We are what we perform. The performances are the self.

But this is also liberating. If I want to be more charismatic, I can try being more charismatic—on this person, in this conversation, today—and see what happens. If I want to be the kind of person who makes people laugh, I can try throwing in more jokes. If it works, if I like who I am when I do it, then I become it. The self is not a discovery but a project; the material of the project is performance.

Meditation, the Body, Physicality

The gym has become one of the most important places in my life. It was already important to me in undergrad, but now I go nearly every day. It is an extremely enjoyable routine. Part of it is aesthetic. I want to have a body I am proud of. My body is the most primary home I reside in, and I am fortunate that, at least in this dimension of musculature, I can shape it how I like. We spend enormous effort decorating our apartments, curating our wardrobes, cultivating our environments—but the body is more intimate than any of these. It is the thing I wake up inside of every morning, the interface through which I encounter everything else. To neglect it seems perverse.

But there are other dimensions, particularly relating to what I would call meditation, that I find equally compelling. I have never regularly practiced meditation in the traditional sense—sitting cross-legged, eyes closed. But, if I understand it correctly, the core principle of meditation is that one should reacquaint the mind with the body, directing consciousness toward the experience of inhabiting and being one with it: concentrating on what it feels like to breathe, to feel the ground beneath specific parts of the foot, to sense the weight of the hands resting in the lap. In this sense, the gym is one of the most intense and accessible grounds for meditation I have found.

Gym bros talk about “mind-muscle connection”: the idea that the mind can develop a heightened consciousness of a particular muscle, which is useful for isolating it during exercise. You develop this connection by concentrating on the experience of flexing that muscle, or by having someone tap the area while you contract it. When I first started lifting, a bench press was a single undifferentiated exertion—I pushed, and either the bar went up or it didn’t. Now I can feel how the movement disentangles into the coordinated firing of separate muscles: the pectorals driving the bar off the chest, the anterior deltoids taking over as the arms extend, the triceps locking out at the top. I have greater resolution over my own body, can sense it in finer grain. And yet the body remains mysterious. I will take a set to failure, completely convinced that I cannot do another rep, and then imagine someone holding a gun to my head—and I will rep out not one but two or three more. Where was that capacity hiding? What does it say about the relationship between my mind and my body?

There are experiences available in the gym that most people will never have. The feeling of the pump—blood filling the muscles after extensive exertion—is so unique. I feel full with the immediate sensation of being capable, of inhabiting a body that can do things. The first time I was able to bounce my pecs was a revelation. Most people, even those who do not work out, have some sense of what their biceps or quads feel like when flexed. But most people have no idea what it feels like to flex the chest this way—it is not a matter of strength alone, but developing enough muscle mass and mind-muscle connection to perform the movement at all. In learning to do it, I gave my body a new capacity, a literal new dimension of movement, that most people will never experience. Christine Swanton, writing on Nietzsche, puts it this way:

Thus in GM [Genealogy of Morals], Nietzsche contrasts two forms of happiness: that of the engaged active person “bursting with strength,” and that of the passive powerless type for whom happiness is a disengaged escape: it is “essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, ‘sabbath’ relaxation of the mind… in short [it is] something passive!”

I want to experience this particular kind of happiness of “bursting with strength” over and over again.

Spiritual Journeys

My friend, roommate, and co-first-year-PhD student Carmel described their vision for their PhD as a “spiritual journey.” I found that quite beautiful. I want my PhD—these next five or more years of my life—to be a spiritual journey too.

What does this mean? It means I am willing to be dismantled. To have my categories fail me, my stories about myself become inadequate, my familiar refuges revealed as evasions. One goes in as one person and comes out as another. I want my thinking to be challenged so deeply that I am forced to abandon positions I once held with certainty; I want to encounter ideas that make my previous intellectual life look narrow. I want to develop new capacities: to write more precisely, to read more patiently, to sit with problems longer, to express ideas more elegantly, to think more broadly and more deeply. I want to become more interesting, more knowledgeable, more active, more present.

This is not primarily about research, though research will be a primary byproduct. The papers I write, the contributions I make to my field—these matter, but they are not the center. I am the center. The PhD is an opportunity to work on myself under conditions that are unusually conducive to self-transformation: years of relative freedom, resources to pursue questions that interest me, an advisor and community that will challenge and support me. I am privileged that I can approach it this way, that I am not forced by circumstance to treat the PhD as instrumental. I want to use this privilege well; I want to emerge from this process as someone I could not have become otherwise.