Seven Days

In seven days, the semester will begin again. I have a feeling this one will punch especially hard, but I think I am more capable now than I was four months ago, and I was more capable four months ago than I was a year ago. I learned so much during my first 2 1/2 years as an adjunct, and now I feel that the learning curve started all over again a year ago.

Strangely, I feel empty. This break has overall been productive, although not as productive as my highest hopes had it. But to break it down: usually during break, I am very productive for a few days, and then I go on some kind of drinking/video-game/socializing/traveling binge (some of these binges are more worthwhile than others, and some are more addicting), and I ignore the work that I wanted to get done. But a few months ago, my computer was destroyed by accidentally spilling beer all over it, which has ended my video-game playing and, oddly, was around the time that I significantly reduced how much I drink. Over break, I traveled and socialized, but not to excessive degrees, and I had plenty of time to read, think, relax, and do a little bit of writing. I did not do nearly as much writing as I intended…goals for next time.

So, overall, I feel satisfied. But the difficult thing is, I also feel empty. I am sitting here, starving for something: perhaps another human being.  I have thought a lot about this over the past couple of weeks, as a lack of purpose and structure has afflicted me from time to time. Last week, I voluntarily went to school and worked on my classes while sitting in my classroom because it was the only way I would start feeling like I should work. On the two days I stayed home yesterday, I was nearly worthless, and afflicted with a touch of depression. I felt nothing to work toward: and the unfortunate thing about having such a demanding, purpose-driven job, is that when the job is inactive, I find I am handicapped in summoning that purpose on my own. Perhaps this is something that has afflicted me my entire life. Until the day I left for the Marines, I rarely felt much of a thirst for purpose. The Marines gave it to me, and then college gave it to me. But whenever I am on vacation, the feeling of purpose does not come easily. I have to force myself to feel any kind of purpose at all. But that “force” or “will” is not something I can just choose. I try to intellectualize it, and solve it like a puzzle, but that only rarely brings much success. I may be addicted to needing an external force to motivate that purpose, which is not something I admire about myself. I think this is why I can get so addicted to something like video-games: when I feel that emptiness of purpose, a game provides an entertaining purpose-driven structure. When I am feeling that emptiness, the game is a drug, because it provides exactly what I crave in doses that are designed to keep me coming back for more. Even the study and teaching of philosophy, no matter how fulfilling I feel it is at the time, cannot deliver on the speed, lights, thrill, and accessibility of a video game.

But despite this, I recognize my life is much more full without the video games. Because now, when I feel the emptiness, I either (A) struggle to find something to work to, because I absolutely despise that emptiness, or (B) give in to the emptiness and watch television shows or cruise the internet for too long: but at least this never persists for more than a few hours. The video game streaks could go weeks or months. Although I still crave it, I see it as the craving of a junkie for his drugs (even if this exaggerates the problem), and one that I need to resist. I’m four months “clean” now, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if this is what has drawn me to the philosophers Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Each one of their ethical theories is devoted to thinking about the most important purposes of a person’s life, while denying that this purpose is something that is given or determined by anything beyond one’s self. That statement requires some qualification for Aristotle and Spinoza: For Aristotle, our purpose comes from our nature, which is certainly an external cause, but the purpose is an individual’s own happiness, and so it’s destination is not beyond the person’s self. For Spinoza, the purpose is “understanding God,” but, of course, God is not something that loves us or cares about our conduct, for Spinoza. And in fact, we are a part of God, identical to God: and our purpose is always the restructuring and improving of our own ideas.

For Nietzsche, this absence of an external purpose is more pure: when we look at the universe for purpose, all we see is the abyss, and that when we concentrate and revolve our minds around that abyss for too long, the abyss stares back into you. Is there any more perfect way of describing the emptiness I feel? God is Dead just means we recognize that there is no purpose to living, at least not one that comes from beyond ourselves. And so we must create one, knowing, rationally, that it is always a farce, a game that we are playing with ourselves. But it must be a game that is somehow worthwhile, that we are creating ourselves, and fighting through it ourselves, and the quality of the game and its obstacles becomes the quality of our own selves, and gives worth to its purpose.

I’ll finish this post with a quote from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, section 283. But I will preface this by saying that the talk of “war” is a metaphorical war, where the battleground should be considered minds and the ideas that inhabit/live-in them.

Preparatory human beings. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day–the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism–human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for–equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings! For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is  — to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it! and you with it!