The descriptive sub-title of this blog—Against Professional Philosophy—originally created and rolled out in 2013, is “A Co-Authored Anarcho-Philosophical Diary.”
Now, ten years later, after more than 350,000 views of the site, this series, A Philosopher’s Diary, finally literally instantiates that description by featuring short monthly entries by one or another of the members of the APP circle, in order to create an ongoing collective philosophical diary that records the creative results of critical, synoptic, systematic rational reflection on any philosophical topic or topics under the sun, without any special restrictions as to content, format, or length.
In this thirteenth installment, Otto Paans explores the nature of self-cultivation in the larger context of an ecological ethics of planetary and cosmic cultivation.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS
#1 Changing Social Institutions From Without Or Within
#4 Respect For Choices vs. Respect For Persons
#5 Thirty-Six Philosophical Precepts of Martial Arts Practice
#6 Enlightenment, Education, and Inspiration
#7 Rigged and Lucky: The Myth of Meritocracy in Professional Academic Philosophy
#9. How Much Does The Chatbot Brouhaha Affect Anarcho-Philosophical Teaching and Learning?
#10 Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and Faculty as Mental Health “First Responders”
#11 There’s Nothing…And Everything
#12.1 Philosophy and Flow States, Part 1—Real Philosophy and Professional Academic Philosophy
#12.2 Philosophy and Flow States, Part 2—Integrated Flow States and Philosophy as a Way of Life
A Philosopher’s Diary, #13–Cosmos and Care: Reflections on Self-Cultivation
A close-up of the author’s alpine plant collection.
The cosmos is our home in the most literal sense. We inhabit it and are part of it. Indeed, we are to such a degree part of it that stars, minerals, asteroids, eukaryotes, plants, amoebae, catfish, wolves, bonobos, and humans are all constituted by the same basic elements. Literally, we are stardust: the atoms that constitute the Earth’s biosphere were once part of the surrounding galaxy. In a very strange way, it makes sense to think of our bodies as galaxies for bacteria and unicellular organisms. Even our own cells are not unified entities, because they contain various bacteria that they co-opted at some point during their evolution. Much of our DNA is not as homogenous as science suggests. What we call “an entity” is a veritable galaxy, or even a cosmos, of various lifeforms.
As sentient beings, we obviously have a relationship to the cosmos that is different from lifeforms that do not share our cognitive capacities. In Kant’s terminology: we are self-legislators. We can make laws and freely decide to act on them. In addition to mere survival, we must exist in the fully existential meaning of that term. This insight can be found in religions across the globe: the human being is conceptualized as a guardian or steward of the cosmos. Relatedly, Diogenes said that he was a citizen of the cosmos.
Quite often, the exploitative aspects of that stewardship have won out over other conceptions: people have routinely declared themselves stewards of the Earth, and by “cultivation” they meant actually “exploitation.” Descartes, for example, held that we are masters of nature, a thought that was temporalized by Hegel when he held that history itself would culminate into the rationally most optimal state – and in which the epitome of rationality was of course instrumental, modern, human rationality.
To see how powerful the lure of rationality is, we can cite the example of agriculture. Agricultural practices and their efficacy in feeding the global population have often been seen as the ultimate expression of our connectedness to nature and even to the cosmos in general, even if the agricultural revolution is (i) a very recent development in our evolution as a species, and (ii) modern agriculture, as “agribusiness,” is anything but connected to nature.
Another way to think about stewardship, however, is to engage in what I call “practices of caring.” Such practices do not necessarily have to do with nature conservation, reducing your CO2 footprint, or with installing solar panels on your roof. Laudable as these practices are, they are abstract in the sense that they are generic strategic or technological solutions to ecological problems. Moreover, they appear as effective, rational measures or strategies that are available to anyone with sufficient means and will to engage in them.
Contrariwise, practices of caring are not merely instrumental, but deeply personal, purposive engagements with the cosmos in the broadest possible sense. They can range from gardening—indeed, cultivating our global garden (Hanna and Paans, 2022)—growing vegetables or fruit, keeping animals, seeking out natural environments, contributing to local cultural events, writing poetry, taking time to enjoy the sunset, or engaging with local or regional cultural history. In other words: the practices of care are personal in the sense that they may respond to ecological problems, but they do so in a way that is not reducible to merely “doing your societal duty.” While the choice to answer the moral demands of a green society is indeed an individual choice, such actions lack the personal dimension characteristic of practices of caring.
Etymologically, we can easily see how this personal dimension enters. The English language affords two different reading of the phrase “to take care.” It could mean “tending to” or “caring for,” but equally well, it could be read as “proceeding carefully” or “going about one’s business meticulously”. But these two readings share a connection: they show that practices of care involve a strategic, attentive and considered meticulousness—a precision that stems from devotion and concentration.
***
A true and lasting “revolution in the disposition of the human being” or “revolution of the heart” (Kant, 1793/1996: pp. 47-48) does not come about by top-down dictates or technological imperatives. Instead, precisely because we are our own legislators, such revolutions must stem from a voluntary embracing of a rule, imperative, or practice. Such practices take time, energy and effort, but they are willingly carried out because their significance is recognized. In recognizing their significance, these practices acquire meaning: they become a life project or pastime activity one is passionate about, or that one literally cares about.
By engaging in them, one changes one’s attitude and acquires skills. Such practices are not mere activities, but tools of personal cultivation. To eat, drink, shop groceries, and have a job—these are imperatives dictated by our bodies and our societies. But to engage in practices of caring is to carve out a space for deliberate self-cultivation and change.
Such spaces are also the places where we can engage in personal therapy, the workplaces of the essentially embodied mind. By means of such therapy, we can rid ourselves of bad thought-shapers and freely invent or acquire new ones (Hanna and Paans, 2021). Thought-shapers, in turn, require domains of content on which they operate. Our work and/or career-oriented societies are domains in which a fixed set of thought-shapers is operative. You know them: everyone ought to have a career; only the best will end up at the top; a steady job is the best thing to have in life; you will enjoy your pension after years of work; your job creates meaning in your life. I could go on, but doubtlessly, this list can be extended into a veritable mythology of the postmodern, postindustrial, and neoliberal mind.
By a diametric contrast, to engage in practices of caring is to carve out a new subjective space of one’s own: a place where you can invent, develop, nurture and otherwise create your own thought-shapers.[i] In that sense, this space is literally a topos—a place in which and from which to act, that constitutes our home in the cosmos. For example, as a hobby, I grow roughly 500 different species of alpine plants. This is the place where I define my own goals in accordance with what the plants require, and the weather affords. Even on such a small scale, one must pay attention to the smallest of details, while at the same time letting things run their natural course. It is literally an eco-logy: a science of our cosmic household that finds its expression in practices like alpine plant cultivation.
To have a home somewhere may mean many things, after all. It may be that you live somewhere in a distanced, anonymous, unattached way—a non-place in the worst way of the word. It could be a nondescript apartment in some nondescript building in some nondescript suburb of some nondescript provincial town. You have a roof over your head and central heating as well as running waterworks, but that is it. Such places are meant to subsist in with an acceptable and even enjoyable level of comfort, but are they places to live? The deeper sense of being-at-home is something quite different. To be-at-home is to be in a certain way. It is to experience a certain stability, a rootedness or contentment that by far surpasses mere subsistence. It involves a connected, rooted, and meaning-suffused existence that has been routinely—and sometimes quite vaguely—been designated as authenticity.
Instead, the feeling of authenticity is secondary. It is a positive effect of being-at-home. Without a certain centeredness, and the dimly experienced feeling that one could put down roots here, that one could stabilize and reach an inner equilibrium, no authenticity can emerge. The saint is a saint because of their agency. That is, a saint’s being saintly is an effect of their prior and ongoing choices, actions, and commitments; hence saintliness is an effect instead of a static property. It is like this with authenticity: it is the positive, emergent effect of engaging in practices of caring as a form of voluntary self-cultivation.
Note that there is no instrumental goal in this sense of cultivation. Once more, we must guard the door for the exploitative conception of stewardship wriggling in. To cultivate oneself means not to stretch one’s bodily and mental limits to the edge for achieving an external goal or preconceived moral ideal. To do so would be to treat one’s own essentially embodied life as the farmer treats his fields. While there is certainly a place for discipline and even exhaustion in self-cultivation, its goal is internal and processual. To grow alpine plants, for instance, one requires an inherent satisfaction that is experienced by tending to the collection, talking to other enthusiasts, seeing the plants grow, witnessing changes in the weather and the climate, and watching the plants bloom and eventually die. This process in its entirety has a logic (and eco-logic, so to speak) of its own, and one must let it run its natural course, without becoming fatalistic. One must move with it, and adapt to it, or—if needed—gently direct it wherever it is possible; or, otherwise, one must limit damage as far as possible. To control the processes of Life is out of the question, and practices of care ingrain this insight, while nurturing the instruments and skills to put such dynamic and organicist adaptation into practice.
In classical Chinese Daoism, this concept is known as wuwei (literally, “doing nothing”). The term is extremely rich with meaning, but it boils down to knowing when things run their natural course, and therefore refraining from intervening. Indeed, the Daoist idea is that disharmony occurs because individuals intervene in natural processes that they should stay out of. This idea applies to mental, bodily, social and cosmological processes alike. Intervening at the wrong point or in the wrong way displays misunderstanding and ignorance about the nature of the natural process. So, “doing nothing” does not signify inaction, but knowledge whether to intervene, when to intervene, and finding the right way to do so.[ii] This capacity is trained and polished in practices of care. It amounts to taking a simple task and practicing on a small scale what should also be practiced on a large scale.
Therefore, practices of caring escape and avoid any form of exploitation or instrumental self-interest. The process of self-cultivation is autopoietic, in the sense that its self-organizing process is constituted by its own satisfaction, growth, development, positively thought-shaping, and ultimately life-affirming character.
To cultivate oneself is to grow towards authenticity, expressed as a way of life, and actualized through thought, emotion, and action. “One becomes what one is” wrote Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, yet this very insight was exactly what he could not himself accomplish. Instead of falling in love with one’s fate (amor fati), isn’t it better simply to let it unfold? No heroism is necessary for this, merely the careful choice of practices of care, the reward for which is the practice itself. Indeed, like in the case of wuwei, to ask what the reward for such practices actually is, amounts to having misunderstood the issue. Only by engaging in practices of caring, will you experience what they can give you—and it will always be far more than you can imagine right now.
NOTES
[i] For a detailed discussion of subjective space, see (Paans, 2023).
[ii] In the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi, this idea is phrased as an aphorism: the wise man does nothing, but still, everything happens. In other words: when people treat themselves as pieces of work, they display ignorance, while the wise man seemingly does nothing. In classical Martial Arts theory, a variation on this thought can be found: beginners move (too) much, while masters seemingly don’t move at all. Or, put differently: there is a crucial difference between perceived speed (i.e., visibly fast punches and kicks) and real speed (i.e. knowing where to move without much effort and to advance strategically without being noticed at all). Nevertheless, it is easy to see that Daoism can be accused of fatalism if its core concept is merely superficially understood.
REFERENCES
(Hanna and Paans, 2021). Hanna, R. and Paans, O. “Thought-Shapers.” Cosmos & History 17, 1: 1-72. Available online at URL = <http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/923>.
(Hanna and Paans, 2022). Hanna, R. and Paans, O. “Creative Piety and Neo-Utopianism: Cultivating Our Global Garden.” Cosmos and History 18, 1: 1-82. Available online at URL = <https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1017>.
(Kant, 1793/1996). Kant, I. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Trans. A. Wood and G. di Giovanni. In I. Kant, Immanuel Kant: Religion and Rational Theology. Cambrige: Cambridge Univ. Press. Pp. 57-215. (Ak 6: 1-202)
(Paans, 2023). Paans, O. “The New Subjective Body: Stillness, Expressivity and Radical Subjectivity.” Borderless Philosophy 6: 169–217. Available online at URL = <https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp6-2023-otto-paans-the-new-subjective-body-169-217>.
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