The ‘Wienpahl Sutra’—Paul Wienpahl’s ‘Unorthodox Lecture’ of 1956

Photo of Paul Wienpahl in his Zen Diary (1970)

In 2007, I came across an article in the MANAS Journal of 13 June 1956 by the American philosopher Paul Wienpahl (Volume IX, No. 24 MANAS Reprint, 13 June 1956). It immediately spoke to me—to the very depths of my soul—because in it he was addressing very similar questions to those that were concerning me greatly.

The following year, 2008, I went on my first professional sabbatical, staying near Avignon for three months in a village called Bédarrides with some French friends. I had a copy of the essay in my notebook and took it everywhere in my bag as I walked and cycled through the landscape around me. I read it through many, many times while sitting in the shade of a tree here or there, or by the banks of the River Ouvèze. It is no exaggeration to say that it gently (but nevertheless radically) changed the course of my thinking, definitively pushing me in the direction of East Asian philosophy, whilst simultaneously keeping me deeply connected to philosophers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche—and, I should add, without diminishing my connection with the human Jesus, especially as he was presented to me through Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief.

Thanks to this, I began privately, and initially half jokingly, to call it the ‘Wienpahl Sutra’—and it has remained that for me since then. For me the text really is a kind of sutra and I constantly return to it as a helpful aid to reflection on my ongoing, free-religious journey of faith.

Now, the version of the piece I first came across (to which I linked above) was an abridgement (and in fact slight re-ordering) of an ‘All-University Lecture’ delivered by Wienpahl, who was at the time the professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As the editor of the MANAS Journal, Henry Geiger (1908–1989), noted, quoting Damon Runyon, ‘a story also goes with this.’ Geiger tells us that ‘reactions to Dr. Wienpahl’s lecture were extreme—ranging all the way from the worried suggestion by two colleagues that Dr. Wienpahl see a psychiatrist, to a demand for copies from enthusiastic students.’

It was the latter demand that encouraged Geiger to publish an abridged version in MANAS in the hope ‘that readers will be pleased to learn that self-questioning does sometimes occur within ivied halls, and will be stimulated by these unprofessional questions.’

Well, I certainly was—and still am—stimulated by such unprofessional, unorthodox questions!

In that same edition of MANAS, Geiger also adds the following short piece, which I think merits reproducing in full here:

COMMENTARY — AN APPRECIATION

‘WE have no desire to put a “label” on Dr. Wienpahl, especially since he refuses to do so himself, and makes the fact that he is a “positionless man” a major point of his article. It is clear, however, that he establishes a kinship of mood and idea with at least two profound philosophical traditions.

In form and content, there are moments when Dr. Wienpahl reminds us of Lao-tze. This does not make him a Taoist, but it didn’t make Lao-tze a Taoist either. 

Then there are times when he sounds like a Zen Buddhist in a non-traditional mood, which makes it all right.

There is material for dozens of articles and discussions in this “unorthodox lecture.” We naturally hope that this is not the last of Dr. Wienpahl’s writing in this vein, but we suspect that thinking and writing of this sort are essentially climactic. If so, we are glad that a MANAS editor was around to capture the manuscript at the moment of blooming. For this is the kind of climax in modern thinking that we have been trying to predict.

It may be poor praise to paraphrase a work of this sort, but the temptation is too great. Dr. Wienpahl seems to be saying that no real knowledge is instrumental. For human beings, to know is to be. Humans are so mixed up with needs for instrumental knowledge, in order to stay alive, that we tend to suppose that having instrumental knowledge—knowledge which measures, and can be measured—is living. It is not. Instrumental knowledge makes only the coarse rind of life.   

So it is the old problem of nature versus nurture, and what to nurture in order to preserve nature, or just discover it.

Dr. Wienpahl probably has all sorts of obligations to his time, his culture, his “background,” and his environment. You could list the nurturing “influences” on him by the dozen. But the really important thing about this lecture is itself, and not the influences, which doubtless were “instrumental,” but did not, could not, make it.

According to a recent Knights of Columbus advertisement, Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Guilt finds us pleasantly unrepentant. We’re proud of this issue.’

Now, as I found and read through Wienpahl’s various other publications during the following couple of years, I came across a much fuller version of his lecture from 1959, quite probably the original text from which Geiger’s abridgement was made. It is full of many interesting further thoughts that are all worth reading, but I have to say that Geiger’s genius was to edit it in the fashion he did, giving it the kind of pacy, accessible bounce and energy that so affected me when I first read it.

However, wanting my cake (and the opportunity to eat it all!), I realised that I could really do with a text that made it possible to read both Geiger’s abridgement and, should I wish, the fuller text at the same time. I therefore made my own paper version using highlighter pens to indicate the text that had been used in the abridgement. It has served me well.

Recently, however, I was talking with a few people who have also valued the abridged text and who wanted an appropriately marked-up copy of the full essay. I thought about sending them a scan of my paper version, but it struck me that the best solution was to make a digital version and post it here on my blog, and I paste that below.

So, if you want to experience the pacy abridgement, please simply read the text that you can find at this link: Volume IX, No. 24 MANAS Reprint, 13 June 1956. Indeed, I’d thoroughly recommend doing that first of all. Then, once you’ve read it a few times, it is really interesting to start reading the whole thing and I have reproduced that below with the text from the abridged version in bold red type. Please remember that in addition to making the abridgement, Geiger also reordered some sections so the bold red text doesn’t reproduce the order of the abridged version.

Anyway, I have discovered that both texts have their value. However, the question of whether what it contains can act for you as a kind of ‘sutra’ is an entirely different matter—and that is, as always, for you to decide. But in all cases I hope that this it proves an interesting and thought provoking read. 

Enjoy!

AN UNORTHODOX LECTURE (1956)

PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS by Paul Wienpahl

The following remarks, which I have with misgivings called “philosophical reflections,” will appear disconnected. They will not flow from one another as sentences in rational discourse should. This is because the connections between the reflections are not of the sort which are called logical. Were I a poet, that which I have written would not need justification. For the poet is expected to be interested by connections other than the logical, and even to ignore altogether connections and relations between things. He is concerned with particular things.

As one whose interest is supposedly philosophical, therefore, I should offer some justification for presenting you with what will seem to be an irrational discourse. Well… though there are few if any logical or rational connections between my remarks, there are connections between them. The reflections are chronological, for I set them before you in the temporal order in which they occurred to me. And they are connected by the thread of the life of a man.

Furthermore, it seems to me now that a philosopher can be interested as well by things as by ideas and the rational relations between them.

"Then too, as far as I have become concerned, and this is a wholly personal reaction, I have grown tired of thinking and the rational. This is not to say..."

Then too, as far as I have become concerned, and this is a wholly personal reaction, I have grown tired of thinking and the rational. This is not to say that thinking and the rational is found to be unimportant. It is rather to say that something else has slipped its way in. I feel the need for control, and, hence, the rational and reasonable, as strong as ever. But I am despite myself sitting back and letting others and things take over. From investigation I have gone to reflection—from the river to the pool, from the clear and clean to the turgid and opaque. The way is not easy and I should not have selected it for myself. Giving up is difficult, and I can understand but not accept the fact that I should be writing these remarks.

Finally, I am doing what I am doing here because I do not believe that philosophy and science are the same thing, or that philosophy is a science, or that there is only one way of knowing. To proceed as I am is to register my protest against the accepted notion of philosophy. In so far as that which you are reading is important, its importance lies more in the fact that I’m saying it than in what I say.

*  *  *

There is ambiguity in the word ‘voyage.’ So a man may be interested in the voyage of another without being interested in the physical details of that voyage. And one can voyage without leaving home. Terms like ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual,’ therefore, have a use. And one can speak of the spiritual without being mystical or otherworldly. The subjective is often confused with the objective, the inner with the outer.

About writing and living. Writing can be and living is a creative act. Seeing them this way helps to see that neither can be forced. They come into being, and grow out of themselves. But this does not mean that they must be formless. It means only, I think, that the form which they have must develop within them. It cannot be impressed from without. (This is why Proust was successful and Henry Miller was not.) Nor, on the other hand, does it seem to me now that creative writing and living can be without some sort of conscious direction. For, if they were, they would lack form. Form and conscious direction are in a sense the same thing, which may be one reason why people have spoken of God.

If this were not true (that creativity contain some conscious direction), why should sustained creative acts be so difficult? Of course, they do seem, just to come. And it may be this element of the spontaneous about them which leads us to suppose that there is no direction about them. No work involved. But it is a different kind of work from physical work which is present. Creative action is the sort of action which Spinoza called ‘actions’ as opposed to ‘passions,’ actions in which the source of the action is within rather than without.

If creative actions like writing and living have no form, then words like ‘integrity,’ ethical words, have no significance. I was close at one time to believing that such words have no significance. I think that this is a common belief today, and a healthy one. The rub is to see their significance in such a way as to avoid the illusions and errors to which those who believe that they have no significance have rightly called attention. I think that one of these illusions is what is called anthropomorphism, which is a form of the confusion of the subjective with the objective.

But it is the significance and not the word which counts? This is so obvious that a great outlook, Platonism, was based upon the distinction. And yet I think that one way of looking at what I am doing now is this: I am trying to get through the words to the things and not to their significances. I had a clear impression once of what this would be like. It felt like getting down from a scaffold and into the stream. Words and ideas, then, are tools. My life, and it may be, the life of any intellectual, is troubled because I live only with the tools and without using them. I am like the miser who forgets what money is for and has only the money.

The difference between life and death is that, although in both you are in the stream, in the first you are aware of it. The intellectual’s trouble, or rather my trouble is that I have made something like the awareness everything. We, I (I easily confuse the subjective with the objective), I have glorified knowledge and lost sight of that of which it is the knowledge.

Having seen this, however, what then? Logically the answer is obvious. Live. But I do not have the art of living. It is almost as though we had forgotten how to live. It is almost as though that which Freud detected were death itself instead of a death wish.

There seem to be two ways in which a person becomes an individual. He grows; and he looks back through himself. The one way is obvious and the other is not, and so it is easy to describe the one and difficult to describe the other. I think that the second process of growth is what has been called the development of self-awareness. In so far as psychoanalysis can be considered non-pathologically, this second process of growth is psychoanalysis. Or perhaps we should say that the tools which the analysts have produced can be of use in this second process.

Philosophers see and show us things about themselves and others which we do not ordinarily notice. They do not provide us with theories and their utterances are not theories. Their utterances are far more like a poem or a painting than they are like a theory such as the law of gravitation. So the philosopher’s utterances are not to be taken literally as one takes a theory or a statement of fact. This is one reason why philosophers are difficult to understand, particularly nowadays when people tend to take everything literally.

Perhaps philosophers should talk only and not write. For the philosopher has nothing to say. He has only something to see and to show. Because he is concerned with particulars as particulars and not as members of aggregates as is the scientist. The prevailing reliance on scientia or knowledge makes us interested in groups instead of ourselves. But take not comfort from this for it can be misunderstood.

Nor is this to disparage knowledge. It is just that there is something more, many things more than knowledge. And there are ways other than the rational for coming into contact with these things. Philosophy is one of these ways.

I find it hard to relax and admit that there is something else than knowledge. For it gives my friends the chance to say that I am becoming mystic. And what I don’t like about this is that it seems to say that I disparage knowledge. I don’t. I simply now see that knowledge (scientific knowledge) is not everything. And this seems so obvious a thing to see that one wonders why it should be remarked.

Kierkegaard wrote that the secret of modern philosophy which stems from the cogito ergo sum lies in the identification of thought with being. Whereas Christianity identifies being with faith. John Dewey wrote that the philosophic fallacy lies in hypostatizing concepts. And Sartre wrote that existence precedes essence.

These are three cryptic statements of the revolt against idealism, a revolt which is a search for reality or the world outside thought. As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what really is, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing.

To see this is to be a man without a position. To get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things is to cease to be an idealist or a pragmatist, or an existentialist, or a Christian. I am a man without a position. I do not have the philosophic position that there are no positions or theories or standpoints. (There obviously are.) I am not a sceptic or an agnostic or an atheist. I am simply a man without a position.

That simple sentence, ‘I am a man without a position,’ does not express a philosophy of life. It is not a philosophy at all. It is rather a statement of fact. In it I am simply affirming my own existence. You have to be very careful about it because it is easy to classify and typify. I can be careful about it by taking it simply and directly. I am a man without a position. This opens the door to detachment. But there is an uncomfortable resemblance between that which is described in the opening pages of La Nausée and what I have felt lately. Something is happening and I don’t know what it is. The temptation is strong to try and ignore it; or to classify it, name it, and thus also deny it. Or to see a doctor. I am worried by it, because of it and because to classify it is easy. And yet I sense something important in the things my friend has said about the aesthetic experience. I do seem afraid to let go and have it happen. I am impatient. In this way I should die miserably. Yet I think that I can see that there is no reason why I should know what the outcome will be.

I hate to think that I need a catalyst like my friend. Yet I am afraid that if I go on by myself, I won’t get anywhere. But there’s the nub. Who wants to get anywhere? Why not let myself become what I shall? Trying to become something is trying to be a copy. I guess that we are afraid to become ourselves, and that is why we are seldom original.

This helps me to see that I would rather become a mediocre Paul Wienpahl than a successful type, say a successful college professor. But I am afraid of individuality and, hence, of originality, which is the thing I prize most.

No wonder it doesn’t come. I am doing everything I can to prevent it. It is like peace for the world today. And it is the striving for it which would cause me not to recognize it if it did, by a miracle, come. For then it, I, would be like no other thing. And I couldn’t recognize it because of this and because of the striving. There is a story about the poet, Rilke. Walking in the Luxembourg Gardens one day, he gave to an ugly old beggar when she extended her hand a rose he had just plucked. Overcome, she kissed him and fled the park, not to resume her begging that day. I should like to have done what Rilke did. But I hope now that I won’t.

In this direction seem to lie disorder and revelation, chaos and mysticism, immorality and insanity. Things despised. But I sense that here also lies freedom.

And by this means one can see through the trouble of our times. Ours is not an age of invention. It is an age of the exploitation of inventions. A technical age. It is an age in which science is the god. An age of planning and order. An age of psychoanalysis. We are bound, therefore, to destruction. As everything living when bound will die. Nor can the religionist take hope. For he also is bound because he thinks that he knows, or he “knows,” where we should go. When you know where you are going there is no fun, and where there is no fun there is no life. But beware of the confusion of the subjective with the objective. The trouble of our times indeed.

I do not want a version of life. I want life itself. My friend said it well. I want “to live in the present moment, in the immediate presence of reality undistorted by patterns from the past, or by hopes from the future.”

I do not want to deny change, for life is change. And thus is death natural to life.

I am bothered by the languages of myth and renunciation. Yet Rilke said more than our bright social philosophers do, even when they speak truly, when he said that doctors with their theories have simply invented ways of killing us. They invented production-line death, la mort en serie. A man can no longer even die today. He must be killed by some disease.

Morality is conventional, not natural. It is, therefore, binding. A man is responsible only when he goes beyond good and evil, when he is outside the law. Not in the way that a criminal is outside the law. Yet why do we hate the criminal?

No man has duties except to himself. This is to say that he has no duties. He has only the life living within him. Which he often denies or throttles. It is then that he speaks of his duties.

Responsibility is positive when you are free. It is negative when you are bound. That is, when you are moral.

There is another kind of discipline than that which we ordinarily have in mind when we speak of discipline. It is the “discipline” which a plant or an animal has which “makes” or “allows” it to take the form which it has. It may be what Aristotle called the essence of a thing. (And see here how Sartre is wrong.) All ordinary discipline, which is order imposed from without, tends only to destroy a thing. The resolution of the paradox, if you can call it that, that life is impossible without discipline, lies in seeing that there is a third kind of living which lies between the two of life with and life without discipline (in the ordinary sense). This third kind of life is one which is free of ordinary discipline. It is one in which the “discipline” comes, so to speak, from within.

You say that the adventure of life is to make sense out of the madness of things. But is it? Is there not also feeling and direct experience? And the madness? We want to cure the insane, but one can also ask whether we should or why we try. There is now, I fancy, a strong tendency to live vicariously. Perhaps this is because we have so many books. Your motorcycle provides a way of living veridically. On that machine you must be aware of the dangers, of the full of awe, else there would be no thrill to it.

We strive too much today to understand, to grasp, to order, to help; and too little to feel and see and be on our own and enjoy. We are, that is, too moral and not enough amoral. We are not living, we are trying to find out how to live. When it should be obvious that living comes naturally. This moral streak in us stems from the morbid elements to which the Kafkas call attention. But not in the way in which one might ordinarily think. For, until we see the morbid elements, we will go on being moral. That is, denying life which is what morbidity and morality are doing. “Of course,” you will say. But the trick is to see why.

People seem ashamed to talk of themselves today. This is an aspect of the loss of sight of the individual. With this appears the frightening opposition between the possibility that I have grown morbidly self-centered and the possibility that this is the role of the philosopher, the human being: to illumine the human situation, his situation, and that this can only be done by looking within instead of without. We may ameliorate our lot by looking without, but we do not thus illuminate it. In generalities again, this is a technical age, not an age of discovery. And discoveries about human beings are made by looking within and not without. Looking without you discover only things about their skins. Ask yourself what is a technical age, or which is the technical age. And see something about looking within.

What kind of language is this, this “within and without” stuff? It does not make much sense to me. Yet it seems to have a sense. One evening at dinner I tried to hurry a friend. “We will be late for that appointment,” I said. “You keep this up,” he replied, “and you’ll keep another appointment too soon.” I saw something in this strange language about my rushing.

When one says that he is a man without a position, does this mean that he is without direction? Does it mean that he is still in search of something? Perhaps. But what I had in mind by saying that I am a man without a position was, I think, this: I am getting away from living by principles toward living by myself or out of myself. I meant that I am no longer a pragmatist, or a realist, or an idealist or a Christian. I am simply Paul. This may also mean that I am lost, without direction. But this is misleading. For it means too that I have a direction and that direction is my own. It will come from within rather than being imposed from without. It means that I will guide it, I will give my life its form. And consciously too. Which seems to be hoisting one by one’s bootstraps, but is not. It is only difficult.

Being without a position also means that I cannot judge others. I have said that I have come to see what people mean by saying that there is evil in the world. In fact, I can see this thing. To be unable to judge, however, seems tantamount to believing that there is no evil. I seem, therefore, to be saying contradictory things. But the contradiction is only apparent, for I think that what people have called evil is simply the recalcitrant, the unmanageable. And it is the latter that I now see better than I did before. An aspect of it is what Freud called the unconscious. Another is death. It is change. It is Moby Dick. In a way Einstein came across it in the general theory of relativity. To admit no limits to reason is to deny that man is mortal. I haven’t seen evil. I have simply seen that which, those things which, people call evil.

But if death is a brute fact so is life. Yet as we miss seeing the one so do we miss seeing the other, and we identify these realities with something other than themselves.

I have been thinking that I want to get away from knowing to living, from trying to understand and classify things to the things themselves. This has bothered me because “wanting” to know is a part of us. Now I see that the split is not between knowing and living, but between two kinds of knowing. The one kind is science and brings with it control over things. The other kind might be called philosophical knowledge. It does not give us control over anything. It simply brings us into contact with things, a kind of relaxed contact which may lead to resignation but not to control. The interest in science can be carried too far. It can lead to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, or the condition in which control and domination become everything. The opposite of the condition of freedom. The interest in knowing cannot be carried too far.

In so-called rational knowledge the thing is lost sight of, and, by being related to a host of other things, disappears. The mystic is he who sees things for what they are, or as they are (in so far as one can speak of things as they are). He sees them in their particularity. As the child does.

You cannot put things into words. You can put ideas into words but not things; although the poet comes as close to doing so as one can.

So now we have two things: a different approach, the subjective; and a different subject: human problems instead of language analysis, that is, rational analysis. But there is a third thing and it is the most difficult to talk about. So far I seem to be able to talk about it only in paradoxes. For it has to do, for example, with reasonably accepting the non-reasonable. When Sartre says that he sees evil in the world (a morbid way of talking), he is saying in part that he can see that which is unreasonable and, therefore, imponderable. But it is obvious that there is something other than reason in the world. And so this only vaguely hints at what I have in mind. In a way the psychoanalysts started it. And the poets like Rilke and Eliot continued it when they sang of the inner life. There is nothing to your destiny, said Rilke, but what is contained in your infancy. It is as though we have gone far enough and realize that now is the time for reconsideration. Not of analysis, but of psychoanalysis; not for more control but for less control.

Here is a way of putting this third factor. The problem today is that of each individual. It is not a political or social problem. It is not an objective problem, and the continued use of objective kinds of analysis is simply a way of evading “the problem.” You will say, there is nothing wrong with me. (And in a way there is not.) Yes, it is the others always and the world. That’s the cover-up.

A man is not responsible for what he does until he sees that he is free. In a sense he then becomes totally responsible, for he cannot rely on anything. I used to believe that no one is really responsible for his acts. I liked the belief because it implied that praise and blame cannot be justified except as educative measures. The saint blames no man. And the hero cannot understand the praise which we heap upon him. But here is the rub. If there is no such thing as responsibility, then there is no such thing as freedom. Praise and blame, then, make another kind of sense. And that is the trouble with being a saint. Dictators are saints and utopians are dictators in embryo.

And, if you do not believe in responsibility, then you must believe that all problems are rational problems. There can be no individual way of doing things. There can be only the common way of doing things. The rational approach leads to uniformity. People who believe in free will and praise and blame are right, although not for the reasons which they suppose. They are right because they are insisting that there is freedom, although when you have it you are beyond praise and blame. This is the reverse side of the coin of sainthood.

One of the things which I think that “looking within” means is paying attention to the individual. Looking within means coming to an “understanding” of yourself (the quotation marks are particularly important). Not coming to an understanding of your anatomy and physiology and psychology, but coming into contact with yourself. Seeing yourself, if you will, as an individual thing. “Looking within” means to see yourself philosophically rather than scientifically. “Looking within” is a mysterious phrase if you think that the process to which it refers will bring knowledge. For it brings only acquaintance with an individual thing.

We do not easily accept solitude. It is almost as though we do not like to be cut off and thus free. The cry of the babe at birth is symbolic. There is some sense in the notion that men do not really want liberty. They talk of it. But when it is presented they cast down the platter. For freedom brings solitude which, in prospect, is frightening. And liberty takes strength, strength which must come from oneself. And few of us are willing to give freely of ourselves in any way.

When I speak of the inner life as contrasted with the outer, I sometimes mean simply the private life as contrasted with the public. A man is living his inner life when he is living privately.

I do not fail to be struck still by the way in which satisfactory sexual relations resolve all private problems. Yet what of the ossuary in Melville’s Taipi-vai, and Pierre’s ending and Ahab’s? Well, but do they not assume importance because of disillusionment rather than because of clear seeing? It is the puritans, the Christians, the idealists who are shocked by the skeleton in the family closet, and this is because they expect and want to see something else. The tragedy of Hamlet appeals because those who read it do not see. Or it appeals as a case history. It does not appeal because there is tragedy in life.

It appeals because we think that there is tragedy in life. Hamlet’s story is true, not because it corresponds to a fact, but because it corresponds to an imaginary fact. For a clear seer there may at first come disillusionment and, hence, a sense of tragedy. But there finally comes acceptance. The sense of tragedy depends on futile striving. It may be a part of living to experience this sense at one time. But the sense is not otherwise part of the ultimate furniture of the world.

It is a mistake to look for an agent wherever there is an action. Witness Thurber’s aunt who feared that electric outlets, if left unplugged, would let electricity leak out all over the house; and Jamie’s own bewilderment when he went to look for the cloud under which a certain individual was leaving town. So looking for the inner life can lead to confusion. (It is like looking for the answer.)

On the other hand, not to look for an agent where there is an action is to lose sight of the individual. Scientifically speaking, or as far as science is concerned, it is healthy to employ a language which does not lead one to look for the agent. Looking for the agent is religion and metaphysics. But in speaking scientifically about human beings we, therefore, do lose sight of the agent. That is, of the individual.

The preoccupation with property and attainments which is today in vogue is what might be called a public preoccupation. It is resulting in people who have a public but no private life. By a private life I do not mean simply having a home and sometimes pulling the shades. For even then we are often absorbed by what is essentially public: chairs which other people have, music which other people have, and learning which other people have.

By this means we can come to see what the inner, the spiritual and the mysterious mean. They refer to what is your own and characteristically your own; that which is your own and which no one else could possibly share in the sense of having the same. These are the unique things, and that is why they are mysterious. They are your memories, your reveries, your dreams, the private happenings in your life, the picture you paint, the song you sing. What else is there which can be surely your own except the things which you create and which are you? This is why the poor man’s house can be happier than the rich man’s. The rich man’s house is “better” because it is standard. It does not have the defects of individual workmanship. But the poor man’s house is happier because it is his own in a way in which the rich man’s cannot be. No one else’s hands came in to perfect the poor man’s house, no machines, and make it thus like all other houses.

Lest all this ring too much like spiritual uplift, bear in mind that it helps to take the opaqueness from terms like “spiritual” and “inner.”

Confusion about the inner life arises from the fact that “inner” is a spatial term. The phrase “inner life” thus leads us to look for a thing within. This is why speaking of the private life may help.

The trouble with philosophic systems is that they are like crutches. They keep us from walking alone.

We used to walk on all fours and there are many of us who still cannot stand alone. For the crutches by means of which we “walk” in this world can be material things as well as they can be our children or our parents or the so-called spiritual things, such as philosophic doctrines and ethical codes. But when individuality is achieved, when a man can live by himself and out of himself, then neither property nor concept nor doctrine is important. This is why people are slaves to their property, why they cannot bear to part with it or even see it damaged. It is their crutch, their substitute for living; and taking it away from them is like taking life itself from them. And so it is with their religion and their gods.

The injured feeling which the righteous have.

Although it may sometimes be advantageous to speak as though there were two selves, an inner and an outer, there is only one. And, since there is, to suppose that there are two will result in making a mystery out of one or the other, since it will set us to looking for something which is not there. We easily think that there are two selves because we seldom know by acquaintance the one self which we are.

You might say that the personal, the private, has its place and that this is not in the public. Why then a published article of this sort? The answer, I think, may be seen by turning the coin over. Not to be personal in public is nowadays part of the sublimation of the individual which as much as anything characterizes our times. We are pushing the individual so far into the background that one day he will cease to exist. Otherwise it is true that the personal should not be aired in public.

Failure to distinguish worth from creativity blinds us to, and makes us neglect, our own little acts of creation because they often are worthless. And so we easily commit spiritual suicide.

People think that there are values because they need crutches.

There are valuings, actions of liking and prizing, and there are things valued. But there are no values.

I am interested, you see, mainly in freedom.

You feel free when you see that there are no values. And, hence, no good and evil. For this takes your mind off success and worth and lets your self come through. You can accept what you are doing when you don’t judge it. That is, you can accept the creative or the free act.

We still think in general terms about particular things. Until we see that our theories are but guides to the particular we will not grasp them in their essentials. We live with the symbols rather than the stuff and so believe in heroes rather than in ourselves.

My friend said that creativity consists mostly in letting the world come to us. Usually we are projecting our cares, pleasures and needs onto it. Our problem now is that of accepting creativity consciously. As a child one lets the world come to one. But unconsciously. A little like the woman who conceives when she is raped. One way of seeing the philosophical life is that of seeing it as life “devoted” to becoming fully conscious, to distinguishing your self clearly from all else, and thus being in a position of knowing yourself and of letting the world come to you.

I have been trying to say that what is real does not have value. This is why the individual appears worthless when you get through to him. This is difficult to see because we do not have words for it. For example, it leads one to want to say that that which is “important” is valueless. But an illustration may help. We fear death because we imbue it with value. It is contradictory to accept death with equanimity and continue to believe in values. Values, then, are unreal. We attribute them to things. In this sense, of course, they are part of the world and hence “real.” But in this sense we have been deceived by them and have come to think that they are real in every other sense. When death is accepted as a fact, that is, with no valuation placed upon it, it cannot be feared. Or welcomed. Until you see yourself or anything as worthless, worthless, you will not see the reality which is yourself or this other thing.

Self-knowledge is the kind of knowledge which is completely useless. We acquire all other forms of knowledge for their use; unless, like the miser, we have come to confuse the means with the end. But why should something useless be desirable? Because life itself is useless (the mistake of the dictator is to use people). And because, like a human being or a painting, it has what is called intrinsic value. Which is, I think, to say that it has no value at all. And this is to say that it is natural and real. Values are utilities, that is to say, things which are used and not accepted for themselves. In this respect they are unreal, for it is not they which count, but that to which they lead.

Nowadays we know the value of everything and are nothing.

When you know yourself, you’ve got nothing. This is true because what happens in knowing yourself is that you become something, not that you get something. And when you become something you do not need anything. It is then that you attain to the detachment from things which allows you to accept them instead of demanding them. It is when things have no use that you enjoy them.

It follows, then, that self-knowledge results in freedom. But we are afraid of freedom because it brings with it solitude. So we fall back on controls, laws, ideals. Which is made easy for us because so many controls have been built into us as we grow up; or rather, were brought up. Self-knowledge results in seeing the sources of the controls, for which sources we have been able to blame others. This, too, makes self-knowledge difficult.

The old insight, expressed in the doctrine of freedom of the will, is that men are responsible for what happens to them. The new insight, expressed in the doctrine that moral responsibility is meaningless, is that things happen to people. Neither insight should be lost and neither should be stressed. For the first makes for harshness and individuality, and the second for tolerance and loss of individuality.

Knowledge can tend to reduce individuality because the greater our knowledge of a human situation (unhappiness in marriage) the smaller our inclination to blame the individuals for their unhappiness. We take their responsibility from them and place it in environment and heredity. Tolerance which depends on understanding has a similar tendency to reduce individuality.

Whoever said that man is a goal-directed animal is a fool. Man can be goal-directed. But when he is, he is bent on suicide.

There is the problem of whom to blame when things are going all right and we nonetheless find ourselves in difficulties. It can easily be put as a psychiatric problem, but I think that it is often not that, though psychiatric techniques might aid in its solution. It is a problem which we are increasingly ignoring under the lure of the notion that everything can be explained. We explain our difficulties by tracing them to their origins without thereby solving them. The solution to the problem is the acceptance of the inexplicable but nonetheless knowable. The “problem” is that of living. Knowing oneself consists in part in seeing the causes of one’s behavior in oneself, or at least a part of them, instead of seeing only the external causes. I am violent because I am violent. Or better, I behave violently because I am violent. We are the necessary causes of our actions. Other people and things are only the sufficient causes, or even the occasions for actions we perform. A man is kind because he is kind, not because a child makes him kind. Knowing this is knowing oneself. And it too results in giving up praise and blame. For self-blame is at best a curious process. This is why, too, that self-knowledge results in seeing that there is in reality no good and evil.

When you reflect that children learn to walk and talk and are not taught to walk and talk, you see that the seeds come from within and that the environment is just the soil in which they grow.

The way into the realm of grace is through purgatory. That is, we only get next to our selves by admitting to things which we want most to deny.

It is not really that there is an inner being. It is rather that there seems to be one because the individuals we are have been laid over with levels of personality which have been smeared on us by social custom and usage. Usually the lower levels speak only in our dreams and in slips of the tongue. In the great philosopher or artist they speak out directly. Even in the great scientists the discoveries are probably made by the lower levels of the man’s being.

I am no more interested in ideas now than I am in games. I have become detached from all that. It is out there at my finger tips and I am not in it. I am like the man who has lost interest in his business and wonders what he has been doing. This may be where philosophy begins. If it is philosophy it is harder than I thought. For philosophy would then begin where everything seems unimportant. No, that is where life begins.

There is a story in this: a little child wandered off into the rain and was lost. Lost to death. But why does it have to be a little child?

There are no great men. There are only individuals each in his own niche, living. We think that there are great men when we are not living in our own way. Then we seize upon another for support and let him carry the load.

Becoming an individual brings with it the feeling that there are no leaders and the realization that the President is as stupid as you. But not that you are brighter. How childish was Eisenhower’s call, “atoms for peace.”

I think that becoming an individual brings with it too, or lies in the realization, that behavior is never completely rational. One tends to think as one grows up that society is like a family in which there are wise heads. When one finds that there are no wise heads and that society is not a family, one has become an individual. Then, too, is it that one sees that one has no prospects and no projects, no profession, for the pressures have relaxed. What comes now will come from oneself, for one has ceased to be a middleman. Then you feel superior to no one—and inferior to no one.

The abiding truth in religion is the realization that there is something external to our consciousness which is more powerful than we are. The mistake lies in believing that it is external to us as well as to our consciousness. Or at least, that what is external is a person.

The despair one feels, which the existentialists recently have described, is not only due to seeing one’s freedom. It is also due to coming into contact with one’s self. And seeing through one’s talents and accomplishments, the utilities. For, when one contacts that which has no value (or which is, as we say, an end in itself) or which is real, one is likely to think that it has no value. So one feels confronted with a void. And, if one be an intellectual, one analyzes the concept of nothingness as the existentialists have. This is frightfully misleading, for that with which one has come into contact is the real and needs no analysis.