Month: September 2021

Chapter 27: Skill

“Good people teach people who aren’t good yet; 

the less good are the makings of the good.

Anyone who doesn’t respect a teacher

or cherish a student

May be clever, but has gone astray.

There’s a deep mystery there.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Early in the Republic, Plato offers a rough definition of philosophy, and it isn’t smoking a pipe, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and pontificating in an armchair: it’s “love of learning.”

For Plato, human beings have three basic loves because our souls have three basic parts: pleasure (appetite), honor (thymos or “spirit), and knowledge (reason). Put simply, we want to feel good, we want to be liked, and we want to know things.

But the philosopher is not the person who knows all the things. She is the person who wants to know all the things and loves learning about them. More precisely, she is the person who knows she doesn’t know most of the things, and can only teach others because she is a student of the world. She is drawn above and beyond the lame gravity of pleasure and prestige to find out what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful. She wants to see these things unwarped by the forces of fad and convention.

I always wondered: why these three? My colleague Steve McIntosh offers a brilliant way to understand this philosophical trinity. Each corresponds to a basic part of our being that grows through two complementary activities, and if we’re not exercising each, we will go astray. Think of it as the circulatory system of the soul.

Beauty is the dialectic of appreciation and creation. 

Goodness is the dialectic of devotion and service.

Truth is the dialectic of learning and teaching.

The first pole of each is more passive and receptive, while the second pole is more active and generative. In the first, we fill up. In the second, we empty out. Receive, give. Inhale, exhale. Following Aristotle, the goal is to hit the sweet spot, the mean between excess and deficiency. 

If you don’t appreciate the beauty around you, your senses will wither. If you don’t allow grace and gratitude to interrupt your days, you heart will harden. If you don’t follow your curiosity, you’ll become close minded.

Too much appreciation curdles into consumption. Too much service without devotion leads to burnout. Too much learning without teaching makes you a know-it-all.

Emerson wrote that ‘In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.’

In this way, the true teacher understands that the inner student is his primary pupil, and that his students are his true teachers. The more he respects his teachers, the more he will learn, and the more he will teach them to listen to their inner teacher.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 26: Power of the Heavy

“Heavy is the root of light.

Still is the master of moving.

So wise souls make their daily march

with the heavy baggage wagon.

Only when safe 

in a solid, quiet house 

do they lay their cares aside.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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The Greek mathematician Archimedes posed the idea of what we today call “the view from nowhere”: a point from which we can see all, objectively, without our own perceptions warping the world. Descartes recast his idea into the form we most commonly encounter it today:

“Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe from the place it occupied to another, demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so, also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.”

Mathematicians, philosophers, alchemists, and the everyday laborer alike have sought the fabled Archimedian point, the philosopher’s stone, the exit from the Matrix, the secret to offloading the mental and material baggage we lug around.

Today’s chapter might suggest a hardcore training program: pile your wagon with as much baggage as you can carry. Toil away all day so that you can rest at night. Work heavy, play light. But that is not the sense of the thing.

The “solid, quiet house” is not the reward at the end of the road, but what enables you to lift any load. The still point is the mind attuned to the baggage of the moment. Of course, at some point the limits of your physical strength assert themselves, but respect for the load will prevent injury and expand how much you can lift. But mentally, the text suggests that there is no limit to what the heartmind can carry and, indeed, the heavier the load, the lighter we can become. Our baggage is our best teacher. We try to drag it, but it drags us, kicking and screaming, until we realize that the heaviest thing—what Nietzsche called “the spirit of gravity”–is inside ourselves. 

The Archimedian point is an ark, a vehicle, a mobile home that can carry anything. There is a reason that in Exodus, the Hebrews are told to build the ark of the covenant in the desert, and have to lug it around for forty years before they reach the Promised Land. Once you find your inner ark, you can lay your cares aside, and shoulder whatever load is before you.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

I am thrilled to announce that I have been made a Senior Fellow with the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a think tank of “philosopher activists” focused on defusing political polarization, healing the culture wars, and building cultural coalitions to solve our country’s biggest problems.

I will be contributing to their flagship publication, the Post Progressive Post.

You can read my first contribution here: “Why We Will Grow Together or Grow Apart: Cultural Intelligence and Climate Change.”