An Unorthodox Lecture – Wienpahl

• Highlight, page 1 they are connected by the thread of the life of a man.

• Highlight, page 1 Then, too, I have grown tired of thinking and the rational. This is not to say that thinking and the rational can be found to be unimportant. It is rather to say that something else slips in. I feel the need for control, and, hence, for the rational and reasonable, as strongly as ever. But 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 perhaps I should not have selected it for myself.

==The aspiration is to become both an intellectual and a mystic, with an inclination toward the latter, a direct connection with reality.

• This implies studying the work of those who showed both a dedication to intellect and direct knowledge.
• Continuing an exploration of photography as direct knowing.
• Deepening my meditation practice.

• Highlight, page 1 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.

• Highlight, page 1 For the poet is expected to be interested by other connections than the logical, and even to ignore altogether connections and relations between things. He is concerned with particular things.

• Highlight, page 1 one can speak of the spiritual without being mystical or other-worldly.

• Highlight, page 1 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 can not be impressed from without. 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.

Wienpahl argued that writing and living cannot be forced. Their form must develop from within. They also require conscious direction to have form. This is philosophizing on the nature of creativity and therefore living itself. He proposes that while art has spontaneity (it comes from within and the arrival of ideas cannot be forced) it is guided by a conscious direction.

• Highlight, page 2 If this were not true (that creativity contains 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.

• Highlight, page 2 there is something more, many things more than knowledge. And there are other ways than the rational for coming into contact with these things. Philosophy is one of these ways.

• Highlight, page 2 Words and ideas are tools. My life, and it may be, the life of any intellectual is troubled because of living only with the tools—and without using them.

• Highlight, page 2 knowledge is not everything.

• Highlight, page 2 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 is really, 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.

• Highlight, page 2 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

• Highlight, page 2 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 aggregates instead of ourselves.

• Highlight, page 3 position, and this should open the door to detachment.

• Highlight, page 3 I hate to think that I need a catalyst like a 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.

• Highlight, page 3 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). That 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.

• Highlight, page 3 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 also 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.

• Highlight, page 3 When one says that he is a man without a position, does this mean that he is without direction? Perhaps. 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 just difficult.

• Highlight, page 3 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.

• Highlight, page 3 And by this means one can see through the trouble of our times. Ours is not an age of discovery. It is an age of the exploitation of discoveries. 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 where we should go.

• Highlight, page 3 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 apparent only, 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.

• Highlight, page 3 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. Responsibility is positive when you are free. It is negative when you are bound. That is, when you are moral.

• Highlight, page 3 I have been thinking that I want to get away from knowing to living, from trying to understand

• Highlight, page 4 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.

• Highlight, page 4 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 “have the same as.” 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?

• Highlight, page 4 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.

• Highlight, page 4 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.

• Highlight, page 4 The trouble with philosophic systems is that they are like crutches. They keep us from walking alone.

• Highlight, page 4 If there is no such thing as responsibility, then there is no such thing as freedom.

• Highlight, page 4 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

• Highlight, page 4 “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.

• Highlight, page 4 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 yourself. 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.

• Highlight, page 5 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.

• Highlight, page 5 We live with the symbols rather than the stuff and so believe in heroes rather than in ourselves.

• Highlight, page 5 creativity consists mostly in letting the world come to us.

• Highlight, page 5 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.

• Highlight, page 5 The solution to the problem is the acceptance of the inexplicable but nonetheless knowable. The “problem” is that of living.

• Highlight, page 5 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.

• Highlight, page 5 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.

• Highlight, page 5 For philosophy would then begin where everything seems unimportant.

• Highlight, page 5 The abiding truth in religion is the realization that there is something external to our minds which is more powerful than we are. The mistake lies in believing that it is external to us as well as to our minds.

• Highlight, page 6 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.

References

Wienpahl, Paul. “An Unorthodox Lecture.” MANAS Journal, vol. 9, no. 24, June 1956, pp. 1–6. https://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeIX_1956/IX-24.pdf