On 7 Faulty But Reasonable Strategies For Being at Home in The World - Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher, PH.D

07/07/2018 On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for being at home in the world – Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher,
l Philosopher, Ph.D.
ANDREW JAMES TAGGART, PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHER, PH.D. MENU
On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for

being at home in the world
APRIL 11, 2012
ANDREW TAGGART
Let’s suppose that a person P experienced suf cient physical harm during P’s
formative years, such that P’s standing in the world is brought into question. What
strategy or strategies would P likely employ (where these strategies are more ways of
being in the world than conscious choices, more ongoing practices than ‘cognitive’
takes) in order to maintain a sense of basic integrity?
The key is to see each strategy as an attempt to make my standing in the world
intelligible to me. To a degree, for the world to be intelligible to me is for it to be
meaningful (enough) for me. The rst strategy is to take an early exit.
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07/07/2018 On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for being at home in the world – Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher, Ph.D.
1. Suicide. To P, the world is not and cannot be a home. P does not belong, and the
future will closely resemble the past and present. This being so, P will remove himself
from it. (But see my “On the Suicide’s Claims and the Philosopher’s Replies.”)
2. Contemptu mundi. The temporal world is not a home. In which case, P renounces
the temporal world, thereby turning the eyes of the mind (or soul) toward the
transcendent alone. Here we have asceticism.
3. Love of the Flesh. The world in general is not a home but the esh is alive. The
world rejects, but the esh af rms. P can be a master in control of P’s desires, the
other a slave. The love of the esh is, it turns out, a safe space in which P can say yes
to life, if only for a time.
4. Inner Citadel. The Stoics contrast the inner sanctuary of willing and thinking to the
tragic cast of the world of others. (This is not entirely true, since the Stoics af rmed a
cosmopolitan vision of human fellowship. But set this thought aside.) The Inner Citadel
(Pierre Hadot’s leitmotiv for Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy) is the site of self-
suf ciency, the rejection of all dependency on others. P’s Inner Citadel is a safe place
where the chances of being wounded are lessened.
5. The World of the Imagination. If the world is not a home for P, then P can conjure
an alternative. P’s imagination gains ‘depth’ rather like the birth of the soul for
Nietzsche: as if a at surface were being stretched and deepened. P’s imaginary world
is thereby set over and against the real world to which P does not belong. (In my “On
Putting Life in Order,” I write more about so-called “OCD,” a term I nd objectionable.)
6. Bourgeois Respectability. The world’s so far not being a home does not entail that it
cannot be a home for P. Perhaps P can ‘accommodate’ himself to it as it is. Bourgeois
respectability aims at a life of stability and moderate comfort, a world (largely private)
shorn of the greater passions and greater vulnerabilities.
P’s approach is one of prudence: not to live with the greatest intensity (e.g., German
Romanticism) but to ensure that he has an insurance policy against whatever may
likely befall him. P is not trying to live but is trying to defer the prospect of dying, as if
dying could be held off, set aside, or deferred inde nitely.
7. Life Mission. When Eli Wiesel said, apropos the Holocaust, “Never again,” he was
drawing on an intellectual tradition that began around the 17th C. and that has become
the background picture for modernity. P, having been harmed, can make his life into a
mission to stamp out X (where X is harassment, sexual abuse, female genital
mutilation, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.). The late poet Adrienne Rich also supposes
this when she writes that the goal of her life was to “create a world without
exploitation.” We will see that this is a reasonable strategy, but it nevertheless contains
an irremovable metaphysical aw.
In modernity, Edward Craig argues, we have seen a broad shift away from The Mind of
God thesis (man as contemplative being seeking to approach or achieve access to the
mind of God) to the Agency Theory. On the latter, he states that man was
no longer a spectator, but a being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world. It
did not, one cannot over emphasise, manifest itself only or even primarily in moral
or practical philosophy; the striking thing about it was precisely the way in which
what might be called the practical concepts invaded areas previously thought of as
purely theoretical, those areas where ‘spectator’ [contemplator] theories had been
paramount, and whose connections with the practical had been thought of as a
welcome but wholly inessential extra (The Mind of God and the Works of Man, p.
229).
This idea is evident as early as Kant and doubtless comes to fruition in Marx’s famous
nal thesis on Feuerbach. For Kant, the normative (the ‘ought’) is distinct from the
factual/scienti c (the ‘is’). Kant’s novel claim–novel, that is to say, in the history of
Western thought–about injustice would go as follows: The world is not as it ought to
be.
Marx’s nal thesis is a radicalization of Kant’s thesis, philosophers heretofore having

only interpreted the world, the point now being, Marx says, to change it.
P would therefore take on board a life of restlessness:
a. The world is not as it should be.
b. My life must be directed at closing the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’
c. My life shall be in nite striving after the impossible.
For P, who is beholden to this metaphysical picture, the world can never be a home.
Conclusion
True philosophical self-re ection only begins once P has lived out any or all of
strategies 1-7 and found it impossible to make the world into a home on these terms.
Most people will never be ‘alive’ to this impossibility. (The Left has a bone caught in its
throat with respect to 7. If this characterization is right, then it follows that I am not a
Leftist.) A few brave souls will see that a different way of being–a way of self-
cultivation–can put one in touch with the world. Yet the path of yes-saying is a long
one–in Spinoza’s words, rare and precious and excellent.
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07/07/2018 On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for being at home in the world – Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher,

ANDREW JAMES TAGGART, PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHER, PH.D. MENU

On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for

Marx’s nal thesis is a radicalization of Kant’s thesis, philosophers heretofore having

P would therefore take on board a life of restlessness:

a. The world is not as it should be.

c. My life shall be in nite striving after the impossible.

Imagining 2 economic On lived logic and A very brief tutorial on

Posted in education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics

‘Philosophy is not suited to the classroom’: An essay on ascesis

TOP POSTS & PAGES

William James on "The Moral Equivalent of War"

How Artists Can Make a Living

Total Work, the Chief Enemy of Philosophy

Join 1,919 other followers

Enter your email address

Political Moderates Are Lying - Quillette quillette.com/2018/07/02/pol… 20 hours ago

'The Task Facing Masculinity' areomagazine.com/2018/07/06/the… via @areomagazine.

How We Converse With Each Other

How Artists Can Make a Living

Money Rules for Simple Living

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