Lebenskünstler

Lost Intimacy in American Thought – Edward Mooney

[Thoreau and Bugbee] write ‘salvations’ that raise life from decline; they are philosophers who write intimately, personally, for love of the world.

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He [Bugbee] proposed that philosophy was “a walking meditation of the place.”…a philosophy that brings life to things, a lyrical philosophy that finds plenitudes in them.

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To test a world by theory, we retreat from the-world-to-be-theorized and size it up in terms of that theory. Thus the detachment of theory is the detachment of the theorizer from an intimate immersion in the world…this stance of ‘looking at’ (rather than beholding) destroys the wider intimacy that a religious sensibility seeks and sometimes finds…To know a sunset intimately is in part to bask in its presence, which is to find ourselves basking – not theorizing.

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His [Thoreau’s] walking is an exercise in weaving the world, weaving the self, weaving contacts that occur as revelations of the world as a place overflowing with meaning – even holy, so deep is its significance.

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…philosophy becomes identified less with a saving journey, and more with a cognitive grasp attained through abstract products – explanatory or critical schemes…thinking theoretically vaults one above or outside the fray in an aspiration to motionless onlooking that freezes that onlooker in a narrow slice of the significant range of life’s wider plenitudes. To cut back from the immersions and submersions, passional and practical, that are the tissue of life is to cut adrift from opportunities for self-knowledge. A knowing contact with oneself cannot come about through distancing oneself from vital contacts.

…One travels, with baggage, passions, and commitments. Sometimes the wondrous is not in the remote valley or mountain top, or distant heavens but in the local. One finds the astonishing as one moves with and around parochial passions, promises, and practices. Then philosophy [or social practice] can become a quasi-religious journey toward the intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of  family or neighborhood life, of rock-climbing and cooking, of the ups and downs of walking a friend through cancer, or of swimming away from catastrophe.

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…the uninterrupted ‘eternal’ standpoint of theory, or of the benefits of impersonal theory-production, a detached stalling that occludes our particular immersions in local pains and delights, family ties and occupational demands…his [Bugbee] condition clarified, not by argument or theory but by moving ever deeper into his condition.