Everything Should Have Its Place
And then we can learn to put things away, with Socrates
Philosophy as a way of life means thinking about what you do. That doesn’t mean always thinking about what you are doing as you are doing it, of course. We have to compartmentalize to some extent and, in solitude, reflect on our actions retroactively. This is when we can assess the behaviors we call “habits” and form judgements about whether they are good, fine, or in need of improvement.
Too often this work has been outsourced to self-help books, gurus, or therapists—all of which are potentially helpful in certain limited cases, so long as we do not become reliant on outsourcing the work of subjectivity itself.
The work of subjectivity is the work of reflection, judgement, and adaptation that should, in the first instance, always be the primary work of every person’s life. This is the space opened up by the conversation between me and myself that Hannah Arendt describes as the basis of moral thinking, which, in her Responsibility and Judgement, she describes as being something constantly under threat of erasure by a society of institutional control.
“The presupposition of such judgment is merely the habit of living together explicitly with oneself, that is, of being engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which since Socrates and Plato we usually call thinking (pg. 40-41)… Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.” (pg. 90) “Thinking, the intercourse between me and myself, is the condition of possibility of the fear of (bad) conscience, and it is this fear, not thinking as such, that impels man to abstain from doing wrong… Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evil-doing? (pg. 160) - Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment
Yet, whenever it comes to thinking about the basic needs, functions, habits, and flow of life, I find myself running into people who are still convinced of this stultifying division of labor between serious philosophy and self-help. They roll their eyes and scoff, or if they can help themselves, they nod politely, or blink listlessly.
Academic philosophers have a foolish tendency to scorn this thoughtfulness about human activity as mere “self-help.” Sure, I get it, to a certain extent we can all admit that the kind of slop produced under that header often postures as more profound and helpful than it really is while simultaneously closing off entire horizons of the context people would need to understand for really reclaiming agency.
But why are academics so quick to allow the industry to capture something so important? If we look to the founders of philosophy, there was no separation between metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, and the virtuous kind of conversation had between truth-seekers about ways of living better. Thinking seriously about the nature of The Good Life is the point.
We have seen how philosophy without this dimension becomes detached from practical life and eventually secludes its participants into the back offices and dingy basements of the screened society. Even before the domination of screens and its society of the spectacle, Nietzsche was already warning us to not trust thoughts that come from “stale air.”
“Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion—nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said elsewhere, is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
The screened society makes the capture of intellectually inclined individuals more easy than ever. Abstract thinkers already inhabited virtual worlds. They were, as Ivan Illich would say, in a state of disablement.
“I propose that we name the mid-twentieth century The Age of Disabling Professions, an age when people had ‘problems’, experts had ‘solutions’ and scientists measured imponderables such as ‘abilities’ and ‘needs’… The Age of Professions will be remembered as the time when politics withered, when voters, guided by professors, entrusted to technocrats the power to legislate needs, renounced the authority to decide who needs what and suffered monopolistic oligarchies to determine the means by which these needs shall be met.” - Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions
This is not about “those intellectuals” vs “us practical people.” I am one of those intellectuals captured by the screened society. Yet I am also a practical person. I am both, and by being both, I have become, in some strange new sense, neither. But insofar as a part of me still feels like an intellectual incapable of changing his own oil or washing dishes after dinner, I speak on our behalf: Helped by all the rest of society, we become incapable of helping ourselves.
When taken to an extreme, we are like the analytic philosopher Saul Kripke, who, nasty rumors have it, needed help just to urinate. They say it was the autism that made this so, and honestly, I don’t even believe the anecdote is anything more than an urban legend, but it is getting at something—for what analytic philosopher have you ever met who is capable of really doing much for himself? Like a person who lives in a filthy house but keeps one particular countertop immaculately clean, if analytic philosophers do anything well, they do it too well.
Analytic philosophy is, in a sense, the division of labor objectified in a professorial position—it is the occupation of a person who believes everything functions in accordance with logic, all should have their own place, and the role of philosophy is to be the mere handmaiden of the sciences, i.e. humble conceptual analysis devoid of historical context of social significance.
No poetry, no literature, no history, no politics—no such thing as context or stakes. They say, “No! Meaning, insofar as it is meaningful, operates strictly within the confines of the positive sciences.” Ah yes, as if being and nothingness, much less power, alienation, or exploitation, worked in accordance with the rules of molecules or syllogisms.
Forgive me for being unfair to those amazing exceptions who prove the rules towards which I am hastily gesturing on my way to the main point of this piece. Analytic philosophy is, for those who do not know, the more well funded and exclusive tendency in academia that has defined itself in opposition to all philosophy it doesn’t consider philosophical enough, which tends to be all of the stuff that deals with the most important questions and stuff of life.
Yet there is “a baby in the bathwater” of the analytic tradition. It is that things have their proper place. Or at least, if they don’t, then they should be given a proper place. That is part of our nature, our responsibility, i.e. the assignment of things to their rightful place on the basis of their given essence, telos, i.e. purpose. We must work with the chickeness of the chicken, the treeness of the tree, the ecosystemness of the ecosystem, and when it comes to the tools in our arsenal of equipment, we must find a place for the broom.
For anyone who has ever lived in a messy home, you already know that the peace of solitude is a hard won privilege. How can we really reflect on our lives when the spaces within which we would do such reflection are themselves out of order?
For anyone coming from a background of dysfunction or poverty, you likely know more than anyone else that one of the most philosophically challenging questions of all pertaining to the good life is, as Booker T. Washington asks, “Where is the broom!?”’
“Think of the time lost in the average family looking for the broom when the time comes to sweep the floor. At this time all business suspends. Mother cries out first, “Where is the broom?” The older sister cries to John and Susie and Jane, “Where is the broom?” and that kind of thing goes on every day in the week and year. It takes the average family from ten to twelve minutes every day to find the broom.” - Booker T. Washington, Putting the Most Into Life
Teaching at black schools across the U.S., and attempting to teach his teachers in training at Tuskegee to be the best they could be, Washington talked at length about the importance of teaching one’s students that things, like the broom, have their proper place. If the broom has yet to be designated a proper place, then finding a fitting location becomes the utmost priority.
Why did black teachers, many of whom were recently freed slaves, need to be taught to teach this to their students? Because, surprise surprise, they are human beings. As human beings, we do not magically have knowledge of where the broom goes. As human beings, we don’t have instincts for almost any of the stuff of what we call life. One significant difference between black Americans and white ones, at the time, was that, as recently liberated, they were having to teach themselves to do the things that had been formerly institutionalized.
An institution is, in the most simple sense, a body of knowledge-practices that help human beings intergenerationally reproduce a form-of-life that is directed towards, or in service of, some end. To be “liberated” from the institution you were dependent upon, and which was dependent upon you (or people in your position), means that you now have to teach yourself those things that were a part of the background knowledge of that institution.
Liberated humans have to re-learn how to reproduce life, or that liberation becomes poverty and ignorance. This is one of the many reasons I disdain the elite PMC scorn towards all things self-help. People who engage in this anti-philosophical discourse reveal their ignorance that is based in a form of privilege that is itself disablement.
It is the kind of discourse that is downstream from a mode-of-life based in a social position embedded in the relations of production that doesn’t have to clean up after itself—or that takes for granted the knowledge-practices of its institutions and class that made these feel obvious and second-nature.
We are a different breed of philosophers, we thinking-doers. We have to learn to assign the broom to its proper place, communicate about this with those with whom we live, and then concert our efforts to develop the habits necessary to performatively render true that assignment.
Cleaning, organizing, and performing the basic tasks of self care can be deeply philosophical. Insofar as mindful behavior helps us develop stewardship, it helps us free ourselves from our disablement by the commodity form. Neither producers nor consumers simply, we are whole human beings who take ownership in our lives and care for ourselves, our loved ones, and those things that, if not used mindfully and tended to in such a way as to make useful when needed otherwise threaten to dominate us.
This theme of stewardship, as right ownership, is about more than just surviving in a messed up world. It is about power. It is about wisdom. It is about the good life. Though when thinking of mindful daily activities we tend to think of Zen monks making tea or sweeping, the fact is that no one person’s voice resonates through the ages more powerfully on this than that of Socrates himself.
In Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse, the Oeconomicus, Socrates tells a young man about a conversation he had with a gentleman about the conversation he had with his wife when they were settling into a working domestic relationship. “There is nothing, woman, so useful or fine for human beings as order.” (p. 38) This section is fun, and funny, and at the same time somehow both powerful and wholesome.
Socrates says the gentleman, whose name was Ischomachus, told his wife a bunch of analogies to convey the truth of the inherent goodness of order.
Order in music:
“A chorus consists of human beings; when each acts in a chance way, a confusion appears that is unlovely even to look at, but when they act and speak in an ordered manner, the same ones seem worth looking at and worth hearing as well.” (p. 38)
Order in military:
“A disordered army is a thing of the greatest confusion, the easiest prey for its enemies, and for its friends a most inglorious and useless sight—mules, heavy-armed soldiers, baggage carriers, light-armed soldiers, horsemen, and wagons, all together; for how could they march if they were constantly getting in one another’s way... An ordered army, on the other hand, is the finest sight for friends and the most appalling for enemies. What friend wouldn’t look with pleasure on a large number of heavy-armed soldiers marching in order, or wonder at the horsemen riding in ordered groups? What enemy wouldn’t be terrified by the sight of heavy-armed soldiers, horsemen, targeteers, archers, and slingers, all distinctly arranged and following their rulers in an orderly way?” (pp. 38–39)
Order at sea:
“I saw there a very great number of implements divided within a rather small space... everything is kept in such a way that nothing obstructs anything else or requires anyone to search for it, or is so inaccessible or so difficult to remove as to cause a delay when needed for some sudden use.” (p. 39)
Socrates says that Ischomachus’ wife was eager to hear these stories. She was not embarrassed, for she also desired to have a clean house—human beings always want to live in clean conditions, but the development of the knowledge-practices requires conversation, education, reflection, and practice. Otherwise we wouldn’t need Socrates, and the students at Tuskegee would not have needed Booker T. Washington.
Having shared all these wonderful analogies to his wife, Ischomachus goes on:
“Having observed, then, the accuracy in this arrangement, I said to my wife that we would be very slack indeed if those in ships—which, after all, are rather small—find places for their things and preserve the order among them, even when they are roughly tossed about, and are able even in moments of panic to find what is needed, whereas we, who have large and distinct storerooms in our house for each kind of thing and indeed have a house on solid ground, cannot find a fine place for each of our things where they may readily be found—how could this be anything but the greatest unintelligence on our part?” (p. 40)
I share these quotes in full because they bring joy to my heart and, I suspect, nourishment that shall enrich all of our relationships. These words retain their power even through translation and the reaches of millennia.
“But how fine it looks, too, when shoes of any kind are set out in a regular manner; it is fine to see clothes of any kind when they are sorted, as also bedcovers, bronze kettles, the things pertaining to the table, and—what of all things would be most ridiculed, not indeed by the solemn man but by the wit—even pots have a graceful look when distinctly arranged. Indeed, all other things look somehow finer when they are kept in order.” (p. 40)
We must thank Ischomachus, through Socrates, through Xenophon, for relaying this conversation—and indeed, Ischomachus’ wife for being such an encouraging learner. Household management is, as Socrates argues, a form of art like any other skill—it is the most immediate, primordial, and essential for doing all other things. It requires thought and care. Without deep thought and care about how we manage our most basic affairs and care for ourselves and others in our lives, we become slaves of our appetites and tools, mere pawns in the game of alienated and alienating production and consumption that leaves us perpetually and incessantly in a state of disablement.
Thanks for reading.
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