Traveling for Education, Traveling Where

 When I was younger, I wanted to travel and see the world. It did not happen.

Two things come to mind about traveling when I read Phil Christman's Adventures Close to Home: What Has Travel Ever Done for Me?. The Thoreau epigraph Kurt Vonnegut used for Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons: "I have traveled a good deal in Concord."

So I like to see a little of the stuffing knocked out of travel’s reputation. I think the overvaluing of it is a species of privileged self-congratulation. Lots of people can’t afford to travel, and only do it because it suddenly becomes a matter of life or death—if we grant that the refugee or asylum seeker is also a sort of traveler. And then some of us are just constitutionally bad at it.

On the other hand, here is Michael Leppert's A week away from America can really do the soul some good:

Perspective. That’s what trips like this give me. This era in American history has embedded in many of us a feeling that the world revolves around each of us and every domestic division we face. To those who seemingly enjoy feeling that way, I encourage you to spend some time someplace, anyplace else.

Second, this is what I have been thinking about with "Road Tripping". Traveling away becomes traveling within. That is how I find affinity with Samantha Rose Hill's Beyond authenticity from Aeon.

Against this notion of Heidegger’s lonely authenticity, which became the foundation for German existentialism, Jaspers offered another understanding of what it meant to be conditioned by the world of everydayness. Jaspers was a professor at the University of Heidelberg who moved from psychology to philosophy when he was nearing 40. They were both concerned with the meaning of Being, but they approached the fundamental question of human existence quite differently. Heidegger wanted to understand all that could be known about Being, whereas Jaspers was more interested in what could not be known. As the Jaspers scholar Carmen Lea Dege put it in Psyche in 2020: ‘Jaspers is one of the very few existentialist thinkers who did not seek to master, tame or conquer the unknowable and finite condition of human life.’

***

Caught between German and French existentialism, Arendt offered a critique of authenticity in her final unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. In place of authenticity, Arendt turned to the concept of the will in order to think about how one decides to act in the world. A student of Heidegger and Jaspers, and a fellow traveller of Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir from 1933-41 during her years of exile in Paris, Arendt rejected the idea that a true self exists within the self. She was not a transcendental thinker. For her there was no capital-G God, and there was no capital-B Being. In place of an inner-authentic self, she argued that the inner organ of decision-making that guided one’s actions was the will.

***

Willing is the mental activity that goes on between thinking and judgment. It has the power to shape us by drawing us into conflict with ourselves. Without inner conflict, there is no forward movement. These are the basic principles of willing:

• Willing is characterised by an inner state of disharmony.
• Willing is experienced as a felt sense of tension within the body where the mind is at war with itself.
• Willing makes one aware of possible decisions, which creates a feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once.
• Willing can feel very lonely. Decisions and choices are shaped by one’s environment, by the everydayness of being, but ultimately the responsibility for deciding is up to oneself.
• Willing makes one aware of the tension that exists between oneself as a part of the world, and oneself as an individual alone existing in relationship to the world.
• Willing is the principle of human individuation.
• Willing relates to the world through action.
• The will is the inner organ of freedom.

• ***

A few months later, Arendt went to study with Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg. She cut her hair, started smoking, and found a group of friends. She found stillness in her solitude, and a sense of self-belonging in Heidelberg, as she learned to keep company with herself in the quiet moments. She would always be different, but instead of experiencing her difference as something that isolated her from others, it became the foundation for how she came to love the world of being with others. Loving the world, she realised, was a choice, and an act of willing, and the beauty of being together is that one is always coming undone in the dance of knowing and unknowing.

I have read a little of Jaspers and a bit of Arendt. I think I need to read more Jaspers. I do not feel authentic, too much internal roiling for that. I understand the willing of disparate parts.

Attention is also an issue for me and my protagonist. Both of us feel we have been traveling through life without paying attention to life itself. Derek King's Reading as Moral Formation: C.S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch on Attentional Humility from The Hedgehog Review touches on this.

English writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, borrowing from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, thought attention should not be reduced to mere focus. Attention is the central moral category—“the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent,” as she put it. Her emphasis on attention came in response to what she deemed a failure of modern moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, she claimed, was mired in discussions about will, action, and moral deliberation. But for Murdoch, morality is fundamentally, prior to any act, a matter of seeing. Moral agents are only able to will and act in the world that they “see”—the world, that is, we attend to. But that is not just looking at the world, either. Attention, for Murdoch, expresses “the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” In comparison, our contemporary concept of attention looks emaciated. 

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Lewis distinguishes between the act of using and receiving. “When we ‘receive’ [a work of art],” he writes, “we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities.” Murdoch would surely have agreed. The posture of attention is, necessarily, one of reception.

Traveling in Concord means for me to go deep instead of wide. The deepness belongs both to the place and the person. If we do not pay attention on our journeys, if we are not seeing ourselves and our world, then we have learned nothing.

sch 7/20