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  ALSO BY AARON JAMES

  Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy

  Assholes: A Theory

  Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump

  Copyright © 2017 by Aaron James

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph and design by Emily Mahon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: James, Aaron (Aaron J.), author.

  Title: Surfing with Sartre : an aquatic inquiry into a life of meaning / Aaron James.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Doubleday Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017000670 (print) | LCCN 2017021274 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385540735 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385540742 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, American. | Surfing. | Sports—Philosophy. | Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905–1980.

  Classification: LCC B936 (ebook) | LCC B936 .J36 2017 (print) | DDC 201/.679732—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017000670

  Ebook ISBN 9780385540742

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Aaron James

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: This Book Is About Surfing, and Not

  Part One: Epistemology in Action

  Chapter 1: What the Surfer Knows

  Chapter 2: Freedom

  Chapter 3: Control

  Part Two: Metaphysics

  Chapter 4: Flow

  Chapter 5: Being

  Chapter 6: Transcendence

  Part Three: Political Philosophy

  Chapter 7: Society

  Chapter 8: Nature

  Chapter 9: Work

  Epilogue: Under a Fortunate Sun

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  About the Author

  For Tim, who believed in a surfer

  To ski means not only to enable me to make rapid movements and to acquire a technical skill, nor is it merely to play….I am changing the matter and meaning of the snow.

  —JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations.

  —MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

  Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.

  —BRIAN WILSON AND MIKE LOVE

  Introduction

  This Book Is About Surfing, and Not

  NOT SO LONG AGO, in the dark days before the forty-hour workweek, the average person worked constantly, without time to completely rest, let alone laze around, get creative, and maybe take up surfing. Fortunately, history brought something of a revolution. By the early 1940s, the labor movement had won limited workdays, weekends off, and periodic vacations for most workers. The postwar economy boomed. And many people hit the beach in this new leisure culture, finding new forms of meaning. Nowadays, in our more leisurely style of capitalism, the workaday surfer can be found at surf breaks the world over, stoked in gushing exuberance about the better waves of the day, feeling lighter about the stresses of work, acting as if the whole meaning of human existence can be found in the simple act of riding a wave.

  And I mean, like, super stoked, at least in the peak moments. As in effusive, bursting forth in hoots and howls. As in feeling like things are easy. Fine. Golden. As though you can just relax and eat some nice tacos. As in you were worried about some things, but what were they again? Maybe the surfer gushes with profoundly vague slogans. “Only a surfer knows the feeling”; “Problems just wash off in the water”; “It’s all connected”; “You just have to tap into something bigger, you know what I’m saying?” And maybe the honest answer is “Actually, what are you saying?” But, you know, whatever, because who cares? Can’t the vague slogans just express the easy moment, without stating carefully defined truths? Surely complete thoughts aren’t always necessary, if only because the world can never be mastered in language, even in the most precisely chosen words. When you’re stoked about the waves on which everything totally came together, or when you got a serious, proper tube, and you rode inside the tube of the wave for what felt like ages, you don’t need to get control of anything. You’re stoked precisely because nothing else has to happen. Because nothing has to change. Because you can just be. Because right there at 3:15 p.m. on a Monday after a good surf session in Southern California, standing by the taco truck, under a fortunate sun, you are being.

  —

  Surfers aren’t ungrateful slackers—at least not in any greater proportion than the general population. Most surfers work. They show up to work even when the waves are cracking, moved by that pained sense of duty that comes in acting contrary to the strong inclination to go surfing. The “workaholic” shows up to work eagerly, with a zeal for money and self-promotion that requires no thought of duty. But then whose work has greater moral worth? The one who is solemnly moved by duty, or the one who does as he likes?

  For Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher and moral rigorist, the moral worth of an action springs from its motives, and the workaday surfer who shows up from duty—maybe solely from duty—would be especially praiseworthy for doing what he or she really isn’t inclined to do.*1 Yet the high-minded, über-rationalist philosopher (one of the big philosophers of all time, alongside Plato and Aristotle of ancient Greece) probably isn’t the surfer’s philosopher. Although Kant was apparently quite the party animal in his youth, he traveled little beyond his hometown of Königsberg, Germany. It was said that you could set your watch by his daily walk, while he presumably worked in deep thought. The hardworking genius was skeptical about happiness and hyperintellectual about morality and made much of strict conformity to law, and for those reasons alone a surfer might look elsewhere for help in articulating what is distinctively good about the surfer life.

  Not that work these days is so terrible in itself. Most people can find some sort of meaning in a job taken to pay the bills. The time can fly while you get into a “flow state” (of which more later) while arguing about the new kitchen area policy, plowing through e-mails, or restocking a grocery store shelf. But most of us can’t constantly pay close attention, especially not when the job turns mundane. The mind wanders, often to what one is missing. And so the surfer can often be found awash in daydreams of glorious wave-riding moments, at the keyboard, cash register, or roller brush, going through the motions, not quite into work with his or her whole being.

  I once worked as a window cleaner for various restaurants. This paid mainly in flexibility, so that I could surf when the waves turned on. There was also joy in efficiently whipping the squeegee over the glass panes, without a drop left behind, and then, a moment later, opening the door for a customer with a pleasant greeting. The groove of fluid performance was intrinsically pleasing—not to mention time efficient, which put me on the road to surfing more speedily. Yet on the days when the wind would clock offshore, grooming the wave faces gently, with a solid six-foot ground swell running, when all I could think about was how insane the waves must be right this very moment, I could barely remember what I needed my small paycheck for. This wasn’t the dim sense that life could be
better, eventually, if I just worked for it. The whole meaning of life was happening right now, today, only miles away from Denny’s restaurant, and there I was, at Denny’s restaurant, suffering the pangs of lost time, a forlorn lover alienated from his beloved, forcing a smile for the nice people who’d eaten too much of the all-day breakfast.

  The surfer daydreams of glorious wave-riding moments nearly always include a tube ride. As every surfer will tell you, riding inside the tube of a wave is an ecstatic, even orgasmic experience (almost, anyway*2). “Time stands still in the barrel,” they’ll say. “It’s just insane. Epic. Seriously, bro”—a thesis they’ll corroborate by vividly retelling each moment of their best tube ever, even decades after the fact, as though they’ve just been reading Proust. They’ll mention the speed and how seriously deep they were within the wave’s churning bowels. They’ll note certain drops of water flying by and how the spray of water was “chandeliering” at one point, with the water curtain way out in front of them. They’ll note how they just barely squeaked under the heaving wave lip, or just how super easy it all was, given certain heroic adjustments, perfectly timed, along with some stance of preternatural relaxation, though they seriously did not even think they were coming out of that thing. They’ll tell you of the giant sucking sound inside (accompanied by a sucking-sound demonstration), of the remarkable amount of wind swirling around, and maybe of a saucer-eyed guy paddling up the shoulder, hooting like crazy, who totally saw the whole thing and could totally verify all this if you aren’t believing it.

  Fortunately, you don’t have to trust the surfer’s telling, which can be as fantastical as a fisherman’s. The towering, reeling deep-blue/green wall, with the surfer gracefully standing in the spinning vortex, is plainly its own thing of splendor, a feat of natural and human possibility, of attuned flow between person and wave.*3

  —

  Surfers often have a certain natural lightness about being, about the meaning of their personal existence. Those more at sea existentially can certainly appreciate the surfer’s good fortune. And it is hard to dislike people so thoroughly enthralled by living, even when their personal shortcoming might invite distaste or criticism. Surely most of us could learn to live lighter, by sliding over life’s problems. If we wished to “surf” through our daily business with easy efficacy, the surfer’s way of being might even suggest something of a practical philosophy.

  This is a book of philosophy. It asks whether the surfer might happen to know something about questions for the ages, about knowledge, freedom, control, flow, happiness, society, nature, and the meaning of life. It’s a book about surfing, but also not, or not just, because what the surfer knows, or at least senses, without necessarily caring, turns out to be of world-historical moment, for nothing less than the future of work, the planet, and human civilization. Taken all together, what the surfer knows suggests that we should continue the leisure revolution that began in the postwar era, when we emerged from two world wars and economic depression. The trend toward working less has stalled lately, with work hours rising or steady, especially in the United States. Yet we presumably shouldn’t be lazy about adapting our institutions in the current century. We should be ready to go along with the world-historical flow and get used to an even more leisurely, surfer-friendly style of capitalism, in which we all work, but a lot less, and work is to a lesser extent our reason for being. Or at least that is the overarching argument of this book, which I’ll explain at length in later chapters.

  This book is also my attempt at figuring out what my two life’s preoccupations, philosophy and surfing, might have to do with each other. That inquiry brought me to Jean-Paul Sartre, the mid-twentieth-century philosopher and literary figure. This is a man who was so cool, so very French, that he declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. (He explained that he couldn’t let himself “be transformed into an institution,” while giving a few other equally slight or opaque reasons.) A theorist, dramatist, and public intellectual, Sartre spoke to his time, in an era darkened by two world wars, cold war dread, and a palpable sense of the absurd, the limits of reason, and the fragility of civilization. To many, he was the conscience of his generation, a courageous witness to its outrages and a voice to its anxieties. Sartre died in 1980, and although his views haven’t ever been a major focus of the Anglo-American “analytic” style of philosophy of my profession, I’ve started conversing with him, as philosophers do with their greater forebears. If I could have a long chat with him in a café, or by the taco truck, this book is what I’d say to him.

  Our inquiry builds up to matters world historical little by little, from deeper foundations, in the style of an olden treatise. Since that’s just the sort of book we modern readers mostly don’t read, for being too easily distracted (or too busy at work), I should probably say more up front about the surfer’s peculiar role in world history, to suggest where the argument is headed.*4

  —

  A few surfers should maybe get a job and make themselves more useful to others. Most of us, including most surfers, have the opposite problem: we work too much. Insofar as we do work too much, the surfer wisdom on the matter is that we should therefore work less. Meaning we should actually do that, actually work less. We can still work, of course, but more efficiently with less waste, for just enough money, in order to free up time for longer hours in the waves. It may sound odd as a serious proposition, and even many surfers haven’t quite pieced it all together, yet nowadays working less and surfing more can be an ethical chore, another way to make oneself useful to others.

  Work as we now practice it emits gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and so on) that are steadily warming the planet. So in our strange new condition of ecological scarcity, as long as we do something less consumptive of ecological resources than working, such as surfing (without too much driving, air travel, and so forth), we contribute to society by making the climate change problem a little less terrible than it would otherwise be.

  Is this perhaps something of a surfer’s rationalization for dodging work? The idea that working less is somehow a contribution to society—isn’t that rather ridiculous, the warm beach baloney of some hippie surfer “philosopher,” not to mention downright disrespectful of hard work, a cornerstone of civilization and personal virtue? Maybe so. But maybe not. The idea, as I’ll argue, has a clear logic. The philosophical challenge, if you’re down for fresh thinking, is to say where if anywhere the logic is mistaken.

  Gone are the days of global ecological abundance, when a person could work for money like crazy and create greenhouse gases with no worries at all about the profound risks of ecological mayhem, with rising sea levels, droughts and floods, mass displacement, resource wars, and famine, among other dire results. Surfers aren’t the most altruistic lot, but even aside from the barest concern for other people you’d expect them to worry about this for their own reasons, because rising sea levels stand to swamp the world’s quality surf breaks. We should all hope and pray for an easy technological fix. Yet we can’t blithely assume new technologies will make the whole problem go away, without our having to otherwise adapt. And as it happens, one useful adaptation among other urgent measures is to carry forth the leisure revolution that gave us the forty-hour workweek. If we all worked, but a lot less, in, say, a twenty-hour workweek, the climate crisis would be less terrible than it otherwise will be.

  To this world-historical project, the surfer is an eager if unwitting contributor. For those not inclined to surf, there’s also of course gardening, spending time with the kids, reading a book, or whatever you happen to be into at the moment. As long as the activity emits less gas than you would have emitted had you been working in the labor market, doing more of it, instead of working, mirrors the surfer’s contribution to society.

  The surfer is thus something of a new model of civic virtue. The real troublemaker is the workaholic, whose labor-intensive striving makes the problem of global warming worse than it has to be. I’m sure I speak for surfers eve
rywhere in saying that it would be pretty uncool to scold people for an unfortunate inability to take it easy. Fortunately, not everyone has to do his or her full part in the new, limited workweek. Though for every workaholic who works above a new lower average, a surfer will need to be surfing, so as to “offset” the added emissions. This, as well as other weirdness, is what follows once we reckon with the new human condition of ecological scarcity.

  The question is one of ethics: If climate science is even roughly correct, as I assume for the sake of argument, would it be morally okay for us to further enrich ourselves in work, without limitations, if many billions of living or future people are thereby put at grave risk of profound injury? Or are we obliged to adapt? Suppose our “sacrifice” in adapting is a matter of working less and spending more relaxing days with the kids and playing more sports. Would that be so tough? If we’d be happier, or even just no worse off, then continuing the leisure revolution would be not only an ethical imperative but something we could really get used to.

  We would have to upend the Protestant work ethic, the quasi-religious ethic of hard work, discipline, and thrift, to which even the deeply secular remain firmly attached. Borne of the theology of Luther and Calvin, the ethic has become deeply ingrained in our lives, and it’s a real question whether we could ever let go of it. Simply questioning the ethic can make people angry. The idea of living without it can feel deeply uncomfortable, even disorienting. Who am I if not what I do? Sartre, that great twentieth-century philosopher of being, thought we humans are not existentially suited to doing nothing. Being self-conscious and so free by nature, we are “condemned to choose” in perpetual self-creation. And on this point the quintessential Frenchman was fully in agreement with the old-guard capitalism that first caught on in Europe and then prospered in America. Being is just doing, which itself is a kind of work—the work of making ourselves into something, a someone, of a larger identity.