Surfing with Sartre Page 3
Totally; but what does this mean? If I may introduce myself as a relevant data point, I’m a lifelong surfer and a philosopher by profession, and though I could be too literal-minded, I don’t quite follow Leary’s meaning.
So, okay, we’re in the present. But things are changing, as they of course do. And we shouldn’t forget our past, which is “pushing you forward,” but somehow go forward and find power in light of it? Or what, exactly? Surfers do say you have to “stay in the pocket,” the moving power source of the wave. Miles Davis says, “The good drummers don’t play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can’t lay in the pocket.” The attuned surfer and the attuned jazz player both mix passive waiting with active, present sensing, in a spontaneously adaptive activity founded on good timing. But this, too, is the sort of thing a philosophy should illuminate.
To be fair, the meaning of surfing isn’t obvious to anyone. Few professional philosophers surf. And most surfers are more interested in surfing than talking or writing about the idea of surfing, let alone strenuously philosophizing about it. Socrates exaggerated wildly when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, as though you could sanely choose a pensive life and early death over a pleasant, long, but unreflective life of surfing. If Socrates was expressing his do-or-die passion for philosophy (he did die for it finally), his sentiment was a lot like the surfer’s surf-or-die passion for waves. Both activities can organize a meaningful existence.
Yet doing the one doesn’t necessarily help with the other; the practical and intellectual skills in each don’t necessarily transfer over. To again take myself as an example, I’ve devoted my whole life to regular surfing and to serious philosophical study. But before I thought about writing this book, I wouldn’t have been able to say what exactly the two have to do with each other.
This illustrates an ancient problem: How if at all can practical know-how bring theoretical knowledge? Why should having the physical ability to skillfully make such-and-such bodily movements at certain right times on a wave bring any insight into the ultimate truths of philosophy?
In Anglo-American philosophy, much of “epistemology,” the theory of knowledge, doesn’t look to “know-how” for insight. The focus is usually on “knowledge that.” Can it be defined (for example, as non-accidentally justified true belief)?*12 Or is it a primitive, indefinable notion?*13 Knowing-that might then have no connection with mere know-how, much as Plato suggested long ago. A mere “knack” born of repetition, as Plato put it, could never bring true knowledge, which comes only through intellectual contemplation. In the mid-twentieth century, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle convinced most philosophers of a basic difference between the “knowing how” of a craft or skill, such as archery or surfing, and the “knowing that” of a proposition that can be true or false, of the sort wanted in science or math or philosophy.*14 The nerd, as they say, is not fashioned for sports, no matter how steeped he may be in baseball sabermetrics. And just as the dumb jock won’t know much about history, the surfer won’t know much about bathymetry, let alone the finer points of geometry or moral theory. At least not without studying, or spending time in thought. (For Plato, true knowledge comes a priori, in reflection, which one can do in the waves.) In this perspective, we shouldn’t expect any special insight into philosophy’s great questions from a surfer, not per se, anyway.
On the other hand, “knowing how” and “knowing that” could be different and still have some deep relationship. According to a more pragmatic tradition, which runs through Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Europe, William James, John Dewey, and C. S. Peirce in America, and then all the way back to Aristotle in ancient Greece, ordinary know-how can be at least partly explicated, as propositional claims to truth. The know-how of dexterous hammer use, for instance, might be articulated as claims about how “one ought to use a hammer,” which is to say, claims that can be true or false and the object of belief and knowledge-that. As even Ryle might say of the builder, the surfer, and the intelligent reasoner, “He applies in his practice what Aristotle abstracted in his theory of such practices.”*15
Some winemakers believe that wine should be made at every stage from a philosophical conception of its value. For the South African winemakers Eben Sadie and Johan Reyneke (who are also surfers), the liquid in the glass should speak for or express its earthly origins—much as a wave expresses structural contours of the sand or reef below when it draws off the bottom and breaks, peeling off in a particular shape and direction. The value of a batch of wine lies not in qualities such as color, taste, and body scored on a 100-point scale, let alone the resulting social score in a wine (and winemaker) status contest. What matters is its ability to holistically capture the distinctive qualities of soil, sunlight, temperature, moisture, and elevation from whence its grapes came. Beyond all the chemistry and technicalities of production, this shared understanding guides every stage of the growing and fermenting process, even down to the harvester picking each grape from the vine. In a biodynamic craft that approaches a form of art, fully understanding wine and how to make it thus means knowing its distinctive value and enacting it.
Surfers are actually pretty good at wave bathymetry; they intuitively know how any number of wave types will interact with the bottom topography of their local breaks. As a given swell approaches, they’ll know how it will shift and break over the bottom just below. A lump of swell is approaching, and, zooop, the surfer is off paddling, darting in the direction of a cresting wave that suddenly appears. “Wave knowledge” varies with ability, but the best surfers have an almost magical attunement.*16 This isn’t simply a “knack” for hydro-locomotion; surfing isn’t just a matter of moving the body around on a wave so as to keep going. A surfer surfs from a sense of the value in surfing, of his or her own particular way of enacting it, in this or that turn, line, or approach, at just this particular wave moment. The surfer draws a line through a wave’s sections, in a way that reflects his or her own understanding of what is worth going for, in view of the very point of surfing, in something of a performance. Each surfed wave interprets a wave’s moments and a larger surfing practice, which the community is constantly remaking in daily wave-riding actions, from shared ideas of surfing’s distinctive value and meanings. The surfer’s unspoken question is, “Check this out. Here’s what I got for you. Am I wrong?” When an especially good turn or tube ride goes down, the rest of us watching nod and answer, “Yesss. Right ON! You’ve got it.”
That’s plenty for something of a philosophy. Like all animals, human beings come into the world knowing something about how to adapt to their natural surroundings and to other people. Young children know how to navigate social relations from an innate sense of fairness, a “tacit competence” that shapes their feelings and actions, which can be articulated as a principled theory of justice.*17 So maybe wave riding reflects the heightened development or full expression of pretty basic mammalian and human capacities, a “second nature,” as Aristotle called it, that still expresses our first nature at birth. Just as we can construct a theory of our sense of justice, perhaps we can draw out and articulate what’s implicit in surfer competence, in what philosophers would call a “constructive interpretation” of the surfer’s practical knowledge.*18
How might that work? We must first put off asking what philosophical claims are true, given all the arguments, as philosophers usually do. We instead ask straightaway what the distinctive value in surfing is. The question is then which philosophical viewpoints fit best. Surfing has a distinctive kind of human value, I would argue, so the question becomes which possible philosophical views best explain or capture it. We can consider any big question we like. What is it to be free? To be effectual? To be happy? How are we to relate to nature? Should we change our style of capitalism? On a given question of interest, we consider different possible answers, surveying the best that philosophy has to offer. We then select the theory or theories that, if tru
e, best fit surfing, seen in light of its distinctive value and the sensibility about life it engenders and reflects.
We are, in short, looking for the surfer’s position on the topic in question. If, upon considering a given proposal, the average surfer would say, “Yeah, that!” “That’s what I’m all about!” “Stoked you put words on it, brother!” we can say we’ve articulated what the surfer knows “implicitly.” So while I’ll be making various philosophical suggestions, I’m not offering them simply as my own opinions, as expressions of my personal sensibility (I’m only part surfer). I’d like to speak on behalf of my fellow surfing tribesmen and tribeswomen, in view of what all or most of us seem to understand. That’s still my own interpretation of our common knowledge, of course, and if most surfers would feel conflicted, or confused, or simply disagree, I wouldn’t bang the table and insist that, lo, I am the surfer’s mouthpiece. But I would like to suggest, dear reader, that we—you and I—can learn from what the surfer knows in knowing how to ride a wave. We can glean a philosophical perspective that fits with and expresses a surfer way of looking at things, which we ourselves might find attractive, and maybe even true.
The Philosophy of Aquatic Sports
Aside from all of his pondering and pontificating and smoking in the Café de Flore in Paris, Sartre wrote some of his major works while a soldier at war, and even as a POW. Despite the dread of World War II, mass bloodbaths, and the insane possibility that Hitler could close the curtain on free civilization, the indefatigable Sartre found a moment to ponder water sports.
Deep in the pages of his masterwork, Being and Nothingness, Sartre has a long and wonderful discussion of snow skiing. Snow skiing, he says, exemplifies the free person’s path above and through material reality. But skiing turns out to be just one kind of “sliding over water,” and at one point he says that other forms of sliding exemplify human freedom even better. The “ideal limit of aquatic sports,” as Sartre puts it, is “sliding on water with a rowboat or motor boat or especially with water skis.”*19
To which the surfer will reply, waterskiing? I’m sure water-skiers have a good thing going, but I know I speak for surfers everywhere in saying that the act of surfing a wave has no equal, in aquatic sports, solo sports, action sports, and maybe any sports whatever. Surfing is the zenith of all human endeavors; it’s up there with the arts, friendship, love, music, and even sex (or maybe not quite up there with sex, at least for many surfers, who perhaps agree with the promiscuous Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir on that point*20). Sartre never encountered surfing, but I’m thinking that for all of his obscure genius he would have graciously agreed that “sliding over water,” in the sense that reveals the human condition of freedom, is beautifully expressed in the natural act of riding a wave.*21
—
A wave rises from the deep, and a surfer surfs it, being carried along by the wave’s natural momentum. Moment by moment, the surfer is sensing what next moment is approaching and, without too much thinking, responding with his or her body as the coming moment asks, so as to be carried along by the wave’s propulsive forces.
The surfer, in a word, is adaptively attuned. The surfer is attuned to a changing natural phenomenon, so as to sense how it is changing over time. The surfer is adapting as it changes with his or her body, so as to be carried along by the wave’s propulsive forces. And the surfer finds this dynamic relationship purposefully, valuing it for its own sake—for instance, because it’s a sublimely beautiful thing to do with one’s limited time in life.
That, I propose, is the essence of surfing. To surf a wave is
1. to be attuned to a changing natural phenomenon,
2. so as to be carried along by its propulsive forces by way of bodily adaptation,
3. where this is done purposefully and for its own sake.
So defined, surfing a wave has a distinctive kind of value. Being adaptively attuned to a changing natural phenomenon, in part by not needing to control it, is at once a kind of freedom, self-transcendence, and happiness. Or so I will argue in later chapters. To a surprising degree, I submit, what is valuable in human life is a matter of being adaptively attuned—a way of “surfing,” in an extended sense.
To surf, in general, is to be adaptively attuned to a changing phenomenon beyond oneself, for its own sake. In a social form of adaptive attunement, you could “surf” through a conversation, a meeting at work, or a crowded city street, going along with the flow of conversational or meeting or traffic dynamics, by staying attuned to other people and responding fluently in each new moment of cooperation. Whatever else you might hope to achieve, you’d do that purposefully, with a certain awareness of its intrinsic value, partly for its own sake. You’d give up seeking control, perhaps in order to keep cooperative relations sweet, for the feelings of harmonious social connection and the consequent sense of peace.
Surfers often wonder in completely earnest puzzlement what in the world non-surfers are doing with their time. They seem to be spending a lot of time working for a bit more money and are definitely not doing a lot of surfing. Surely they simply don’t know what they are missing, short of being simply nuts, in which case the surfer feels profoundly fortunate to be in on the secret. (“Only a surfer knows the feeling” is a real saying.) No one thinks surfing, or any one activity, could be absolutely everything (though one ideal limits things to “Eat. Surf. Sleep. Repeat”). And of course once-serious surfers do sometimes lose faith. But being a surfer myself, I do believe that surfing is uniquely and even supremely valuable among things to do with one’s limited time in life. Maybe it’s even the final end of world history, or what all the blessings of wealth and leisure after the Industrial Revolution are ultimately for.
It’s surely better than American football, as well as skiing, waterskiing, baseball, golf, and, dare I say, even fútbol/soccer. But I won’t quibble over petty comparisons. Anyway many surfers have a strange fondness for golf, and I myself think ballet and jazz improvisation rival surfing in important respects. So I’ll settle for an inclusive thesis: whether or not it is the best of all activities (which it may well be), surfing has a distinctive kind of human value, which other activities can share in (though often not in the same straightforward way, and to a lesser degree). At the very least, the value of surfing helps us more clearly appreciate the value in many other and related things. So maybe sailing, for instance, can in some moments count as wave surfing in the literal sense. We could call it “surfing” in the extended sense as well, now with a better sense of its distinctive value, the value of being adaptively attuned.*22
Rational Groping
In my view, surfing naturally invites philosophical reflection. I myself was a serious surfer well before I became a philosopher by profession—long before I read about the gloomy Nietzsche and Sartre and encountered Schopenhauer’s dictum that “life is suffering.” (On the contrary, “life is surfing” seems more apt.) Oddly, my first attraction to philosophy lay in the control I seemed to gain over what I believed, even though in life as in surfing control is what you have to let go of, so as to flow. Only gradually did I find a way of doing philosophy that fit my surfer sensibility. Yet for all the benefits of being less inconsistent in my main life pursuits, I never spent a lot of time on the surfing/philosophy connection, not as a sustained topic of inquiry.
Everything is connected to everything, so sure, you can always find examples of big philosophical issues in odd places. Surfing can nicely illustrate fundamental insights that don’t really depend on surfing, which I occasionally noted in my studies.*23 My experience and travels as a surfer definitely influenced my choice of intellectual projects. I wrote a book about fairness in the global economy, and although it isn’t specifically about Indonesia, my sense of the place, and the economic buzz and bustle of developing countries generally, came from my regular surf trips to Sumatra. And in an enjoyable side project, certain irritating surfers inspired a philosophical theory of the asshole.*24 But for all that, when pe
ople would ask, “Don’t surfing and philosophy naturally go together?” I’d say, “Not as much as you’d think. Philosophy is more like math than poetry.”
That’s especially true in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, which becomes more formalistic and less poetical with each passing decade. The analytic approach puts a premium on clarity; it insists on defining terms and uses logic to carefully structure and clarify rival positions and arguments.*25 This brings certain risks: if the surfer is onto some deep insight, obsessing about analytic clarity might stand in the way of grasping it. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared, “What can be said at all can be said clearly.” He then added, “And what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” Of that which is beyond our clear grasp, we should not speak, calling it simply “manifest,” or even “mystical.”*26
Yet must we be quiet simply because the optics are blurry? The continental schools (as in continental Europe) certainly aren’t worried; they’ll just let it rip in very abstract phrases, which feel big and deep, but maybe can’t quite be clearly and precisely articulated, or even sound unintelligible.*27 My education in analytic philosophy gave me only passing familiarity with Sartre, from an appreciative but reluctant distance. No one doubted his depth; as with many continental figures, the main trouble is that he can be hard to read. Witness this doozy of a passage: conscious beings, rather than mere objects, “are what they are not and are not what they are.” Does Sartre mean this, or is he just messing with us? The obscurity can be irritating to the analytic stickler. What is he actually claiming?*28 Yet his method has an admirable motive: ideally, the grand, impressionistic language would let us come to see life from a clarifying distance, to gaze upon big, deep things we’d be missing in our everyday preoccupations. The analytic style of philosophy shares that aspiration, in a more plodding method, which one hopes will add up, eventually, to something larger.