Surfing with Sartre Read online

  Anyway, we are all trying to understand, even as philosophy is never final and probably can’t be. It’s sort of like backing up a few feet from a particular spot on a pointillist painting, in order to see a gentle scene or image emerge—though not exactly. No, you’re trying to cram a wild and bumptious reality into a theory or system and then step back and see it all at once, before it explodes all to pieces.*29

  Should we then look only to science for knowledge? Science has been enormously successful as a human institution, so one can at least understand the hubris occasionally on display when a good scientist blathers on about the irrelevance or unimportance of philosophy (often while doing philosophy, badly). Philosophy often begins in what the sciences haven’t yet captured, and perhaps can’t ever capture fully. It’s the mother of all the sciences (psychology only moved out of the house a hundred or so years ago), and could she have suddenly become barren, despite two thousand years of generating healthy offspring since Aristotle pioneered physics and biology? Still, many do have the sense that philosophical speculation is relatively unimportant. If our only hope is that it might eventually birth a science and coach it to maturity, maybe adding a few pointers, then science will still be the real source of knowledge.

  This is itself a philosophical position, so it isn’t exactly the rejection of philosophy. It’s a scientistic epistemology, a theory of knowledge much like the one that originally inspired the analytic approach to philosophical problems. In the early twentieth century, the “positivists” or “logical empiricists” of the Vienna Circle (which included Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach) proposed theories of logic and language to explain how the empirical sciences were possible. Any other supposed source of knowledge, whether of ethics or religion, went out the window.

  The group wasn’t simply hostile to the impenetrable prose of poor Heidegger,*30 and to all hairy metaphysical systems, including the German “idealism” of Kant or G. W. F. Hegel.*31 The problem wasn’t just difficulty of comprehension. Meaningful claims, the positivists insisted, can be verified. They can be tested in sense experience, in a laboratory experiment or an immediate observation, with the five senses. For some reason, the positivists weren’t especially bothered by the fact that this thesis is self-refuting. “Meaningful claims are always verifiable.” This claim can’t be tested by the five senses. But it seems plenty meaningful: it implies that any ethical or religious claim that can’t be verified experimentally—whether “surfing is worthy of one’s time in life,” “happiness is good,” or “God exists”—isn’t cognitively meaningful, and at best is an expression of feeling. Not simply unknown or mistaken. But meaningless as regards truth or falsehood, much in the way the claim “the number 2 occurs on Tuesday” is. And if there is therefore at least one meaningful claim without verifiability—the thesis of verification itself—why not two? Or three? Or nine! Any limitation would seem pretty arbitrary. So while verification might be needed in a laboratory, why not just generally use our best methods of reasoning to sort out what the truth is? That works well enough in mathematics. Why not do it in ethics?

  —

  The Vienna Circle finally broke up, and Carnap and Reichenbach fled the war in Europe to join the philosophy department at UCLA in sunny Southern California. I gather they didn’t try out surfing when it went mainstream in the late 1950s and the 1960s. The two towering figures who later did the most to undo logical empiricism, W. V. Quine of Harvard and Donald Davidson of Northern California’s UC Berkeley, apparently did dabble in surfing. I’ve never heard that it informed their more pragmatic view of scientific inquiry, which favored a more holistic method. But maybe it loosened them up a bit. At any rate, the new pragmatism opened the door to rational inquiry into value.

  How does one inquire into value? The standard answer these days is, by rational groping. That is, we begin from our intuitive sense of things and then fashion our ethical “intuitions” into a body of knowledge through reflection. Say we ask the question, is time in leisure good in itself? I’m inclined to answer, “Yes, intuitively speaking; it does seem so.” Which is to say something like “Yes, it seems so, but I don’t yet claim to have an explanation why this would be true, and I might change my mind if I can’t find one.” But then I can try to think up principles or theories that would explain my intuitive reactions. I can adjust and prune either the intuitions or the principles or theories, until they all fit into a coherent system. I can keep tinkering until the overall fit seems holistically satisfying, much in the way scientists gradually refine theories. John Rawls, the twentieth century’s most influential political philosopher (and Quine’s colleague at Harvard), called this the search for “reflective equilibrium.” It is always a search, in both ethics and science. We never just coast along without the Socratic labors of reexamination. But the search has a destination. We can gain in understanding and confidence.

  Still, why go to all this trouble? The unexamined life is certainly worth living; an unreflective surfer should keep on surfing until the last of his or her blessed days. Why then devote a life to formulating answers to questions that may not have what people would readily call “answers”? For me at least, the value in philosophy and in surfing is not so different. Both are fun! But more to the point, waves and ideas are often sublime, or beautiful, or both, and in patiently attending to them, you see and feel ever more of what is easily missed. You gain ever deeper understanding, ever greater attunement, in your thinking and your actions. The superficiality of life, the mania for status or money or power, along with its contagious anxieties, then fades away into the background, becoming white noise in a peaceful life lived by its own joyous music.

  Theses for Sartre

  So this book takes up a natural occasion for philosophical inquiry, which is especially pressing in the present century. The labor of philosophy is to soberly articulate what would otherwise be obscure. Here Sartre’s “phenomenological” method is especially useful: we can just look at what our ordinary experience is like, in our ordinary activities. Once it is sensitively depicted, we may discern deeper principles, maybe even a quasi-universal “logic” that is “implicit” in the ordinary know-how we take for granted. I still say clarity is a good way of keeping our bearings; we know what we are saying, at least for starters. From there we can follow the inquiry where our groping leads us, grasping in words for the ineffable. (Wittgenstein abandoned his own dictum about silence eventually.) This goes beyond science, but it isn’t unscientific. Much like the scientist, we need only attune our inquiry, in sober wonderment, to a world we can never master. And if we can so ponder the cosmos, we can surely pursue Sartre’s themes of life and being, by considering the surfer.

  Sartre would be the first to welcome a phenomenology of surfing. And I’ve come to accept that continental figures such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty can tell us much about its meaning. Indeed, as I explain later, it was the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who most clearly explained, almost as if speaking for the surfer, how bodily attunement could be a primary source of human meaning. He and Sartre studied together at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, they worked together at Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes, and they were longtime friends—until their friendship soured in a disagreement over communism. They had common influences and a similar method, but Merleau-Ponty’s concerted focus on the body ultimately makes him the surfer’s philosopher.

  Our task then is to describe what the surfer knows, implicitly, in knowing how to be adaptively attuned, in a life organized around its distinctive value. We begin in Sartre’s existential predicament. Freedom, in his view, is willful self-determination, a laborious project of self-creation in the face of absurd options. The first step is to give up such willful controlling, which only makes it harder to get into the flow. Freedom, for the surfer, isn’t radical self-determination but a kind of achievement, in adaptive attunement. It’s a way of being efficacious without control, precisely by giving up any need for it.

  Neither then is the surfer akin to the Stoic, who controls his mind in order to maintain a steady tranquillity and detachment. Surfers are deeply attached to a life of surfing, and not so cautious about loving without reservation, despite its risks. Betting one’s happiness on nature’s caprice does bring certain frustrations. Yet life is not so terrible, even for the occasionally bummed surfer, who must then play guitar or do philosophy while waiting for waves. The challenge is just to keep faith, giving up any need for control, even over one’s own mental state, so as to settle into a more flowing way of being efficacious through the ebbs and flows of nature’s rhythms.

  Surfers go along with the flow of a wave by intuitive sensing, by attuning to their surroundings with their whole bodies and not simply their brains or eyeballs. This turns out to be the highest expression of human perceptual capacity, the human’s way of at once being and doing. Thus finding flow is more than an enjoyable state of experience. It’s more than finding the much ballyhooed “flow state” of heightened experience in peak performance, which is often elusive, even for the best of surfers. The surfer’s flow is a more ordinary mode of being, which is achieved even in ordinary waves, in the sublime beauty of one’s daily surf.

  This is a relatively easy route to self-transcendence, thank goodness. Attunement comes by faithful practice, but without the Buddhist’s hard road to enlightenment, the abnegation of desire, any radical loss of the self, and without all the effort in constant “mindfulness,” or in striving for personal perfection. The surfer just goes surfing and with relative ease transcends him- or herself in a dynamic, attuned bodily relationship to the world outside.

  Society of course brings its own discontentments, especially in the grave dangers of stat
us consciousness. Even out in the waves, surfers often have to compete for right-of-way and status, given scarce waves, and so can become irritated and extremely bummed, sometimes resorting to violence. Yet as the tide ebbs and flows, a shitty mood passes, and surfers spontaneously attune to each other and to a changing common wave environment.

  Theirs is an adaptive “anarchical society,” a microcosm of different societies adapting together on a changing planet. Given our warming planet and rising sea levels, surfers themselves have to actually do something to keep the world’s surf breaks from being submerged. Yet we all, surfers and non-surfers alike, can help attune society to the changing human condition in a new kind of social contribution: working less and taking more leisure instead, in a much shorter workweek. And if work and material possession can’t mean so much to us any longer, simply being in, and staying in, the attuned moment can be nearly the whole meaning of life, in the creative project that is human history.

  * * *

  *1 Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953).

  *2 Ibid., sec. 151.

  *3 Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 1.3.15, p. 63.

  *4 Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), p. 39.

  *5 Ibid., p. 53.

  *6 Ibid., p. 162.

  *7 Ibid., p. 50.

  *8 As Pink Floyd’s 1973 song “Breathe” put it, “For long you live and high you fly / But only if you ride the tide.”

  *9 “The Evolutionary Surfer,” Surfer, Jan. 1978.

  *10 The stereotypical case in point is Jeff Spicoli, the epic surfer dude played by Sean Penn in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Of a more recent surfer dude, who speaks of getting “pitted, just so pitted” in a widely viewed video clip, one wants to query, you high, bro? (You really are joking, right?) https://m.youtube.com/​watch?v=d0mpUKnh9yo.

  *11 “Evolutionary Surfer.”

  *12 On having a true belief justified by accident, see Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis 23, no. 6 (June 1963), pp. 121–23.

  *13 Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  *14 The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), chap. 2. Ryle’s “anti-intellectualism” has been questioned lately by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, “Knowing How,” Journal of Philosophy 98, no. 8 (2001), pp. 411–44; and Jason Stanley, Know How (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  *15 Concept of Mind, chap. 2. Even here “applies” wouldn’t necessarily mean that the builder or the surfer grasps a proposition in action, or that he could verbally explicate one if asked, even on reflection. This can come after the act, perhaps only by reflection in certain cases, as a matter of “constructive interpretation,” as I suggest below.

  *16 The former world champion Tom Curren is legendary because it was as though the best waves would come to him because he was waiting for them. His influential style, refined in his youth in the point breaks around Santa Barbara, California, was all about attuned anticipation.

  *17 John Rawls’s landmark theory of justice, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), seeks to articulate our “sense of justice.” He compares his project to Noam Chomsky’s famous psycholinguistics, which undercut Ryle’s behavioristic view of the mind.

  *18 I argue that Rawls’s theory of justice relies on constructive interpretation in “Constructing Justice for Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 3, no. 33 (2005). I run the method for the global economy in Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  *19 Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 1956), p. 746.

  *20 Their famous carousing suggests a sporting attitude toward the activity. For their story, see Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre (New York: Continuum Press, 2008).

  *21 I’m sure Sartre would have agreed had surfing come earlier to the exceptionally good waves in the southwest of France, around Hossegor and Biarritz, in time for him to read about it in Paris or see it for himself on vacation. After all, there’s only so much a philosopher can figure out from pure reflection, sitting in a café, without laying eye upon the surfing act—even for Sartre.

  *22 But then why not just call surfing “sailing,” in its own extended sense? To my ear, that doesn’t sound especially apt. Windsurfers and kite surfers are perhaps surfing both the waves and the wind. A conventional sailboat might “surf” the wind and ocean in an extended sense. But the conventional board surfer isn’t “sailing” along the wave in any sense, literal or extended, if only because wind isn’t needed and because the adaptation is of an essentially bodily nature.

  *23 I wrote a second-year paper in graduate school on something called the “supervenience” of value, which my adviser, T. M. Scanlon, took to be in some sense really about the value-making features of waves. The paper derived from my senior undergraduate thesis at Westmont College, which I included in my application to Ph.D. programs, and used surfing to illustrate a key distinction. Professor Scanlon, who was on the Harvard admissions committee that year, reported to me that this confirmed my originality as a philosopher. Surfers aren’t so common in the profession, which assuaged fears of plagiarism. All this could easily have gone a less happy direction.

  *24 Assholes: A Theory (New York: Doubleday, 2012), and for special political dynamics, Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump (New York: Doubleday, 2016).

  *25 A proud saying among graduate students at Stanford University’s department of philosophy goes like this: “We’re putting the a back in ‘anal-ytic’ philosophy.” Perhaps relatedly, I once heard a joke about an MIT graduate student in philosophy of language who was asked to teach a course on “the meaning of life.” The first day of class he wrote those words on the board. He then announced that they would begin with “the,” then turn to “meaning,” and then discuss “of.” But “life,” he x-ed out, because there just wouldn’t be time for it. (I’m sure this was just a joke-rumor.)

  *26 Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, 1922).

  *27 Heidegger famously wrote of nothing, “Nothing itself noths (or ‘nihilates,’ or ‘nothings’),” suggesting that nothing is something, a something that nothings, which is to say, that somehow acts. To which one should ask, huh? To be fair, in his defense of what looks to me like nonsense, he did feel that conventional modes of speech and grammar couldn’t express his central tenets, which broke radically from the received philosophical tradition, and so he invented his own rather unusual language. For help in comprehension, I look to Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

  *28 Scholarly debates about Sartre’s text are partly driven by his fondness for the dramatic zinger. Are those remarks mere rhetorical ploys and not what he really thinks? Or are they his real view, provocative as they may be? The latter is the standard way Sartre is read, and I’ll follow suit. The more forgiving approach can bring Sartre closer to the surfer position (of which more later).

  *29 The brilliant Robert Nozick once said something like this.

  *30 Isn’t his claim that “nothing noths” really just BS? On this theme in light of some recent continental philosophy, see G. A. Cohen’s “Complete Bullshit,” in Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  *31 According to one joke, only two people understood Hegel in his lifetime: Hegel and God.