Here is a problem for the 21st century: how do you live a life that is changing and flexible and that requires constantly reinventing oneself when there are things in life—family, bodies of knowledge and work, the soul of a person you love—that require long term commitments.
Maybe forging a soul of any depth, or getting to know one, is like getting to know a city with broad avenues, narrow alleys, and everything in between; one that holds surprises around almost every corner. You can get to know it only if you can travel back and forth in it from every direction. Not systematically, not with a plan in mind but serendipitously. Eventually, you learn how to make your way through it almost instinctively, knowing at each corner how to get to where else you want to go.
That’s Wittgenstein’s understanding of learning your way around a city–and of doing philosophy. We can add to his story / metaphor that getting to know a city is never really over. As you do get to know your city—and if you never lose your sense of adventure—you feel comfortable enough to begin exploring it even more deeply. You stop to look into neighborhoods that you might have walked or driven by for years. You linger at the shops on streets that it took a while to discover or perhaps that you were afraid to walk down when you first came to your city. And you learn more about how your city works, about how the people in it are connected to and disconnected from each other, about who are friends and who enemies. All the while you are becoming embedded in your city but not necessarily encumbered by it. For if it is a really great city and you have the energy and confidence to keep exploring, there is always more to explore, especially because a great city is connected to the world outside it and thus is always changing in response to what comes in and out of it.
If we are lucky, we find someone to love with a depth of soul equal to that of a great city.
Can we live lives that are both always changing and always rooted as well, in which being rooted is actually the condition of the possibility of always changing? In which we explore new avenues of work that still draw upon all that we have learned before, in which we circle back again and again from different directions discovering new connections between what we have done before and what we are doing now? In which all this crisscrossing through the terrain of our lives from different directions helps us understand better what we have done while giving us greater power to do more now?
That’s what I’ve tried to do by moving from teaching and writing about politics with some occasional activity on the side, to full time political activity, with some writing on the side.
That’s what the friend who helped inspire this post did in moving from one field to another one with some ties to the first.
We both are likely to go back again. And then again.
It’s a tough order to figure out how to live a life that is dense with connections to other people as well as to the place in which one lives, and yet also keep oneself fresh and creative and free.
Part of the answer, I believe, is to move enough from where you are so that you are forced to partly reinvent yourself and develop and extend your talents in new directions, while staying enough rooted in your past that you don’t start wholly from scratch.
Part of the answer is to find friends, lovers, and place with enough depth to live your life with them.
And part of the answer is to be prepared to make more radical changes, even to the point of breaking some of those dense connection and living light for a time, while you find new territory into which to sink your roots, territory that will probably not be wholly new but will avoid some of the dangers to your self and soul in the territory you left.
There are no rules. We have to make tough choices, live by our wits, and hope that, with a little help from the friends we can take along our journey, we wind up in the city of our dreams.
Self-Commentary
What I’m doing here, of course, is playing on Plato’s comparison of a city to a soul and contrasting a Jane Jacobsian, random, decentered, heterogeneous multilayered, flexibly changing view of a city / soul with the Corbusian, orderly, hierarchical, homogenous, single layer, rigidly unchanging view Plato has Socrates present in The Republic. I’d like to develop this way of thinking about souls and cities in order to further a post-modern pragmatic conception of reason / life / politics / art that I’ve been working on for years. And the upshot of the contrast with Socrates’s view is this: free thought requires us not to transcend our own city, as Socrates says in the Republic but, rather for us to recognize that being at home in the right kind city frees our minds to wander from the conventional views of our time.