is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Phenomenology of Procrastination.
My weekend was mostly spent reading or sleeping or moping or working. Not so much working, the bare minimum. Much of the weekend was spent doing the bare minimum. I was in a very low kind of a mood. It was pretty brutal, to be honest. However there can be pleasure even in the lowest of moods. For instance, on both Saturday and Sunday I stayed in bed way too long, and then took much much longer to get around to eating breakfast or getting dressed or doing anything. Sometimes just giving oneself the freedom not to do what should be done is a pleasure, even if it is also an evasion of what must be done, and even if it occurs alongside a bit of misery. So I did some reading and I got ready for this week�s teaching and did some administrative stuff. I didn�t do any of the house-cleaning or laundry or organizing of files and books that really needs to be done. There is dust and cat fur everywhere, and books and papers strewn everywhere, and piles of things to be taken out for recycling, and so on. Still there. Nor did I do any of the writing of papers that should be done soon, or further work on the mythic �book� that I�m writing. No freelance work, no catching up with correspondence. None of it. Oh, and I bought pointless things on eBay.
Then today I had to go to class and talk to my students about the phenomenological significance of weariness and indolence. As I was getting ready to do so, it struck me that nothing could be more ridiculous than an utterly world-weary person teaching a bunch of youngsters about the philosophical meaning of world-weariness. However as I was in the process of doing the teaching it wasn�t so bad. That is, of course, often the case. Once you get started you�ve already surpassed the horror of beginning that is the heart of weariness. (Phenomenologically speaking, weariness is a hesitation before existence and indolence or indecision is a way of putting off making a beginning.) But, really, given how I�ve described my weekend, and the recent lowness of quasi-woe in general, plus insomnia alternating with sleeping too much, picture me discussing in depth for 1.5 hours today, passages such as this:
�There exists a weariness which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our life�our surroundings, because they are dull or ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar or cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself. Instead of forgetting itself in the essential levity of a smile, where existence is effected innocently, where it floats in its fullness as though weightless and where, gratuitous and graceful, its expansion is like a vanishing, in weariness existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an unrevocable contract. One has to do something, one has to aspire after and undertake. In spite of the false smile of the complete skeptic who, having suspended his judgments, abstains from acting and from aspiring to anything, the obligation of this contract remains incumbent on us like an inevitable �one must.� It animates the need to act and to undertake, makes that necessity poignant. Weariness is the impossible refusal of this ultimate obligation.� (from Existence and Existents, p 12)
On the one hand the passage simply states the truism that we don�t notice, when we are happy, the way we have to bear our own existence like a weight. It is only when we are sad or depressed or world-weary that existence seems to weigh on us. However, what we learn from weariness is that existence is there, weighing, waiting for us to take it up and bear it, regardless of whether or not we want to take it up. We may not see it when we are happy (in part because we will have taken it up already, without thinking or resisting), but it�s still there. Weariness is the wish not to have to take up existence, not to have to act or move forward or aspire to anything. But the thing about being a human being is that acting and moving forward is just what we do. When we are world-weary we try to escape the need to do so. But in the end it is just that, a necessity, and nothing we can escape. That is why weariness is called an impossible refusal or an impotent nonacceptance. You can refuse to take up existence, but that doesn�t make you stop existing. It just makes of you a person whose existence is lived out in the mode of refusal. (To be clear: when we are weary, it isn�t that we�ve thought about life and come to the conclusion that it is absurd and thus it makes us weary. The refusal that weariness makes is not contained in a thought of weariness but in the weariness itself, prior to thought.)
Weariness shows us that we must take up existence, that we must act, whereas happiness does not show us this. What weariness sheds light on, then (in addition to reminding us how tiresome it is to be weary), is the internal structure of an act. An act is effort and effort is work and involves fatigue or weariness, and because it involves fatigue or weariness it is made up of instants. Think of it this way: If the work we do is onerous it is experienced more like pain than work: it is painful because we are too aware that we are working. The blister on the hand means that the hammer is experienced as a hammer and not forgotten in the work of building. Every move of the hammer is an instant that gets noticed, so time doesn�t just flow.
Something like music isn�t made up of instants in the same way because in music what matters is duration. If we stopped and tried to isolate each instant, we would miss the music�s overall composition. Music doesn�t make us concentrate on instants because listening to it is a pleasure. However, when we listen to a bad recital, then maybe we concentrate on instants, or then the listening becomes effort instead of pleasure.
Remember that the measured flow of clock time is not the only experience of time we have, as human beings.
This differing relation to time can be compared to our relation to our own body in pain. When we are in pain, we notice our body�in fact the body might be all we notice�while when we are not in pain, we just live in our bodies, giving little thought to the fact of having bodies, or to what having to live in a body means for the human condition. When we are in pain or when we are aware of having to work hard, time passes slowly, such that we are aware of time passing, whereas most of the time we give no thought to time passing at all. Usually we just do take on the present moment because that is what we do. Weariness, and the effort it wishes to evade, shows us that the structure of an act (any act, even one made in happiness) is to take on the present moment.
This could lead us to a phenomenology of procrastination. In Levinas� work it gets called �indolence,� which means laziness or indecision. But it�s not the kind of inaction that comes from having too many options and not knowing how to decide. It�s not like when you�re at Coldstone Creamery and you can�t decide which mix-in you want with your cake-batter-flavored ice cream (however I do not at all wish to underplay the panic one can undergo faced with the menu at Coldstone Creamery). Indolence is the difficulty of beginning an action. (Procrastination, Sitting on the Shoulder of Every Writer.) There is something about time and the human condition that requires of us that we take up our existence over and over again. In. Each. Moment. But when we are indolent, inactive, when we hesitate before beginning, we put off the inevitable, we refuse the unrefusable, the continuing of our existence. What would normally just be the flow of time is experienced by us as dread or pain.
Dread or pain. But also: the present instant. In indolence or fatigue we catch sight of the present instant as what must be taken up. Sure, we see it precisely because we are trying to refuse to take it up. But the point is that the analysis of indolence draws our attention to this, which matters because acting matters, and to act is to take up the present moment.
Why all this dread and pain? Why not just get started already? Well, when we begin something, we do something irreparable. There is no turning back. Even if we abort the project, we can�t undo the beginning. It already exists. It will have come into existence as an act we (or, rather, I) committed, and for which I am now responsible. Thus, to act is to make something be, bring it into existence. To bring something into existence is to be responsible. But, since we simply must exist, and existing is acting, to exist is to be responsible. To hesitate to act is to hesitate before existence.
But, as all of us are well aware, this hesitation does not make us stop existing. The refusal never succeeds.
So indolence is this unthought hesitation we have before existence. But it can also be a pleasure. Isn�t being stuck on the couch unable to start working sometimes the most elemental pleasure of napping or watching television or stuffing chocolate in your mouth, when you should be making a beginning? These activities, of napping or watching television or mouth-stuffing, these aren�t what indolence is, exactly. Indolence itself is torturous. Couch-napping and television-watching are ways of hiding our own indolence from ourselves, escapes from the evasion that indolence already is. My weekend: an escape from an evasion, lived over and over again, in each moment.
12:31 a.m. - October 04, 2006
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