Wisdom in waves
“I know I speak for surfers everywhere,” Aaron James writes, “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.
“The towering, reeling deep blue/green wall, with the surfer gracefully standing in the spinning vortex, is plainly its own thing of splendor.” Pull all the stops, let the organ roar: “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.”
Which brings us to the hammer throw.
The hammer is a sport in which a 16-pound metal ball is attached to a D-shaped grip by a four-foot chain. From within a seven-feet-diameter circle, the tosser — I prefer the noun/verb “toss/er,” which gives the barely contained fury a sense of delicacy — tosses the hammer at the culmination of the launch procedure: a couple of stationary-footed whirls to gather momentum in prelude to a mad, heel-toe pirouette across the ring, where at the apex of speed the tosser looses the hammer, which flies through the sky until it lands far away. The perfectly timed moment of release — whew, talk about zenith.
Still, I am happy to surrender the floor to James, a UC Irvine philosophy professor, whose formidable celebration of surfing comes draped in deep thinking appreciatively wrapped in sheep’s clothing. James shares with the Beach Boys that to catch a wave is to sit on top of the world, although his lineups in “Surfing With Sartre” include not just JeanPaul but David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx and Woody Allen. James butts heads with these gentlemen, as they lean a little too heavily on conspicuous consciousness to ever achieve the groove of fluid performance. James, however, is a bell-clear writer — unlike, say, David Hume — and, here, takes home the gold.
These philosophers don’t serve as foils to James’ state of wavy grace; they throw up considerable obstacles: the riddle of perception, the cruelty of angst, moral worth, value, authenticity, greatest good, dread, absurdity, limits of reason, the fragility of civilization. Some of these quandaries James tackles head on — his call for the overthrow of the whole Protestant ethic as nothing more than guilty of global warming is a gem; and he pokes Sartre in the eye: “Angst is not our natural state but socially induced.” He fruitfully considers Wittgenstein’s respect for the intuitive and Heidegger’s belief that knowledge must be lived. Woven into all this is James’ point.
That point? We are squandering our most precious quality/quantity — time — when we could cut our workweek in half. We could dedicate those extra hours to mastering something of greater meaning to us than work. (Although, paid work, too, can fulfill “one’s deepest innermost drives.”). Then James wants to extend that into how we are in the world. He also makes a pretty natty story about how that activity, if done in leisure without the help of the internal combustion engine or cows, can help combat global warming.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced us to the flow state — when we lose the sense of self as a separate entity and merge with the environment through which we move. For James, it is a state of being adaptively attuned: “attuned to a changing natural phenomena, so as to sense how it is changing over time” — to pluck an example out of the blue, consider a breaking wave — “and adapting as it changes ... at once a kind of freedom, self-transcendence, and happiness.” Freedom is an achievement, a successful exchange between your initiatives and the circumstances that carry you along, adapting as appropriate.
As for happiness, here is another terrific James’ story: “John Locke said that we have natural rights to ‘life, liberty, and property.’ The U.S. founders adapted this to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Why? “According to some historians, the idea of happiness had gained new currency in the era due to reports of surfing from the South Pacific ... one observer wrote, ‘I could not help concluding that this man felt the supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea.’ ” Benjamin Franklin, hanging ten.
Maybe Sartre’s worries about authenticity and absurdity had something to do with his strabismus, or wandering eye, or, less poetically, walleye. Lest you think I’m mocking the man, I, too, sport the Sartre look. Understandably, strabismus is frequently accompanied by diplopia, or double vision. I used to run down the football field, the quarterback would pass me the ball, or balls as it were, and I could catch either one, because they were both real. Double vision can get very busy and weird at times, as you might imagine. No wonder Sartre found life absurd.
Surfing, sure, but James is an apostle of adaptive attunement.
“My suggestion is that ‘the meaning of life’ can be nothing more than the various ways life is meaningful to us, where each of us lives by some individual mix of the many different thing worth doing in life.”
James doesn’t shy away from words like rapture and sublime. A life of nonstop rapture sounds pretty intense, but I can think of worse fates.