Toward a Coherent Life

What, exactly, would a coherent life look like? How can we make all the parts of a life add up to something that hangs together and seems logically connected? And how can we earn a decent living, all at the same time? Matthew B. Crawford takes an interesting stab at questions like these in Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Crawford teases his reader with only the barest of glimpses into his own life, but it seems as though it went something like this: Grew up with mom and sis on a California commune, did not attend high school (which may explain his later success), took his undergrad in physics (just like his dad), earned a master's degree in philosophy (unlike his dad), then terminated with a doctorate in the philosophy of politics; worked for an information services firm, ran a thinktank, and now makes his living as a motorcycle mechanic, the only job he's ever really enjoyed. "[F]ixing bikes is more meaningful," he writes, "because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence" (196).

Here we see the concrete supporting the abstract--a competent wrench supporting grace on wheels and the need for speed. Contrast this with his previous positions, first as a writer of abstracts for an academic database of journal articles (most of which he could not understand and was not given enough time to even try to understand), then as the director of a thinktank whose mission it was to make arguments against the case for global warming appear to be scholarly. There's simply no room for that kind of bullshit in motorcycle maintenance--either the power and handling are there, or they're not.

My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives. (197)

I would suggest that this conversation in deed is one conversation in which we all should engage. And I would recommend letting Matthew B. Crawford lead the discussion.

Scenario Universe

In Synergetics, R. Buckminster Fuller succinctly lays out his definition of Universe and humanity's place therein. The problem with that opening sentence, however, is that Universe is not some system within which one exists.

As Bucky sees it, "Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciouly apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences" (81). Note that, by definition, Universe requires conscious apprehension and communication, without which it would not exist. In the ultimate self-referential recursion, Universe requires humanity to experience Universe as much as humanity requires Universe as the ground against which we experience life. "We have only one counterpart of total complexity," Bucky says, "and that is Universe itself (85).

Thus mutually dependent, Universe and humanity are but components of one eventuation, or, as Bucky notes, "Universe is technology--the most comprehensively complex technology. Human organisms are Universe's most complex local technologies" (85).

At the same time, Universe is not a system. If it were a system, we could stand outside of it and say "There is the Universe"; but that is not the case. Anywhere humanity goes, there is Universe; thus Universe is a scenario, not a system. Furthermore, "Universe and its experiences cannot be considered as being physical, for they balance out as weightless," and "weightless experience is metaphysical" [emphasis added] (84).

Having declared that reality is thus metaphysical, we can look to Joseph Campbell for insight into how humanity experiences this Fuller Universe. "Our eyes are the eyes of this earth," Campbell writes in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion; "our knowledge is the earth's knowledge. And the earth, as we now know, is a production of space" (2). Obviously Bucky would substitute Universe for earth, but he would undoubtedly assent to Campbell's earth as "a production of space"--production as in artistic performance.

Campbell refers to Immanuel Kant's four-term analogy to make this clear: a:b::c:x "where x represents a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable--which is to say, is metaphysical" (29), the point on which Bucky and Campbell converge. Moreover, Campbell notes, "as Jesus also is reported to have declared (in the recently discovered and translated Gnostic Gospel of Thomas): 'The Kingdom is within you'" (53).

To conclude, while Shakespeare's cliched theatrical analogy--"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players"--certainly has some merit, it would be more instructive to consider the fact that the play resides in the minds of the players, even as the players inhabit the play: scenario Universe.