Books as Messengers

 I was talking to my sister about possessions the other day, as she was recounting to me some recent successes she has had with selling old books and articles of clothing online. "I think I'm embracing minimalism," she said. I remarked that that made sense for a disciple of Marie Kondo. It was a kind of evolution. Once one had purged one's personal possessions of those objects that did not bring joy, one could then move to the next stage, and purge oneself of the joy-bringing objects as well. 

My sister replied that this evolutionary process made more sense than might at first appear. "When you are paring down your possessions to only the ones that bring joy," she said, "one of the things you start to realize is just how few of them do actually bring you joy." She then introduced me to the Kondo precept that you should listen to the "messages" your objects send you. The idea being that every possession has a message for you, and you just have to hear what it is. 

The Problem with Things

Continental European writers spent much of the 20th century being terribly interested in things. (Georges Perec even had a book with precisely that title.) And not just in thinking about things. But in worrying about them. There seems to have been general agreement that there was a problem with things. A crisis in the thing kingdom. People had become alienated from the things around them. The thing-question was the great topic of the age. Whole literary movements were devoted to it. The nouveau roman was about nothing else. There are few if any, it would seem, who did not share in this general anxiety.

Should we be anxious too? It's hard to know. It would have to be clear what exactly the problem with things is before we can assess how dire it might be. I'm not sure exactly what people meant when they said they had become worryingly alienated from the things around them. 

Addenda to earlier posts

In one of the earlier posts on this blog, I began with an observation that anyone who has ever written or created will recognize from their own experience: namely, that it is horrible to re-read any of one's own work. And this is usually so for the obvious reasons: the creations of one's younger self often strike one as pretentious, shallow, sloppy, and worse. Which is an awful feeling. But then, I noted, the alternative possibility is often no better. 

Uncomfortable as it may be to discover that something you wrote in the past is bad, that is to say, it can be even more unsettling to discover that it is good. As I put it in another post not long after: "This feels like an affront and a challenge to [one's] current, older self, who is supposed to be wiser but may in fact be duller and more complacent, like the elder lion who is chased out of the pride by his own offspring."

Mudita and Invidia

There is a section in the middle of Spinoza's Ethics, in which he runs through the list of human emotions, which he sees as compounded entirely out of three primary "affects": joy, sadness, and desire. Modern emotional psychologists would of course expand that list to five (if Inside/Out is to be trusted), but Spinoza seems not far off; and he is able to provide a quasi-persuasive, if unromantic, account of how every more complicated emotion in our repertoire might be boiled down to one of these three elements. Love, for instance (in Spinoza's telling) is the emotion we feel when our power of acting expands and we attach this sensation to another person; hate, that which we experience when it is constricted or restrained, and we attribute that to another. 

Moral sentiments therefore, in Spinoza's telling, come about through a kind of extension of these same feelings by analogy to other creatures who are like ourselves. If someone to whom we can relate has constraints placed upon their power to act, we feel sadness on their behalf, because we can recognize their similarity to ourselves and thus analogize their plight to our own condition. This, says Spinoza, is what we mean when we speak of the emotion of "pity." Next, he turns to the analogous situation respecting joy. Presumably, if we feel sadness at the misfortune of some other being like ourselves, by the same logic we feel joy at contemplating their happiness. Yet, Spinoza notes, "By what name we should call the joy which arises from another's good I do not know." (Curley trans.)