CxD #251: 🔥Fire Philosophy: How to Live🔥 Special Edition
If you’re reading this, odds are you’re alive — but Hello! to the the celestial and ethereal beings regardless.
As Martin Heidegger “noticed” a century ago, what being alive means is peculiarly misunderstood and under-examined, thereby making “How to Live” a seemingly unanswerable and borderline preposterous and maybe even presumptuous question.
And yet, despite the impossibility of the task, I’ve gathered together two bold, noble, and astonishingly wise spirits to help me publicly perform and live this task of staggeringly important inquiry.
Below is a short conversation we— Dale Wright, Malek Moazzam-Doulat and yours truly— recorded specifically to introduce ourselves, to give you faces to go along with names. Please pour yourselves a beverage and watch us saying hello to you as we talk about the inspiration for this project.
Dale Wright has written a lot about How to Live, as evidenced by his books that I teach from and which have had a profound influence on my own attempt at learning how to live:
Professor Wright would like to add:
I’ve recently retired from a long career teaching at Occidental College in Los Angeles. That was practically perfect for me--I could stay in touch with young, agile minds while probing any of the great spiritual/philosophical writings that I desired, not to mention time to wander throughout Asia and the great mountain ranges of the world. Although I had no idea that would inevitably lead me to writing, it did, and I am so grateful. Writing for me meant thinking deeply, letting ideas sink all the way down so that I could put them into practice and into a language that was truly my own. I’ve written and edited articles and books, mostly on Buddhist thought and practice but always with an eye toward other traditions of wisdom. The books that might interest this audience most are: Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character, What Is Buddhist Enlightenment?, Buddhism: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra. Buddhism/Zen came to me as a profound inspiration, a source of ideas and practices of meditation that have guided me for many years now.
My sources of inspiration go far beyond Buddhism, though, and it’s probably true that half of my reading has been in other wisdom traditions, most notably what is called Continental philosophy. That includes Nietzsche, and I’ve been reading his works in astonishment for most of my life. For me, the best of Nietzsche and most profound edges of Buddhism and Zen just fit together, each taking a turn to shine inspiring light on the other. To have come of age just when the great writings from around the world became available was an amazing gift. Of all the times to be born, how could I--we!--be so lucky? I also have the good fortune to be married to a poet, a really great poet and live in proximity to two wonderful children, now adults with their own interesting lives. While I live and flourish in urbanity, with friends, music, and museums all around me, I crave the solitude of the wilderness. I’m an avid--no addicted--hiker and backpacker, and seek the high Sierras or the Joshua Tree deserts whenever I can slip away. I have long believed Nietzsche when he said that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” And although I’m still waiting for one that’s “truly great,” the best ones that have popped up so far certainly have that as their origin. So I just keep walking, the higher into the mountains and the further into the wilderness the better. I hope someday never to come back.
Dr. Moazzam-Doulat, unafraid and unabashed in third person, says about himself:
Malek is a student of philosophy as a way of life. Finding that contemporary disciplinary and national boundaries largely miss the profound historical currents that connect cultures, thinkers and texts, he has sought to explore the sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit connections between the wisdom traditions of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the the West. He has spend much of his life thinking through the possibilities for living afforded by the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Prof. Moazzam-Doulat teaches courses on social and political philosophy. His research is focused on contemporary political theory and religion with special emphasis on the relationship between Islamic and European philosophical responses to modernity and imperialism. He has worked as a public policy analyst and advocate focusing on issues of privacy broadly conceived. He has also worked for the ACLU of Southern California on post-9/11 public policy and civil liberties issues facing the Muslim, Arab, and Iranian communities in Southern California. He was one of the founding editors of Studies in Practical Philosophy (1998-2005), a quarterly journal dedicated to the exploration and promotion of social and political thought and activism grounded in the tradition of Continental philosophy.
I hope some of you not yet signed-up will join us on this journey. The life ocean is boisterous and deep, but it’s not the worst thing in the world to have a little boat, some oars, and good company to ride the waves.
