This is our 50th text on the website, and for this occasion we have written a 'text' together that consists of a letter exchange in which we discuss the act of doing philosophy, living for living itself, activism, and friendship.
Thanks to everyone that has been supporting us and reading our rambling, more is coming.
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26-11-2024
Hey Max,
You know why I am sending you this message. We are about to post our 50th text on Thought Magicians, a bit more than 1,5 years after we launched the website. I remember a conversation we had ... I think it was last May, but to be honest I don’t really know. Anyway, we were talking about writing a text or series together about something I told you and that came close to something you had been thinking about at that time as well. I don’t remember the details exactly, but I told you about why I loved cooking, and how I think cooking is similar to dancing and contemplation. The similarity between these things, and this shared element is exactly why I love them so deeply, is that they are ways of turning the minimal elements of our existence – eating, moving, thinking – into something more than just survival. I admire something about this: it needs nothing more than it already is, they are acts that take exactly that which is, that which is around, and start from there and also end there. They also don’t necessarilly produce something, something from which to gain economically in the widest sense possible. Of course, with thinking we can write texts, with cooking we can open restaurants, and with dancing we can win battles. But these are not what I am thinking of when I am talking here about cooking, dancing and contemplation. I am rather thinking about the cypher, the circle of dancers that dance just for dance, just for that moment and joy. I think about taking the effort to cook very good at home, to try out new things just because of the joy of cooking and eating good food. I think about sitting on a bench and just letting the thoughts come and go. Those acts, those arts, in which living turns into living just for living and nothing more.
I have been wondering lately how this relates to Thought Magicians and the task of the philosopher. The ‘task of the philosopher’ seems to imply that there is something more than merely doing philosophy that needs to be done, some external goal. And, with everything going on in the world, it sure seems like there is much to do, more than just living. There is a tension. On the one hand there are so many terrible things going on in the world, things that ask for our attention, our critiques, our action, and on the other hand there is, especially perhaps in light of these horrors, the need for poetry, for sitting still, for doing nothing, for cooking nice food and not wanting anything more from life than life itself, than dancing and reflecting on the beauty of flowers. But, as Adorno once said, it seems in a way barbaric to do those things in this context. I’ve been wondering what the place of Thought Magicians is in relation to this tension. What do you think?
Your friend,
Lex
30-11-2024
Hello Lex,
Thank you for your wonderful letter. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of something we discussed during the conversation you mention and the concept you call ‘practical immanence’. What I take from this concept is that practices, habits, and ways of living can be meaningful without some abstract, external ideal that imbues them with meaning. As you write, it’s about “those acts, those arts, in which living turns into living just for living and nothing more.” I think we tend to forget this because modern life is saturated with abstract notions which follow the formula of the ‘in order to’: I work out in order to feel good about myself. I study in order to get a good job. In these instances, the goal never lies in the practice itself; it lies in that which the practice helps us to achieve. This means that we often seek for ‘true’ life somewhere else, external to, and on the outside of, the practices through which it is lived. The question is what remains of life when it takes place almost solely in this ‘outside’ realm.
Moreover, we seem to generally be estranged from the bare roots and practical elements of life because we can outsource pretty much everything for the right price. If a pipe is broken in our house, we call a plumber to fix it. If we do not want to deliberately decide which show to watch, we can let the algorithm do it for us, sit back, and consume. This also goes for our intellectual endevours: we no longer have to search for meaningful sources or dig through long, difficult texts in order to understand a complicated idea, because we can just let ChatGPT do our writing and researching for us. We don’t have to do anything ourselves, there is always someone or something that does it in our place. And this someone or something is usually quicker, easier, and more predictable than if we would do it ourselves.
These practices of outsourcing do not operate in a vaccum, but are supported by modern notions on the scarcity of time and the realm of the body as an obstacle and a hindrance. We outsource the practical, messy, tiresome and boring tasks of life because we live in the fantasy that this frees us from constrains and creates space for practices that are more sublime and more meaningful. Things must always be optimized, made more efficient, more frictionless. The irony is that the more time we gain because it is not ‘lost’ on seemingly mundane and practical tasks, the more estranged and empty we feel. The time we gain is usually time we spend consuming. This leads to a version of life that is so easy, predictable and calculable that we find it increasingly difficult to actually live it. That is to say, there is a price to pay for our addiction to convenience-machines and our unwillingness to toil and grapple with the practical dimension of life: emptiness, boredom, meaninglessness, unconsciousness.
This all seems dreary and bleak, and in a way it is. We find ourselves trapped in a vicious cycle: we need tremendous amounts of time and energy to build differents habits and practices than the ones that lull us into a waking slumber, but it’s precisely these conventional forms of living that deprive us of the energy we need to break away from them. We must escape the swamp by pulling ourselves out by our own hair, so to say. We must become the Baron of Münchhausen in the epoch of late capitalism.
It is precisely in this project of becoming-active that the concept of practical immanence can serve as a valuable tool to understand where we are going wrong and what we can do to change it. Practical immanence is about establishing practices that propel us upward, that imbue us with a feeling of inspiration or energy when we are doing them. They signify a positive feedback-loop, a motion of reciprocity where the practice itself breeds the desire for more practice. Practical immanence is not doing what you want, but wanting what you do. As you, Lex, put it beautfully in your text on this concept, “once you surround yourself with life, like filling your house with plants, more life will inevitably follow as a result of it.” On my reading, practical immanence is not about surrounding yourself with literal life, though; it is about establishing practices and ways of living that nurture life, that give you a sense of being alive.
Let me illustrate this with an example. I love playing guitar, and have been doing this for many years. I specifically like to play blues, because it offers much room for improvisation and freedom. The great thing about playing blues is that when I am improvising, I can actually feel whether or not I am playing well. It’s never about playing the right notes, though. It’s about the interaction between myself, the guitar and the music at that unique moment. It’s like my playing and I are caught in a positive feedback-loop where I am talking to the guitar, but the guitar is also talking back to me in some strange way, cheering me on and lifting me up. I simply know when I am playing well, but only when I’m doing it. There is no external referent, no position from which to judge the quality of my playing except for my own enjoyment, concentration, and sense of freedom. This is why I play and why I enjoy playing. Or, to be more precise, I play because I enjoy playing. Josh Homme, singer and guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age and a personal hero of mine, captures this point rather beautifully: “when you expect anything from music, you’re expecting too much. You do it for yourself, and for nothing else.”
There is a second layer here, which has to do with the upward motion or direction that practical immanence signifies. As I said earlier, I think modern people struggle to find meaning because we often do things in order to reach a goal that lies outside the practices in which life actually takes place. In the case of guitar playing, such an abstract, external notion would be ‘becoming a more skilled guitar player’, a goal which I could attain quite easily. All I would have to do is practice speed and technique all day, and I would inevitably become a ‘better’ player over time. The crucial point is that in this scenario, I wouldn’t enjoy a single moment of my playing. I would never look forward to playing. I wouldn’t even really be playing, but merely practicing. Playing guitar immanently is to play with intensity, conscious awareness and love for the music, and getting better as a result of that practice. But progress can never be formulated in advance, it must grow organically. I think this convergence of ends and means can be extrapolated to other domains of life as well: progress, growth and gain cannot precede concrete practices, but must arise out of them. They are a byproduct, a welcome surplus, but exist on a different order from the enjoyment and meaning that the practice itself gives us. The practice and its enjoyment come first, and anything to ‘gain’ from it comes second. Always.
This is also what Thought Magicians is about for me. The point was never to reach a certain goal, to have a certain amount of readers or traffic or coverage or anything of that nature. Any text that we post is a victory whether it is read by many people or not. The reason for this is that it’s the act of creating itself that is meaningful, not its effects. The writing is a success upon creation; it does not need any external referent to be validated. It is a miracle that it is there, that somebody has taken the time and effort to bring something new into the world. Any interpretation, any metric, any critique, any gain that takes place after the creation is always parasitic, secondary, external. This is also my response to those critics you mentioned that say it is barbaric to make art, have pleasure and fun in a world as nasty, fucked up and ugly as the one we live in. As you say, “with everything going on in the world, it sure seems like there is much to do, more than just living.” My point is precisely the opposite: to create, to take enjoyment in the practices that shape our lives, is the only antidote to the horrors of the modern world. I envision thinkers, artists and creatives in these times as collectively embodying a singular archetype. I think of us as the violin player on the Titanic who keeps on playing even as the ship goes down. We must continue to create, write, think, and connect, regardless of whether that will ‘do’ or ‘change’ anything in the external world. Not in spite of the world’s ugliness, but because of it.
That is my messy, associative and lengthy response to your letter, I hope you don’t mind me taking your concept and pushing it in a different direction from what you initially intended. I suspect this won’t be a problem though, because part of what drives Thought Magicians is our shared approach to thinking as a collective enterprise, a way of connecting, of producing something new. In a larger sense, this is what practical immanence is about for me: grappling with the practicality of life on its own terms without constantly obsessing over the externalities that have come to dominate our lives. I am reminded of what René Gude, a Dutch philosopher who passed away some years ago, said in response to the cancer growing in his body that he knew would inevitably kill him. He expected that due to his illness and imminent death, he would no longer worry and obsess about the ‘small’ things in life and only spend his time on things that were really important: the big questions, the major decisions, those things that had to be dealt with before he died. The surprising thing he found out was that if you strip away all those practical, messy, tiny things that are supposedly in the way of ‘real’ life, you don’t free life from its constrains or open up a portal to a magical ‘outside’ where the real living takes place. Rather, when you strip away the messy and practical parts of life, you lose life itself. Because there, and nowhere else, does living actually take place.
Your friend,
Max
05-12-2024
Dear Max,
It was really great to read your response to my question. I cannot find myself completely in your elaboration of practical immanence, which itself (this difference) is perhaps the most illuminating element concerning the questions that I asked you. Concerning my initial idea of practical immanence, for example, you write that “progress, growth and gain cannot precede concrete practices, but must arise out of them. They are a byproduct, a welcome surplus, but exist on a different order from the enjoyment and meaning that the practice itself gives us. The practice and its enjoyment come first, and anything to ‘gain’ from it comes second. Always.” I want to think immanence as radical as possible, which means that I would also include things like progress, growth, and gain in the act of living as nothing but living. In fact, the movement of the thought that tries to think living as just living and nothing more is not a movement of isolation, of an individual doing something and not standing in relation to an outside. It is rather the absolute opposite: it is a movement of opening up, of widening. That is why I would never identify this idea of particular immanence with an upward spiral, as you do. If there is a movement to practical immanence, it is a movement that moves into all possible directions.
So, when you write in a fantastic way that “There is no external referent, no position from which to judge the quality of my playing except for my own enjoyment, concentration, and sense of freedom. This is why I play and why I enjoy playing. Or, to be more precise, I play because I enjoy playing”, I would also include the possibility for this to encompass an ‘in order to.’ In fact, it is in practical immanence that it becomes clear that there is no actual distinction between these two. The cooking for cooking’s sake, for the joy of it, for the fun of it, is also an ‘in order to eat, in order to survive’. I was not clear on this before I guess. The life as simply living that I equate with practical immanence is a life in which these two are not opposing one another, it is a life in which it is not possible to designate and isolate an ‘in order to’ that we consider to be bad or undesirable and that we want to therefore dispose. No, I want it all, everything, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad.’ So, when you write that “On my reading, practical immanence is not about surrounding yourself with literal life, though; it is about establishing practices and ways of living that nurture life, that give you a sense of being alive” I would like to say that, for me these two things imply one another, they completely overlap without residue, because the act of surrounding oneself, or rather opening up for, literal life coincides with the practice that nurtures life and ‘that give you a sense of being alive.’
Practical immanence, for me, is the practical attitude that follows from the philosophy of immanence that I am trying to think, articulate, and live. It is not necessarily this or that activity. I just believe that things like cooking, dancing, thinking, and for you playing guitar, are activities that are particularly suitable for explaining this attitude. But I think that there is something in these activities that we can learn from, that we can appropriate, and take with us in living life, to turn it into an art of living. It is first and foremost about – and this is what all my thinking is about – abundance, providence. The idea that everything is already here, that we do not have to look for it (whatever that is) elsewhere. I recognize this is in your text on nightwalking, which I really loved. Especially the last paragraph hints towards a similar direction as practical immanence I believe:
The point of nightwalking, then, is not to pay more attention, but to pay attention differently. Nightwalking shows us how difficult it is to pay any actual attention to things in a society which is absolutely saturated by things to pay attention to. Roaming the streets in total silence is a way to cultivate a sense of attention that is not focused on stimulation, but on awareness; it aims to discover the hidden beauties of a world which we pass by at an ever-increasing speed. This is the stunning paradox lying at the heart of nightwalking: walking around, alone, and paying attention to the world, is perhaps the best way to feel a sense of belonging to that world, if only for a brief moment.
Good stuff.
However, perhaps our different takes and elaborations of this idea or this direction of thought are not the most enlightening element for the questions we started with. It is rather, as you already mentioned yourself, the difference between our approaches, the fact that you take up an idea of mine and make it your own (exactly because the idea was never ‘mine’ to begin with). Any text, any idea is there out in the open, ready to be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. And this, indeed, is what Thought Magicians is about. It is about creating that space in which this can happen. But I have come to realize, and I think we have had this intuition all along, that this ‘space’ is not really a space in the literal sense, but rather a coming-together of different people.
That is why I can recognize you in your elaboration, in your take on this concept and topic. At this point, after all the texts you have posted on Thought Magicians, and which of course I have all read attentively, I almost feel like I could recognize a text by you without knowing the author beforehand. An unintentional face. It seems to me that Thought Magicians is also just about this: friendship. Although, I wonder often to what extend we, you and I, agree or disagree on things (which, however, is not really an interesting question), it feels to me like our texts and ‘our’ ideas are, just like us, friends. Our texts are friends, our practices are friends. The difference between our work and our existence evaporates in friendship.
We have been talking about what we should do for our fiftieth text. I sent you this first letter as a way to kickstart something, without knowing where it would go. I now know what I want: an ode to our friends and to each other. You are undoubtedly one of my best friends. And I feel insanely grateful for walking this philosophical path together. I am insanely grateful for every single person that has posted on our website and worked with us so far, and I am insanely grateful for everyone that read one or more of our texts. What I look forward to most is working with more others, more friends, and reading their work, their thoughts, their lives.
I am really happy that you brought up the concept of practical immanence. I have now come to realize that practical immanence is always an immanence of friendship: we are always already among friends. Perhaps this is the greatest abundance of all. Thought Magicians is about this, about the simultaneous growth of creative thought and friendship. And here the tension that I asked you about in the first letter has become clear to me (that is, it has dissolved). Again: poetry or critique, art for art’s sake or strategic activism, pondering in silence or actively changing the world for the better? In friendship as practical immanence these two are folded together and are no longer apart. In eating together, thinking together, dancing and making music together, the friendship in which we dwell starts to spread out over the surface of strangers that surrounds us. To make friends is our activism. To motivate each of us, all of us, to think more, to go just slightly further, to look just around that next corner again and again, we get lost together and form bonds. Our new friends bring in new friends, and creative and intensive thinking reaches new places and minds. To change the world by sitting down and contemplating it, collectively. Everyone keeps on living their lives, but something has changed. We become nightwalkers, one with the world, together in friendship.
Thank you, Max. Thanks to everyone that has contributed and followed us. You know who you are. I am looking forward to making more friends.
Your friend,
Lex
10-12-2024
Dear Lex,
Thanks for your reply. In my final response to your ideas, I want to point out one thing that you mention right at the end, something that strikes me as touching on the very center of what you and I have been doing for the past couple of years. It deals with an important ethical question; should we spend our time trying to change things for the better, or should we focus on our private pursuits and the things that make us happy? Is writing about philosophy a moot endeavor in a world full of injustices and people who can use our help? You brilliantly show that when we approach thought as a practice of immanence that is always moving, making new connections, ‘opening up’ towards life and different forms of life, we can deconstruct this question. That is to say that there is no longer a clear distinction between doing philosophy or making art ‘for it’s own sake’ on the one hand and engaging in practices of resistance on the other.
As you write: “In friendship as practical immanence these two are folded together and are no longer apart. In eating together, thinking together, dancing and making music together, the friendship in which we dwell starts to spread out over the surface of strangers that surrounds us. To make friends is our activism.” When we take this idea at face value, it might not seem all that radical or urgent. Can we really fight the major challenges of contemporary society through friendship? However, we must remind ourselves that we live in a world which constantly pushes us towards isolation, towards being stuck in our own little cage of comfort, our suffocating identitarian box. No matter how virtuous, progressive or free-thinking we think we are, we find ourselves trapped in this box, just like our reactionary and conservative counterparts. The point of approaching thought and/as friendship seems to me to point out the artificial, contingent and porous nature of the walls enclosing us. Look around. Experiment with new connections. Do something spontaneous. To cite Deleuze, “don’t have just ideas; just have an idea.” In a world which constantly pushes passive consumption and lonely entertainment, focusing on the connections we make in the real world through thinking collectively is itself a radical idea. It won’t overthrow capitalism or stop global warming, but it will make life better, more nourishing, more kind to us. And this is badly needed to keep ourselves afloat.
Thank you, Lex, for your wonderful companionship on this collective experiment thus far. Your ideas make me look at myself and the world around me in a different way, and I always feel inspired reading your texts or discussing these things when we hang out. Let us continue practicing immanence together for many years to come.
Yours,
Max
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