Nick Riggle dropped out of high school at 17 to become a professional skateboarder, participating in world-class stunt shows, demos and competitions (including three ESPN X Games). He is now an author and professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego.
Below, Nick shares 5 key insights from his new book, This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive. Listen to the audio version, read by Nick himself, in the Next Big Idea app.
1. He did not consent to the existence.
Here you are, on planet Earth, alive and conscious, with your heart beating and incarnated. You didn’t ask to be here; you did not consent in this life. No one had a chat with you about whether you would mind a carnal existence on this spinning space orb.
Why should you care about your life? Why worry about something you didn’t ask for?
If someone randomly handed you the keys to a Ferrari, it’s entirely up to you whether you care. It’s great, but it’s also expensive to own, unwieldy, super finicky and finicky. It is perfectly reasonable to reject it as a burden.
Life is also expensive, uncomfortable, finicky, and delicate. And you didn’t ask for it. So why accept it? Why appreciate and value it?
This Beauty seeks a heartfelt answer to this question, one that I can confidently embrace, affirm, and share with my precious readers, including, when they are old enough, the two children I have brought into this world.
2. You only live once.
Carpe diem, live like there is no tomorrow, live in the moment, treat yourself. They are phrases, often clichés, that affirm the value of life and inspire the embrace of it. I call them existential imperatives and they suggest answers to my Question.
After all, a little reflection on your one and only life can send you into a wild and uncertain world in a frenzy. You only live once! Live as if there were no tomorrow!
“If you only live once, why embrace life instead of shrinking?”
These phrases ring true, but why do these phrases work? If you only live once, why embrace life instead of shrinking? Life is delicate and precious, so stay home; take no chances Or Consider Living Like There Is No Tomorrow: Why Not Terrible And Irresponsible Advice? There is a tomorrow, and everyone needs to plan for it.
Existential imperatives tap into something special about life, but it’s not clear why or how.
3. The difference between living and being alive.
We have two very different ways of thinking about life. One is the life of your beating little heart, your warm, bloody, delicate body. It is the life of rest, food, protection, comfort and support. This life is precious, and therefore it is a demanding life that needs to be cared for in the complex and volatile biological world. I try to sleep eight hours, I shower, I eat, I shave, I exercise, I seek comfort, I recover from illness and exhaustion, I squirm to relieve back pain, I visit doctors, I work to pay for food, housing and insurance and hopefully find moments to give myself a breather. The preservation of life represents the largest part of this precious life.
Then interwoven is this other life: the life of passion and search, of dreams and aspirations, of love sought and realized, of beauty and community, with the hope of peace and justice. It is a life desired but not always lived, animated in thought and action by the hope that I will prosper together with friends and family, that we will support one another through excellence, creativity, and goodwill. We flourish together, humanity flourishes. The thoughts of this life fill the heart with love and hope.
“There is more to life than maintaining it, that you can reach beyond your little self: toward love, creative achievement, community, and higher beauty.”
When it touches me, you only live once, I don’t listen to it since you only have one life. I hear it like, remember: you’re alive. It offers the reminder that there is more to life than sustaining it, that you can reach beyond your little self: toward love, creative achievement, community, and greater beauty.
4. Beauty imbues with meaning.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have thought of beauty in terms of pleasure, beauty as the ability to cause pleasure: the pleasure of a beautiful sunset, a dazzling painting, or a special song. These things reward the experience and enrich our individual lives.
But beauty is much more than mere pleasure. You can also answer my question. Pablo Casals (1876-1973), the mythical Spanish cellist and conductor, entrusted and returned to his followers the beauty of music. He wrote:
For the past 80 years I have started each day the same way. It is not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and play two Bach preludes and fugues. I can’t think of doing anything else. It’s kind of a blessing to the house. But that is not its only meaning to me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with an awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible wonder of being a human being.
Beauty sustained and renewed Casals, and in return he gave us all the beauty he was capable of creating. Leonard Cohen spent his life writing beautiful songs and literature. He said: “A lot of those songs are just a response to what seemed to me to be beauty, whatever the curious emanation of a being, an object, a situation or a landscape, you know. That had a very powerful effect on me, as it does on everyone, and I prayed for some answer to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me.” Cohen prayed to answer beauty with beauty, and we are lucky to know what his “prayers” and his sustained effort over many decades yielded.
“Beauty makes life worth replicating as beautiful.”
It is a remarkable and mysterious fact that we can devote ourselves to beauty. This suggests that beauty is not mere pleasure but meaning. Beauty moves us to be alive. The beautiful or the aesthetic is not a pretty face or a silky sky. Beauty makes life worth replicating as beautiful. It moves us to create, imitate and share the significant sources of value in life. Beauty is an invitation and acceptance, a joint venture and a promise to give each other our best answers to The Question.
5. Aesthetic community.
Wittgenstein pointed out that beautiful things have very little in common, except this: the hand wants to draw what the eye sees as beautiful, whether it be a Gothic church, a beautiful face, or a stunning landscape. Maybe you don’t draw, but you stay in a beautiful space, write a poem about it, or take a photo. The dish is delicious, so you recreate it at home. Like Cohen and Casals, you imitate and recreate the beautiful.
But imitation is not your only aesthetic impulse: your hand draws the beauty that your eye sees, and then what? You offer it. We share the beautiful. You watch a movie and share your reactions and interpretations. As I decorate my home, I think about future visits, hoping others will love the space. You dress to impress; bands play concerts; the chefs can’t wait to launch new menus. Beauty is what we find, create and propagate, either through imitation or by distributing the thing itself.
And finally, do not imitate or share any old aesthetics. Why did you share that song, play it repeatedly? It moves you to imitate and share things that speak to you, that seem alive with beauty in a way that makes you feel alive. you express yourself Displays aesthetic value as a means of self-expression in aesthetic engagements and interactions. You make your own sensibility concrete by sharing this beautiful thing. You even make your special connection to beauty real, present, and social in the way you laugh or dress, the food you cook and serve, and the way you write or speak.
Beauty involves us in aesthetic communities, in which we express, imitate, share, and offer our individual ways of being alive in response to beauty.
To listen to the audio version read by author Nick Riggle, download the Next Big Idea app today:
Source: news.google.com