Part 1: The formative years

With that teasing title, what is this about, and why did I write it, and more importantly, why should you bother to read it?

One of the reasons for writing this is for my own personal need, as these retrospectives can be cathartic and a good way to think things through, reassess past decisions and plan a path forward.  I don’t feel a strong need for self-reflection at this point in my life, but it is useful to put things in writing, to reassure yourself that your values and goals make sense. 

A more important reason is that these are difficult times, and I feel I have a lot of valuable perspectives and experiences that can be helpful to share with others, either within the family, or outside.  However, as I’ll discuss later, I have gotten “burned” in the past is trying to share these insights, and have mostly refused to share with friends, family, or associates as a result.  So, much of this retrospective will be about issues and events that I have intentionally kept from others.  I’m hoping that putting these insights in writing will be a way to share some of these experiences and maybe help someone work through similar issues.  I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge and have a better perspective on philosophical issues than most people because I’ve been very fortunate to get a good education and, in many ways, I’ve had a “lucky” life.  Most people growing up in today’s world will not have the opportunities and good fortune that I have enjoyed, and I feel somewhat guilty about not giving back enough to others less fortunate.  For example, how many people today have vivid memories of lying under a blanket with their girlfriend with her top off, listening to Jimi Hendrix playing live at the 1968 Newport Festival less than 100 feet away?  And that’s not the best of it.  Yep. I’ve been very fortunate.

A final reason for writing this is that I’m getting old enough to think about what people would say about me if I needed to check out.  The people closest to me don’t know me as I would like to be remembered, and I would probably be “rolling in my grave” (or the cremation equivalent) listening to a bad eulogy from beyond.  I’m hoping there will be some material here that someone could use for a better send-off. You can read the final postscript for my recommendation.

Our Parents

One of the many ways I consider myself fortunate is that we moved to California in the late 50’s.  On my sixth birthday, we headed out on a vacation trip from Cincinnati to San Diego, camping along the way.  When we finally got to San Diego, my dad fell in love with the area and told my mom to stay with the kids while he drove back to get the furniture.  Our grandmother was a strong-willed authoritarian with a history of meddling in his marriage.  I can’t imagine how much grief my dad endured in announcing this move to her, but God bless him for doing it.

My dad was both an important role model and a foil, as he was someone I had to “transcend” in my youth.  He was smart, clever, and resourceful and he was successful in so many varied ways.  He skipped 3 grades and started college before getting drafted into the Navy for WWII.  He returned to finished college as a psychology major, during which time he met and married my mother.

Dad was successful in so many ways, and he always seemed comfortable taking on new and different challenges.  He played the piano and organ, did all the fix-up projects on the house, built tube amplifiers and his own speakers, and taught adults English at night after a full day’s work as a personnel specialist.  He even taught some of those English classes on a local TV channel.  He wrote and sold several magazine articles, made several custom rifles and pistol stocks, and took us to the shooting range for gun safety lessons.  He was the Pack master for our Boy Scouts chapter, and he seemed able to fit in wherever he went.

We did a lot together, and he encouraged me to try things on my own.  One of the projects we “sort of” did together were the Pinewood derby cars.  They start out as a kit of a block of wood with four plastic wheels and four nails.  Today, everyone knows that you need to sand down and polish the nails to make good axles, but back in the early and mid-sixties, such sophistication was not common.  Dad put the nails in an electric drill that was clamped in a vise and cleaned up the nails under the head with a file, followed by sandpaper.  Then, he polished the “axle” with jeweler’s rouge, inspecting the shaft with a jeweler’s loupe until the shaft was highly polished.  The other cars went down the ramp and got measured when they stopped, but for ours they had to measure the distance after it went across the room and bounced off the wall.  Eventually, the other participants figured out how to improve those axles, but dad kept coming up with improvements, and we won 3 years in a row.  Dad wasn’t obsessed with winning or dominating others, but he loved technical challenges, and he had the creativity and skills to be successful in many different fields.  He had written several articles that got published in American Rifleman and other magazines and developed all the pictures for the articles in his own darkroom.  Later, after graduating from college he helped me sell some articles to Audio Amateur and Radio Electronics.

Obviously, a father with this many talents is an inspiration, yet I felt the need to reject many of his beliefs and tenets.  Part of that was the inevitable clash between the more formal years of the 40’s and 50’s with the turbulent 60’s that led to revolutions in culture, politics, sexuality, and civil rights.  The era of opportunity and prosperity as the war ended and American manufacturing thrived and the GI bill paid for your education was ending, and the values and world outlook offered by our parents seemed out of touch with a new reality.  But a larger part was disillusionment with my father’s philosophical outlook.  His favorite poet was Rupert Brooke, who gained notoriety as an idealistic “war poet” (WWI).  Although highly regarded by some (particularly for his good looks), most of his poetry is overly flowery and lacks the depth one expects from serious English poets.  And my father’s fascination with reincarnation, Edgar Cayce and Ouija boards wasn’t satisfying, as it felt like a lot of simple answers to issues that deserved more thoughtful treatment.  But when I expressed skepticism for these beliefs, I think that he was more pleased that I was thinking on my own than disappointed by my disbelief.  I appreciated that response, and I respected him for his insight.

My mom was what most people would say was a “good mom”—always supportive, always friendly, and proud of her kids.  She took one year of college, but it was primarily to find a husband.  She never learned to drive and didn’t have any hobbies or skills that she took pride in.  When she went back to community college for an AA degree, she would always place her grades on the table for dad to see, to show him that she did well.  She read a lot, but it was mostly Erle Stanley Gardner books, which we often read ourselves in the same room with her when we were in elementary school.

My sister and I had a blow-up with my mom one summer when I came home from college, as we accused her of trying to live her life through her kids rather than on her own.  That confrontation didn’t go well, as nothing really changed afterward, but at least we tried to be sympathetic and helpful in those exchanges.   I can’t fault my mom for wanting to support us any way she could, but there were times when it felt that she was hovering too closely and that she needed to be more engaged in her own activities without us.

A New Generation

Growing up in California in the early 60’s was an inspiring experience for which I am truly thankful.  With an active counterculture and a sense of liberation that provided hope for profound generational change.  And while much of that idealistic enthusiasm fizzled out by the 70’s, the sense of hope in the 60’s in California was infectious, and there was a feeling that more people were striving to be better people, with good values and lasting goals.  I can’t say that the 60’s lived up to those aspirations, but I feel fortunate to be a part of that generation.

This was also a time when kids could be on their own and play outside without adult supervision.  We grew up in a house next to a large canyon that we could explore.  There was a large treehouse there that someone had started with a long rope swing, overlooking a stream, so there were many opportunities to do things that would justifiably frighten most parents today.  We would bring home horned toads and lizards and learned to avoid the venomous snakes.  We spent many hours digging up a prairie dog tunnel system, just to see what’s inside.  We even had “canyon wars” with the kids on the other side, including shooting arrows from home-made pipe cannons, but that came to an end when the area caught fire and drew the attention of our negligent parents.

But the greatest opportunity in that time was an excellent school system and a culture supporting math and science education.  This was the era of the space race, and those of us showing “STEM” skills were treated very well.  I was able to score well on aptitude tests, which got me into a special program for gifted kids.  This was well before there was any backlash to academic elitism, so the program was well funded and attracted good teachers and students.  Our teachers were concerned about how the world was changing with all the new technologies, and I still remember listening to our junior high school science teacher, who had a PhD in chemistry, explain his concern over the way carbon dioxide traps heat in the upper atmosphere—and this was over 60 years ago.

Fortunately, we also had some good teachers outside of the math/science track to inspire us.  One of my English teachers liked to quote Hemingway, and his favorite quote was about the beauty of an iceberg was that only one-eighth of it was above water.  That is the source of this narrative’s title, as we were encouraged to not just focus on what was visible in plain sight, but to appreciate what is normally hidden.  That English class was a spark that would eventually lead me to studying philosophy in college.

Questioning reality (high school)

I had skipped 6^th grade, so I was at least a year younger than my peers in school.  I could compete with others in our classes, but couldn’t keep up physically in sports.  I was popular in our classrooms but didn’t get involved in too many outside activities, so I had a lot of time to think and reflect on my own.

I had always enjoyed math and would often apply “mathematical concepts” to everyday experiences.  For example, while walking at night I would think about how the length of my shadow from a streetlight changed length as I walked at a uniform pace.  I knew that I could write the equations that relate walking speed to shadow length for given streetlight positions, although I wasn’t enough of a geek to work out those equations.  That relationship is a mathematical model, and what fascinated me during this time was the extent to which our thinking is based on rules, models, and patterns.  And it was clear that the mathematical models were different from other models and patterns of thinking, but I couldn’t articulate the way in which they were different.  That fascination with how models affect and shape our thinking was something that would affect me all my life.

The counterculture of the 60’s exposed many of the previous generation’s values as following rules and conventions of behavior that were out of touch with the new politics and the emerging cultural revolution.  So, a lot of us growing up in this era were questioning the prevailing values and sought new ways to find meaning and value.  We viewed our parents’ actions as beholden to old behavior models and looked for ways to break free of those old conventions.  But I tried to take this questioning to an extreme, by trying to understand how these behavior models evolve, and why they would change, and how much of a generations’ values were based on “universal” human traits and behaviors, versus how much was historical, and shaped by current culture. 

My acid test was always:  how would people react in each situation 100 years ago or 200 years?  I kept using that test, trying to understand why people acted as they did, looking for behavior patterns that would account for why people derived happiness or satisfaction or comfort.  In a way, I was questioning where our moods and feelings come from, and how much of those responses are “universal” rather than “historical”.  For example, it was clear that some chord changes in popular music engendered certain feelings or emotions, and I would ask whether current-day music or other artforms would convey the same meaning to someone 200 years ago, or even 1000 years ago.

This type of questioning, in which you look analytically at normal, free-flowing words and actions and moods, can get in the way of “normal” behavior.  Eventually, I took these questions to an extreme, and even questioned “normal” physical movements such as walking.  It got to the point where walking was difficult and somewhat surreal.  Instead of having a natural gait, I felt aware of how individual muscles were working, and movements that are normally fluid and unnoticed became stiff and mechanical.  And instead of normal, “natural” conversation, I would focus on the social rules of discourse, and stumble at putting words together.

This extreme questioning felt somewhat dangerous, and in retrospect, I understood why.  Some children and adolescents experience these behaviors, and they are diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia.  I can see how some people would not be able to cope with these disorienting thoughts and would need help or might never recover.  I always felt at least partially in control and was able to “snap back” to “reality” when it was necessary to pass myself off as “normal”.  But I can understand how these thoughts could overwhelm a child or adolescent, and that they would not be able to function socially without help.

I think the reason I was able to cope with these disorienting thoughts was that I had a disturbing recurring dream as a boy and eventually learned to manage the mental discomfort.  The discomfort was like the sickness people get from claustrophobia or the dizziness from heights, and it was frightening.  The dream was about floating in a large vat of goo-like stuff and trying to escape.  There was nothing clearly focused in the dream—it wasn’t a well-formed “me”, it wasn’t a well-formed “vat”; it was just the struggle and trying to escape, with everything being “fuzzy” and quite unreal.  My dad thought that it was an impression of childbirth (rather than a recollection), which made some sense at the time, but I suppose there could be other more likely explanations.  Nonetheless, I had that dream many times, and each time I would allow myself to get a bit more frustrated or terrified, until I was able to endure the frustration and dizziness without fearing the anxiety.  Those dreams prepared me for the anxiety of my incessant questioning in high school.

Even though these thoughts were somewhat crippling, I knew that they were not the result of a pathological disorder, but rather the result of questioning “reality”.  I had a general understanding of why I would feel disoriented through this behavior, but I never felt there was anything wrong with me, and that I was just discovering how large and strange the world can be.  It was a dive into the cold depths below the tip of the iceberg, and although I was somewhat shaken and disoriented, I didn’t feel that I needed help.  In fact, I felt I was progressing toward a “truer” understanding of the world.  My biggest frustration wasn’t having these thoughts, but rather that I didn’t know how to articulate these thoughts to others.  That would change when I got to college.

Like many students today, we were able to take advanced placement courses in the math/science fields, such as calculus and computer programming.  I got my temporary license at 16 and shortly thereafter was driving across San Diego to La Jolla to take a computer programming class at UCSD, taught by Ken Bowles, who had developed UCSD Pascal.  That was still in the days of programming with decks of punch cards, but an exciting time as the university was just starting to emerge as a computing powerhouse. I even joined the math team, which came in first in the city of San Diego.  I felt that I was expected to pursue a math or science or engineering program in college, and I was somewhat comfortable with that expectation because I was good in those fields. But after all the questioning I had done in high school, I didn’t feel that I wasn’t ready to commit my life to being a mathematician or scientist.

An awakening (first year of college)

A turning point in my life was taking an introductory philosophy class in my first quarter at UC Irvine.  The class was taught by A.I. Melden, a well-respected philosopher who edited the book on ethics used for the class.  I had started out as an engineering major, since that was my strength, but took that philosophy class to satisfy some of my general education requirements.  The study group for the class was a place where I could finally start to verbalize my interest in philosophy, and even though I couldn’t write well after high school, I started to feel a bit more comfortable outside my math/science “comfort zone”.

I transferred up to Berkeley after one quarter at the request of a girlfriend but transferring to the Berkeley campus meant I had to stay out for a quarter, during which I worked at the dorms.  I had gotten a high enough GPA at Irvine that I had library stack privileges.  That meant that I could freely roam the holdings of one of the largest library systems in the United States.  I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store, looking up the original sources of books from my first quarter, and browsing through books I never suspected existed.

What fascinated me most about the library was that there were so many books that I didn’t have the background or training to read and put into historical perspective.  It was humbling to see so much written material that I couldn’t understand, and I knew that most of those books would be rewarding if I could comprehend them.

At UC Berkeley students had considerable freedom in selecting courses to meet their general education credits, and I picked courses and instructors that looked interesting from their description in published reviews.  Berkeley always had excellent visiting instructors, and I was never disappointed in the courses I took.  I took classes that were well outside my area of strength—Intro to Art History, History of Musical Style, English Literature, etc., and began to feel much more confident in my ability to excel in classes outside my originally selected field of engineering.

I appreciate how fortunate we were back in those days, with tuition at the University of California at $50 per quarter.  And we weren’t pushed into a rigidly structured program to get through as quickly as possible.  I stayed at the Student Cooperative, where you had to put in 5 hours of work preparing meals or some other tasks in exchange for room and board that was a bit over $600 per quarter.  I had two scholarships that covered my expenses, so it wasn’t a significant financial burden on my parents for me to seek out educational opportunities that didn’t directly lead to a career.  I know that it is much harder now for young adults who don’t have affluent parents to afford a broad education.  Even worse, our culture doesn’t recognize the value of a liberal arts education the way it should, so that college has become focused on vocational training for all but the elite few who can afford a liberal arts education.  The great educational opportunities I enjoyed just don’t seem to exist any longer unless you are blessed with wealth at birth.

Lesson in seduction (Trip to Berkeley)

One the way up to the Spring quarter at Berkeley in 1970, I checked the “rides” board at SDSU to see if anyone wanted to share the car.  I contacted a female who needed a ride to Redwood City, which was along the way, about 10 hours from San Diego. 

It was a long ride, but somehow, I was able to entertain her the entire trip by talking about Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest whose writings were popular at the time.  I had recently read his book The Phenomenon of Man, which argued that human life was inevitable, given the immense size of the universe.  Teilhard makes this argument based on probabilities and the scale of the universe.  Even though the universe is tending toward disorder, or maximum entropy (as characterized by the Second Law of Thermodynamics), the size of the universe is so large that there will always be “pockets” of negative entropy, which are highly organized.  He argues that the world we know, including human life, is one of these sanctions of negative entropy, and that the immense size of the universe makes this organized system highly probable.

I’ve forgotten most of the other arguments made in Teilhard’s book, but I must have been able to digest much of the work, as I was able to keep talking almost nonstop for that 10-hour trip.  But what I remember most about that trip didn’t have anything to do with Teilhard:  it was my companion’s reaction to what I was saying. I could feel that she was being seduced by philosophy.  Who knew that discussing philosophy was an effective way to score?  This was someone I had never met before, yet after a 10-hour car ride she was looking at me like she wanted my baby and asking me to spend the night with her.

This seductive power of philosophy was both fascinating and creepy.  Clearly, my rider had a need to discuss “deep thoughts” that she probably wasn’t aware of, and my discussion filled that void.  That’s something I did not expect, and I was surprised when she started showing affection.  But this was also creepy, in that I was simply trying to share some writings that I found interesting, and I wasn’t trying to seduce her.  In fact, I was on my way to meet up with my girlfriend in Berkeley and had no desire to spend the night with this woman.  My conclusion was that I needed to be careful with whom to discuss philosophical issues, because people are hungry for answers, and they will easily latch onto you as a savior or messiah.  But I didn’t want the responsibility of being someone’s guru, and I found the idea of “philosophy groupies” repugnant. 

I had additional philosophy discussions that were even more disturbing after taking more classes at Berkeley.  I got into a discussion about living authentically (a term from Heidegger) that I regretted, as the discussion upset the person, who viewed the discussion as an attack on their values rather than an intellectual dialogue.  And once you start someone on a path of thinking, you change their lives, and they depend on you even more for stability and guidance.  But there is never enough time to help someone explore the chilly depths of an iceberg if they aren’t prepared to make that trip themselves.  It’s a path we all must pursue on our own, and we must be ready to endure the confusion, uncertainty and loneliness that comes with extreme questioning of who we are.

The politics of this current era, where a large segment of the population has embraced a grifter, makes it clear that many people are looking for a messiah, with the promise of quick easy answers.  But there is also a large, educated segment that is susceptible to seduction on a more sophisticated level, where they are looking for meaning, values, and answers to philosophical questions.  But I’ve always viewed any form of seduction as dishonest.  Seduction plays more to the heart (or other organs) than to the mind, and it is not an adequate foundation for a long-term relationship.  My response has been to be paranoid about appearing as an authority or messiah to anyone, so I have kept my thoughts to myself, even excluding my children from philosophical discussions.  That decision might have been a mistake, for which I have some regrets.  That’s how my father was toward me, and I didn’t need him to prod me on toward a life of questioning about thinking and being.  But I have been far more fortunate than others in having access to education and cultural experiences and a career, so I probably should have been more active in helping others appreciate the beauty of what is usually hidden. That’s one of many regrets, although I’m still conflicted about how much I should have tried to change other people’s lives.  As I found out, some people can’t deal with deeply challenging thoughts, and there is a lot of “psychological risk” associated with providing direction to people who are not prepared for that type of journey.  I came to feel that other people had to find direction and meaning in their own way, on their own, and focused more on providing a supporting environment for exploration rather than direction.

Nihilism

Whenever you question “reality” in a search for meaning and values, you run the risk of nihilism.  Nihilism has several definitions, but what I mean here is the frighteningly scary feeling that there are no absolute truths, that morality is “relative” rather than absolute, our lives are empty and devoid of meaning, and that there is nothing worth living for.  For many people, it’s like the metaphorical “everything bagel” in the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”.  It’s a state of mind that is easy to enter and difficult to escape.

One reason I succumbed to nihilism in high school and early college years is that I was getting exposed to great thinking and great art in classes, yet it felt that our current culture was shallow and lacking beauty.  So much of what passes as art in our modern age is a rehash of old ideas that have been explored originally and more thoroughly in prior eras, or else is based on “cleverness”.  Cleverness is usually characterized by the ability to think quickly and come up with ideas that impress others, without involving a deep understanding of how those ideas originated.  And it turned out that much of the “new thinking” of the 60’s was just a negation or denial of previous generations, rather than genuinely fresh thinking that broke entirely free from old patterns and paradigms. 

Also, our generation benefitted from technology that allowed new freedom from diseases, greater mobility, and rapid dissemination of cultural movements.  These were all good things that made life easier.  However, one effect of greater faith in science and technology was to make the world appear less mysterious, and it resulted in an arrogant notion that human knowledge itself had finally evolved and in doing so assimilated all previous cultures.  For Nietzsche, this arrogance was what he called the “last man”:

The earth has become smaller, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.  His race is as ineradicable as the flea beetle; the last man lives longest.  “We have invented happiness” –say the last men, and they blink.  [Zarathustra]

Heidegger explains what Nietzsche meant by the phrase “…and they blink” by referring to the Middle English root word “blenchen,” which means to deceive, and to “blinken”, which means gleam or glitter.  Heidegger argues that Nietzsche is saying the last man sets up a glittering deception world which is then agreed upon as true and valid—with the mutual tacit understanding not to question the setup.  This observation by Nietzsche of the shallowness of modern man aggravated my bout with nihilism, as it was clear that I wasn’t the only one feeling that our modern culture was lacking substance and was short on lasting values. 

A good example of how nihilism can affect you was an incident at my brother’s house where I got physically sick thinking about the emptiness and nothingness.  He smokes a lot of marijuana, and that night I joined in.  But he doesn’t read much, and he doesn’t question much, and the more I looked at the more I felt on oncoming sense of panic, fueled by my own nihilism.  It got to where I was feeling such a sense of emptiness and bleakness that I had to throw up in his kitchen sink.  I had used pot many times before, and never felt any such physical effects, and in general, marijuana is a euphoriant that doesn’t cause people to vomit.   But, if you get overtaken by a severe sense of emptiness and nothingness, even this usually pleasant drug can cause discomfort.

A positive outcome of this incident is that I realized that I should never indulge in hallucinogenic drugs.  A lot of people in our living quarters at Berkeley were taking those drugs to loosen the hinges to their minds, so to speak, to let in new ideas.  But my hinges were already quite loose, and I didn’t need any help to initiate a flow of ideas.  Hallucinogenic drugs would probably have caused the screws on the hinges to pop out, and I didn’t want to risk that.

In over my head/Kierkegaard

I hadn’t declared a major yet, and I only had one prior philosophy class when I tried taking the highly rated Existentialism and Phenomenology class taught by Hubert Dreyfus.  I hadn’t taken the prerequisite courses, so I wasn’t properly prepared, and because it was a popular class, we had quite a few graduate students, who invariably asked questions that showed a far greater amount of understanding than I was capable of.  But the course was riveting, and I stuck with it.  The grade was based on a single paper, which I was somehow able to get a “B” on, so I survived…and even took the next course in the series.

Every lecture was eye-opening, starting with the background discussion about western culture’s “schizophrenic” heritage between the Greek and Judeo-Christian influences.  Dreyfus discussed the various attempts to explain one of these influences in terms of the other but suggested that these efforts always resulted in contradictions.  However, Kierkegaard was able to introduce a concept of self that reverses the traditional philosophical view of truth.  With Kierkegaard’s definition of the self, subjective truth becomes higher than objective truth; the individual is elevated over the universal, and the temporal is more important than the eternal.

Kierkegaard argued that the self is a “defining relation.”  This relation is defined in terms of your concern for someone or something. The “object” of such a relation determines who you are.  Your whole world is organized in terms of this concern.  That is, what is taken to be relevant and significant in your experience gets its determination as important or unimportant by being referred back to this relation.  The relation gives content to one’s world and identity to one’s self.

As a theologian, Kierkegaard was most interested in the Christian’s relation to Jesus.  But it’s clear from his writing that other relationships could define the self—in particular, the love for another person.  Dreyfus argues that there are other possible defining relationships:

The object of the defining relation need not be a person.  It could be.  It might be an art or craft or a particular political cause.  It is any relation that gives you your sense of identity and gives your world its content [from Fybate notes, Philosophy 152a].

This discussion was both strange and fascinating, as the focus was on what constitutes a “self” or existence rather than the traditional questions about epistemology (the theory of knowledge), morality, or metaphysics.  The questions about the self, existence, and time are the crux of existentialism, and seeing these questions discussed in philosophy class was a shock. But for someone wrangling with nihilism, this was a life-affirming breeze.  Because if there was an explanation for how the self is defined, or if there is a way to define “being”, then there must be meaning and purpose in the world.  That purpose is simple:  our goal in life is to affirm the life-force, or whatever it is that makes us human or that is essential to “being”. That is, we must understand what it means to be human and embrace that as the purpose of life:  that is how you defeat nihilism. 

So, this was finally the type of answer to nihilism that I was looking for.  Kierkegaard offered a definition of the self as a defining relation, and for Nietzsche, the life-force that defines us is the will to power.  But these definitions still seemed to lack a more rigorous treatment of being, and they are difficult to reconcile with our Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage.  But this line of questioning, with a focus on the self, “being” and existence, laid a foundation for Heidegger and his treatise “Being and Time”.  That work was the subject of the second half of the course.

Heidegger

There are many good books on Heidegger, and I’m not going to attempt a summary here.  But I can summarize a key argument that helped me understand what I was struggling with as a teenager.  Heidegger argues that we can only have a self by being in a world and being concerned about that world.  Heidegger argues that it makes no sense to think of beings as isolated, self-contained subjects confronting isolated, self-contained, objects.  He rejects the mind-body dichotomy of traditional philosophy as a misrepresentation of being.  He argues that human being can only exist through concerned interaction with the world.

He argues that our initial and primary mode of interaction with things is through using them as equipment in service to some concern.  And when we interact with things in this way, we are not aware of them as objects—they are transparent.  He uses the example of a hammer, which we use in service of driving nails, without awareness of its properties as an object.  Heidegger calls this mode of being “ready-to-hand”, as we understand it through handling. We are only aware of the hammer as a separate, isolated object when it fails as equipment, and is no longer being used in the service of our concerns.  This mode of being is what Heidegger calls “present-at-hand”, and in this mode of being we are aware of the hammer as an isolated object, with properties such as size and weight. 

So, for Heidegger, the familiar world of isolated objects, like the tip of the iceberg, is secondary to a transparent world of concerned interaction.  He argues that human being is a “clearing” in a forest of concerned interactions, in which objects “outside” of us can emerge.  And for him, the submerged portion of the iceberg is vast and mysterious and only knowable through encountering it as equipment, subordinate to our concerns.

We keep using the word “concern” here, but the German word that Heidegger uses is “sorge”.  Dreyfus related that he was in one of Heidegger’s seminars in which he asked whether it was helpful that the translation of “sorge” as “care” in English has a connotation of “love”.  Heidegger responded that the connotation of “love” for “sorge” was fortunate in characterizing human interaction with the world as equipment.  So, this type of interaction with the world echoes back to Kierkegaard’s defining relation and the passion from which the self is defined.  The primacy of concern or care for being human is a good antidote for anyone trying to address the emptiness and meaninglessness of nihilism.

Heidegger also offered answers for other concerns that I was coping with, such as the value of great art, the role of “practical arts” mastered by craftsmen, and the role that technology should play in our lives.  Heidegger has a lot to say on each of these topics that appears in his later works, and I’ve tried to summarize those thoughts in the next few sections of this retrospective.

More good classes

I enjoyed many classes at Berkeley, but the best courses always had a common effect:  they showed me new worlds or helped me view history from different perspectives than the everyday understanding.  One such class was on renaissance English literature that covered the period from Shakespeare to Milton.

The course only provided a small sampling of Shakespeare and even that limited sampling was difficult enough to wade through.  But it is clear from what we studied that few writers in history can convey nobility, purity, honor, corruptness, or other profound modes of human being as elegantly and convincingly as Shakespeare.  I remember feeling queasy and almost crying while reading Troilus and Cressida and being sickened by the corruption of the Greek army, with many references to the bone-ache (syphilis), contrasted with the purity of the lovers in the opening act.  It’s hard to read, but I could understand why others would devote their lives to studying English literature.

We also read Milton, and I wrote a paper on Paradise Lost in which I argued that the God Milton describes is quite different from the God we recognize today.  Milton’s God was very clearly depicted as the giver of light and reason.  God is what allows us to have thoughts, and the opposite of God is Satan, who embodies contradictions.  God is the source of the law of non-contraction, in which a thing can’t both be and not be, whereas Satan is depicted as making straight crooked, symbolized by tangled serpents.  Milton’s God was much like the “cogito ergo sum” of his contemporary Descartes, which is more properly understood as a recognition of the light of God rather than a trivial tautology.  Milton was describing the beauty and wonder of thinking and did not depict God as a being who controls and monitors our daily events, which is how God is depicted in modern Christianity.

What I found so exciting about Shakespeare, Milton, or many other artists and historical figures was that their worlds were so unlike ours, and in so many ways, more profound and thoughtful.  The artist can capture the uniqueness and depth of their world and bring it forth in radiance.  The ability to expose and express the undercurrents that give rise to human experience is the gift of the artist according to Heidegger.  Our experience of the world is at first lost in our concerned interactions, and it is the artist who sees the undercurrents and makes us aware of these possibilities by making them unhidden and giving them clarity and voice.

This view of art as “revelatory” is much different than how we view art in modern popular culture.  The popular notion is that we are the culmination of centuries of Western culture and that our culture is thus more profound and more worthy of the term “art” than the old masters.  Yet, so much of today’s music and popular art is based on technical mastery and cleverly rearranging existing ideas rather than engaging in a deep reckoning with our rich cultural heritage and a more fundamental encounter with what it means to exist.  I can’t find the quote or the source anymore, but one of the “serious” modern composers (Schoenberg?) said something close to:  “the purpose of great art was to allow us feel as-yet unfelt emotions”.  That’s what was done in great art of the past, where the artist allows new thoughts and heightened clarity of vision to emerge from what was previously hidden.  That’s not what we look for in today’s popular culture, and it’s not even a pursuit that most people recognize as worthwhile.  I believe that If more people today listened to Bach or other great composers, or if they read more from our rich heritage, we might have hope of escape from Nietzsche’s grim vision of the “last man”.

Treading water

As I’ve already said, I was fortunate to have so many opportunities growing up when I did and where I did, and to have access to a wonderful, affordable school system.  But our family wasn’t independently wealthy, so once I graduated, it was time to get a job and figure out how to survive on my own. 

I was able to put off the inevitable for yet another year by living at home and taking pre-med courses at SDSU, and if I had taken that path more seriously and wasn’t so stupid about applying to medical schools, I might have ended up with a career in medicine.  I was blissfully ignorant about having to get recommendations from instructors, and although I put in volunteer time at a psychiatric unit in a teaching hospital, I wasn’t focused on getting the recommendations that I would need there. On the one interview that I was granted, I didn’t even dress properly and wasn’t well prepared for the interview.  Fortunately, I enjoyed the pre-med courses of organic chemistry, zoology, and embryology, and I have no regrets about taking those courses.

It was a bit of a shock to not get into medical school, because up to that point every door I wanted to walk through had been open, and this was a rude awakening to find out that you needed the right contacts and preparation to get in.  It should have been obvious, but up to then I only had to have good grades and high test scores to go wherever I wanted.  There are many gates in life that are guarded by rules that aren’t posted, and unless you get help from people who are inside, you will never get in.  I think I would have done OK if I had gotten into medical school, but I really wasn’t all that motivated to ensure I got in, so things probably worked out for the better.

Without a marketable degree and still stubbornly idealistic, I stumbled on someone needing help servicing electronic organs.  I had put together many electronic circuits and kits all through high school and found that electronic repair of most consumer electronics was easy enough if you had good analytic thinking skills.  So, that is what I did for several years, until I got a better job at a company manufacturing data communication analyzers.  And once I got a clearer insight into electronic product design, I felt that I should be upstairs with the design team rather than out with the assembly crew.  Since that would require an engineering degree, I decided to go back to “reform school” to get a BSEE degree.  So, there I was back at the beginning of an engineering program, some 12 years after starting out in engineering right after high school.

It took two and a half years to finish the BSEE program at UVA, and it was surprisingly easy.  I was older than most students, I had good study habits, few distractions, plus I had some electronics background already that made the theory more intuitive.  I was recognized as the top 3^rd year student and finished either first or second, with all A’s and a single black mark of a B+.  That made looking for work as an engineer much easier, but true to my lack of competitiveness, I only interviewed at one company:  Melpar, in Falls Church, VA.  But I got the job, and it turned out to be a great place to work.

When I went back to school to evening classes for an MSSE degree, I got the honor as the top student in that program.  I always questioned whether I should have stayed in academia and teach.  However, I don’t think I had the patience or disposition to be a scholar.  My concern in school was to find good solutions to issues that concerned me, but the scholar needs to study and be able to relate a larger set of issues to others.  That patience to survey multiple viewpoints wasn’t a skill that felt I possessed to the extent needed to become a professor, and in undergraduate school I didn’t have the verbal skills that I needed to take the next step.  As much as I enjoyed school and would have liked to refine those skills, I knew I had to move on.

Living Authentically

One of the challenges of reading and trying to understand Heidegger is that you are forced to reconcile his discussion of “authentic being” with your own goals and values.   Heidegger is careful to characterize “authentic” and “inauthentic” as just different modes of being, without intending to denote a negative connotation to “inauthentic”.   However, the disparaging meaning is unavoidable, and he even uses the term “existential guilt” to describe the obligation to live authentically.  So, what is authentic being and how is it different from inauthentic being, and how should authentic being affect our daily lives?  Again, this retrospective is not the best place to learn about Heidegger, but dealing with these questions has been a challenge for me and continues to affect me every day, so some review of Heidegger is necessary.

Heidegger argues that the self is only possible through concerned interaction with the world.  The authentic self takes a stand on this concern and defines its world in terms of that concern.  Dreyfus and several Heideggerian philosophers provide examples of this authentic understanding of being in the documentary “Being in the World” by Tao Ruspoli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcCRmf_tHW8&t=3601s).  The video chronicles a jazz musician, a Louisiana cook, a Flamenco musician, a Japanese carpenter, and several other individuals who have mastered a certain area of human concern and interpret everything in terms of that deep commitment.  That commitment is much more than a job or arbitrary vocation:  it provides the purpose for living.  Dreyfus claims that Heidegger’s “authentic being” can be interpreted as a secular version of Kierkegaard’s defining relation, if that sheds any light on “authenticity”.

Of course, Heidegger also argues that there is an inauthentic mode of understanding the self, where our understanding has been hidden, covered up or forgotten.  This inauthentic mode of understanding is especially prevalent in the modern technological world, in which human beings are employed in jobs where they are treated as replaceable units and where art, history and mastery of skills are no longer regarded as crucially important human endeavors.  The inauthentic understanding of being views the self and cultural patterns as objects that can be analyzed and catalogued using “facts”, isolated from the world, and it results in a public mass-culture understanding of the world that is characterized by what Heidegger and Kierkegaard both call “leveling”.  Mass culture, “the one” or the “they” as it is sometimes translated, has an insensitivity to all distinctions in level and genuineness.  As Dreyfus puts it:

“Thus, the one, in providing average intelligibility, opens up a standard world in which all distinctions between the unique and the general, the superior and the average, the important and the trivial have been leveled.”

We must always conform to public norms and do what makes sense in public, so there is always a “pull” to engage in the idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity that characterize mass culture.  It can be difficult to resist this pull and avoid what Heidegger calls “fallenness”, in which our understanding of being has been misunderstood, hidden, or forgotten, and relegated to inauthenticity.

There are probably much clearer discussions of Heidegger and authenticity, but I needed to present at least an outline of authenticity to make sense of how I relate to the “real world” of having a marriage, kids, a career and how I spend my “spare time”.  So much of my behavior and attitude toward things and other people is shaped by resisting falling and by trying to preserve a better understanding of what it means to “be”.  This aversion to fallenness is something in my thoughts just about every day.  Moreover, it’s not something I “got” from reading Heidegger.  Heidegger provided clarity of thinking and formal analysis of these concepts, but I had already recognized the profound difference between authentic thinking and mass-culture fallenness back in high school.  This isn’t surprising, as these concepts of being and thinking are part of our Greek heritage, and are part of our world.  And, as Heidegger notes in the book What is Called Thinking?, “We never come to thoughts. They come to us”.

Living in “Reality”

The coursework at Berkeley helped me understand the beauty of the submerged iceberg and the historical nature of the tip that we call reality.  But once you are out of school, that iceberg tip that we call “reality” must play a larger role in your life, as you need to hold a job to have an income, among other obligations.  Most importantly, you need enough social accountability to establish relationships and act on your needs for concerned involvement.  Since I had ruled out an “ivory-tower” career, I needed to plot a course to survive in the working world.   How does a person who rejects the value of many social norms survive in a world that mostly doesn’t value the importance of living authentically?

Social Skills

Unfortunately, people who do a lot of questioning of values tend to not develop the social skills that help them survive in competitive social environments.  Most young adults spend much of their time in college mastering behavior patterns that are essential for establishing relationships that are effective in business or other occupations, but I was too deep into questioning social behavior to learn those skills that would help me get the sort of job that a typical liberal arts student would pursue.  And the sort of questioning I was pursuing was making any adjustment to “normal” social behavior much more difficult.  This wasn’t a crippling deficiency, but the lack of social skills got in the way of advancement in engineering management and popped up on many other occasions.

The behaviors underlying “normal” social interactions are what Heidegger would call “ready-to-hand”—they are actions we do without questioning, in a way that is fluid and “natural”, without analyzing each word or intention.  I’ve already described how Heidegger uses this term for “things” like hammers, but it applies as well to social interactions.  When we start questioning why people act the way they do and have a certain outlook or demeanor, those fluid social interactions are analyzed as a set of rules and characteristics that we can document.  These social interactions are then viewed as “present-at-hand” things with objective characteristics that can be studied and analyzed as patterns of behavior.  The discipline that studies these behaviors is sociology.  But there is an inherent difficulty in sociology, in that we tend to treat those rules as more primal than the behaviors.  Much like the classic example of trying to analyze humor, the patient (in this case “fluid” or “natural” social interaction) dies in the process.

As early artificial intelligence research found out, you simply can’t capture human behaviors through a set of rules—there are simply too many variables and too many contexts to evaluate.  The result of analyzing social behaviors and trying to get by just by following the rules and patterns without feeling them naturally is awkwardness.  I felt that awkwardness many times while trying to fit it at work and other social settings.  I understood well enough what I should say and how I should act on an intellectual basis, but my actions would not come naturally and were probably not too convincing.  So, it was oftentimes difficult for me to interact in these situations, but oddly enough, most people were totally unaware of my discomfort or awkwardness.  As a result, this tendency to intellectualize social interactions was not a problem unless the demand to interact was very high.  For example, getting along with peers in engineering management meetings was almost always stressful, as I “didn’t speak the language” fluently.  I found that I needed to prepare for meetings more than other engineers, as I just wasn’t as skilled at impromptu interactions.  However, if I was well prepared with facts and a strategy for presenting them, I could do quite well.

Living on the Edge

A larger problem with rejecting many of the social norms is that you sometimes feel like you are swimming upstream, against the strong social currents that others enjoy.  For example, I would be extremely uncomfortable at a gathering for a Barbra Streisand concert, or a church prayer meeting, or in my later years, just about any pop culture event.  The problem I have with these gatherings is that whereas the other participants would genuinely feel strong emotional bonds with the performers and other participants, I would feel out of place, out of sync and totally frustrated that I am asked to believe in something that is usually shallow, formulaic, and predictable.  So many performers in today’s world get by with recycling old ideas that lack depth and freshness, and that “tug at heartstrings” or that reek of cleverness.  And, if they act seriously and can pass themselves off as “genuine,” they are deemed cultural leaders and can mesmerize crowds.  I get very uncomfortable when I am around others who expect me to share in their adoration for these cultural or religious pseudo-heroes.  That’s not at all surprising, since mass culture relies on conformity to perpetuate itself.  But it’s especially uncomfortable in that I appreciate good music and respect spirituality and I want others to recognize the value in more genuine and more creative cultural offerings. I actually find some pop culture interesting, but usually not for the same reasons as most other people.

One result of swimming against so many social norms is that you earn and deserve a reputation for being an iconoclast.  An iconoclast is the person in the room who casts doubt on the cherished beliefs and norms and tends to be a “disrupter.”  Fortunately, you can often get by as an iconoclast if you are an engineer, as engineering tends to embrace disruptive technologies to be more competitive.  However, if I hadn’t pursued a career in engineering, I probably would have had a much more difficult time holding a job.  But I never considered myself an iconoclast by choice—it’s just that in many problem-solving situations, there is an “internal logic” that I would try to discover, and I needed to question established beliefs in that search.  In fact, in systems engineering, the goal is to find “root causes,” and usually those roots look far different from the effects and the solutions commonly applied to mitigate those effects.  But where that iconoclast mentality gets you in trouble is questioning current practices or beliefs in social situations where “change” and disruptive thinking are not appreciated.  For example, being the one who insists on testing speakers at the Rocky Mountain Audio Festival with a CD of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion will get you branded an iconoclast, even though it is one of the best ways to test speakers.  I can remember many examples of bringing disruptive ideas to social situations, but most are best left forgotten.

One of the reasons I tend to embrace disruptive thinking is that I am not a “quick wit” in that I don’t have a natural gift to always say the right thing at the right time, or to quickly understand situations.  It sometimes takes me some time to understand the social dynamics, and what comes off the top of my head can often be inappropriate.  But once I “wrap my head around” a situation, I can usually keep up with others socially.  I’m one of those types that “runs slow but deep”, and it sometimes takes me too long to figure out how to interact more appropriately for the situation.

Fortunately, I acquired enough social skills along the way to get by in most social settings that I needed to attend.  Plus, I got married, which provided me with a partner who could help me navigate many challenges of “reality” that might otherwise have gotten me in serious trouble. But there were still too many times when I would get into “social trouble” by not taking something seriously that I doubted and should have feigned more respect.  There is a lot more on this topic of navigating social challenges in the sections on “Marriage” and “Surviving in the Modern World.”

The 100 Year Test Revisited and “Unhiddenness”

As noted earlier, I often invoke the “100 year” test in situations to question whether something we are considering would make sense 100 years ago.  Usually, the answer is an emphatic “no,” because today’s concerns are so often rooted in issues that only make sense to those of us living in the present.  Heidegger suggests that we can take this test to a greater extreme, in that not only have worlds changed throughout history, with different perspectives and values, but some things could not even emerge from hiddenness as objects.  That is, some things that we take for granted as “real” might not even exist in other eras, because the context in which these objects emerge doesn’t exist.

A good example of this hiddenness is in “The Wild Child”, a documentary by Truffaut.  In that documentary, a child who grew up alone in the forests in France is discovered and assumed to be deaf and dumb because he does not respond to human voices and sounds in the doctor’s laboratory.  However, when one of the scientists cracks a nut, the child responds.  For the child, the sound of the nut is an object that has a meaningful context, whereas none of the other sounds can be related to prior involvement in his world.  Those other sounds are hidden in what Kant calls the “thing in itself”, which is part of nature but not yet an object of our experience.  We can never directly experience the “thing in itself”.  We can only experience nature when it is presented in a context, shaped and given meaning by a world of concern.

Another example, perhaps a bit easier to grasp, is in the book “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn looks at how the worlds of physics have changed throughout history, and he documents the critical role that scientific theories of nature play in making those worlds possible.  One of the many examples of how the physical world views evolved was the theory of phlogiston to explain combustion.  Prior to Lavoisier, phlogiston was as “real” to scientists as atoms and subatomic particles are to physicists today.  But when experiments by Lavoisier and others showed inconsistencies in the theory of phlogiston, the resulting crisis started a revolution in thinking that led to the discovery of oxygen.  Kuhn points out that prior to this revolution, the concept of oxygen didn’t exist, and he argues that it couldn’t exist.  There simply wasn’t the right framework for “oxygen” to make sense, and the only way for this framework to emerge was for the theory of phlogiston to fail.  He calls these frameworks a “paradigm”, or model of nature, and without these models, “things” like oxygen can’t exist.  Dreyfus points out that this understanding of scientific revolutions is fully consistent with Heidegger’s account of the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand modes of being, where the hammer being used transparently fails and emerges as a “present-at-hand” thing.

So how is this discussion about hiddenness relevant?   And why do I feel the need to use this 100-year test so often?  Think about the many things that people hold as truths in today’s world and the answer should be obvious.  Most of the values that people hold as dear, or the way people respond to music, technology or even the way they seek vengeance, are historical responses that could have been quite different in other times.  That doesn’t mean that those responses are “invalid”, it just means that they aren’t true for all eternity, and for that reason they lack one of the essential characteristics of “truth”.  Things that are true are presumed to be so for all time.  That’s one reason to apply that test—to determine whether certain concerns are worthy of being taken seriously as eternal truths. 

But a more important reason to use this test is to expose the extent to which others are lost in using modern technology.   We have so many shiny diversions in today’s world that is littered with technological devices and toys.  And we even tend to view ourselves in terms of that technology.  In discussing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus suggests that our concern shouldn’t be about machines becoming more like humans, but rather that human beings are becoming more like machines as we hide or gloss over what it means “to be”.  That’s a warning we should all heed, and the 100-year test is one way to keep that warning in mind.

Heidegger addresses this encroachment of technology on our lives by advocating what he calls “openness to the mystery”.  He says that we can use and benefit from technology while keeping technology at a distance, remaining open to how rich and profound our heritage has been and will continue to be. That hundred-year test, then, is a simple way to keep from being overtaken by the seductions of modern technology and mass culture.  As an engineer, I constantly view the world in terms of modern technology, but I also keep technology “in its place”.  But there is more to that interaction with technology and surviving in the modern world in a later section.

Marriage

As noted in the section on “living in reality”, it is almost impossible to balance everyday needs from work and family with the need to lead a thoughtful authentic life.  Even if you are financially independent, you are going to need help in negotiating day-to-day affairs and to find comfort, support and meaning in a good relationship.  Marriage isn’t the only way to lead a full and useful life in today’s world, but it solves a lot of problems, and it opens possibilities that make that challenge much easier and more fulfilling.

I liked having family around and close relationships, so I always assumed I would get married and have my own family.  But relationships don’t always work out, so I wanted to be very careful before making that social commitment.  In retrospect, I know now what I needed to look for, and it turns out I did very well.  These are the five qualities that I needed from a marriage partner.

First, I need someone who could help me with skills and abilities that I lacked or never developed, for whatever reason.  Marriage is a team effort, where each person brings complementary capabilities, and the team can accomplish far more than is possible individually.  I knew that I could bring in at least a passable income, so money-earning skills were not important to me in a mate.  Also, I was handy enough around the house to cover most repairs and upgrades.  But all of those “domestic” skills including cooking and homemaking and child rearing were complementary to my contributions, and those tasks have been taken care of quite well.  Also, I needed a lot of help and advice with social skills such as taking care of our parents, interacting with our neighbors, and relating to coworkers.  Even deciding on appropriate dress was sometimes a challenge for me, so getting advice on these social issues was important to a successful marriage.

Second, I needed to make sure my marriage partner shared at least some of my “philosophical” values, including the way humans discover “being” through concerned interaction.  As I noted earlier, the world isn’t just presented to us as a catalog of objects with properties but is discovered through models or paradigms that allow things to emerge in a world.  Heidegger argues that this understanding of being is the original Greek understanding, and that it should be familiar to us through our Greek heritage, but that we have become so taken over by a technological view of nature that we no longer recognize the “mysteriousness” of things. 

Thomas Kuhn’s book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” makes essentially the same argument but remains focused on the things of science and the role of scientific models and paradigms in discovering things of science.  Kuhn’s argument can be viewed as a microcosm of Heidegger’s account of the world, where the focus is just on objects of science and the role that paradigms play in allowing new things to emerge.  I thought this narrower focus would be an easier way to explain this understanding of being and when we were considering getting married, I said “sure, but you have to read Kuhn’s book, twice”.  To some, that may seem like a violation of the 8^th Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” but to me it was more of a “Heidegger made easy” book and therefore no big deal.  Eventually the arguments “wear off” and you need an occasional booster argument to ensure your values are protected but sharing a book or article on Heideggerian philosophy or modern artificial intelligence (which has come to embrace Heidegger) is a good start. Kidding aside, it is critical to have values that you share in marriage, and to stay faithful to those values.  There are many types of values that couples can share in marriage, and that would be a good topic for someone else to write about.  For me, those key values needed to be based on a view of the world that I can’t escape and that hasn’t changed substantially throughout my years.

The third quality that I needed in a marriage partner is a sense of humor.  Making jokes and being irreverent is an important mechanism for breaking the seductive hold of everydayness and the flatness of mass culture.  If you don’t make jokes about things and find things funny, you probably don’t appreciate how strange and interesting things can be.  Some people are a lot more creative and insightful and have better timing in their humor than others, and I was fortunate enough to find someone with good humor skills.

The fourth quality is the ability to be logical and follow an argument.  It is amazing how many people can present an argument and not be able to defend it with facts and understand the underlying causality and show how the facts necessarily supported the conclusion.  Worse yet, they will present an argument that is fallacious and be totally deaf to its contradictions and implausibility.   It is difficult to be around people who do not have the intellectual integrity to respect good reasoning, and who do not understand how to defend a position with evidence.  Marriages are always going to have arguments, and the participants need to play fair and according to the rules of reason.

One of the best ways to refine those logical skills is to write argumentative essays and have those efforts be analyzed and graded.  So, for me, a college education with a healthy dose of paper-writing is extremely important.  I think that one of the best things for our marriage was when Barbara went back to school at GMU and had to write argumentative essays in art history, which required references to historical events and developing a position based on that evidence.  That discipline of learning to research facts and use them to logically support a well thought out position is probably important for any marriage but was critical to ours.

Another quality of a good marriage is commitment, or a willingness to see things through without giving up.  Many people do not have the ability to stay committed to a course of action, and many are not willing to put blind trust into a relationship, expecting that things might not turn out well.  Having the ability to commit is difficult enough, and staying committed is harder still, especially when there are arguments and differences in how to deal with things.  Fortunately, both of us in this marriage understand the value of commitment and we have been able to overcome issues that might break apart other couples.

I believe that if you have all five of those elements addressed in your marriage, compassion and understanding and tolerance will follow.  And the first four are really the only ones that are critical, as for many people, commitment will follow naturally from the first four elements.  With compassion, understanding and tolerance you will have the tools to manage daily annoyances and not be easily affected by disappointment and the world’s frustrations.

The goal of a good marriage isn’t to just “get along,” but rather to intertwine your lives in a way that makes separation unthinkable.  You may have arguments and find yourself wishing for physical separation on many occasions, but when the tension gets resolved, you will understand the extent to which you have become interwoven and how much you need each other to be whole.  This “intertwining” isn’t something that you can actively seek or hurry along.  It is something that happens after many years of depending on each other, sharing common values, enjoying the humor in the world, and being intellectually honest with each other.  Commitment and always doing things for each other is evidence that you are inseparable.

Kids

Probably the most primal urge for humans, besides eating and leaving behind waste, is perpetuating the species through procreation.  So, the desire and need to produce children and nurture them and have them take our place in the world is something we all experience at some level.  But how we respond to those urges and needs, and how we view “child rearing” in the modern era is “difficult” and something about which I can claim little knowledge or expertise.  In fact, this is one facet of my life where I have many regrets.

I had no trouble at all being a “good dad” when the kids were young, as I enjoyed being with them and doing things with them whenever I could.  We went to museums, parks, theme parks, and we made sure our kids were always entertained, and I think overall they enjoyed a nice childhood in which they were loved, protected, and allowed to learn and grow.  However, as the kids got older, I felt I missed a lot of opportunities to help them deal with their challenges, and I felt there were many more things I could have done to improve their lives.

Unfortunately, a lot of things happen about the time your kids enter high school that make your own life more difficult.  I was starting to travel a lot more for work, and as a result I wasn’t around as much as I would have liked.  Also, the old people in the family (Nana/Ruth) were demanding more of our time, which required extra time and energy.  But the main reason I had a hard time with our kids in high school years is that the expectations for raising kids had changed so much from when we grew up.  When I was at high school age, I was pretty much on my own, free to explore different ideas and I didn’t feel much social pressure to behave in certain ways.  As a result, I didn’t need interaction from my parents, and would have rejected it anyway.  In our day, we were more like the youth in the final scene in the movie Zardoz, where the boy sets out on his own way and the role of the father was to keep the mother from holding him back.  That’s pretty much what my dad did for me, and I still expected that approach to work.  With that approach, the best you can do is try to set a good example of living in the world and hope that it “rubs off” as they find their way on their own.  But there were far more opportunities in our time, such as good affordable schools, a booming economy, and viable counter-culture movements to explore.  Also, the grip of mass culture has tightened, and it is more difficult than ever to break free to discover the hidden beauty that lies beneath the surface of modern life.  Kids in today’s world need more help and guidance, but I wasn’t prepared to provide that help.

The biggest problem I faced in raising kids is that my values don’t scale well.  They work well for me, but I have always been reluctant to share them with others, because I know that they often don’t work well for other people.  And the few times that I did share values with others resulted in bad experiences—see the section on Seduction for why I am reluctant to discuss philosophical issues with others.  Also, dealing with socialization in the modern world was not one of my finer skills, and I was in many ways “out of touch” with their world.  So, I didn’t have a clear idea on how to help my kids navigate the complexities of the modern world and arrive at good values that would guide them in later years.  And, often, I ended up scolding them for doing the wrong things rather than helping them find the good.

As a result, I feel remorse that I didn’t help more with “enculturation”, or at least help open more doors.  In retrospect, there are many more things I could have done to help our kids make more informed decisions for themselves.  I don’t think they suffered too much from my “hands-off” approach, but I regret I wasn’t more involved.

Loss of a child

Our almost 8-year-old son Phil stepped on a Lego block in his room while holding a stick from a baseball pennant.  The stick went into his mouth making what looked like a minor wound, but within 24 hours he was lying brain dead on a hospital gurney.

I’m not going to attempt describing what we went through in the following months, as it’s a mix of frustration, sadness, guilt, anger, and a lot of strange moods that don’t translate well to written text.  But it’s worth pointing out that there isn’t a “positive side” or a “silver lining” or lesson to be learned—losing a child just sucks, and dealing with it is awful.  The only consolation is that all other challenges in your life don’t seem as bad by comparison.

Something that helped our recovery was having another child.  We paid for “elective surgery” to undo Barbara’s tubal ligation and welcomed Nolan some 9 months later.  It probably wasn’t fair to Nolan, since having older parents in this modern world can make growing up even more difficult, but it certainly helped us feel more whole after losing Phil.

A career

After graduating from UVA, I interviewed at just one company, which was Melpar.  I had excellent grades at UVA, so I could have applied to just about any blue-chip company, but Melpar was close to where we were living at the time, and I wasn’t at all motivated to shop around.  I wanted to get started in engineering, but I wasn’t too concerned about the salary, career opportunities or climbing the corporate ladder.  Plus, I had no clue what I was getting into at the time, so the process of settling into a career was a bewildering new frontier.    

Growing up in the 60’s, and with the 50’s still not too distant, we had different ideas than today’s youth about working and compensation and commitment to a career.  In the 50’s and early 60’s, professionals like engineers typically worked for only one or two companies, climbing a ladder of success that brought higher pay and more status.  But during the late 60’s and beyond, there were several cultural and economic shifts that resulted in increasingly higher mobility in the workplace.  The Wikipedia article on “career” cites Bureau of Labor statistics for 1979 that showed that individuals between the ages of 18 and 38 will hold more than 10 jobs.  That’s not the way we approached our job in those days, as I ended up staying at the same job for over 30 years.

Engineering turned out to be a good fit for me, for several reasons.  First, it was something I could work passionately at times yet keep at a healthy distance when I needed to step away.  We had a small core of career professionals who worked long hours and defined themselves in terms of their job success, but you weren’t required to follow in their footsteps, if you demonstrated enough loyalty and showed commitment when it was needed.  There were many occasions on proposals or large projects, where I had to put in many extra hours, but these bursts were balanced out by less demanding tasks where that commitment wasn’t required.

Second, there were a lot of challenges in different disciplines to keep the work interesting.  When I first arrived at Melpar, I was assigned to a team working on audio storage and playback and was able to get a patent on an algorithm for playing back audio at rapid rates with pitch correction.  It used cross-correlation to determine optimal editing points for minimizing artifacts, which is a technique not too far removed from what is done in certain artificial intelligence applications.  In later years, I worked in many different electronic and system design roles, from designing militarized circuit boards to evaluating supercomputers to risk management.  There was so much variety in what I was assigned to work that I never felt I needed to leave to find more interesting work.

Third, I had a better-than-average education and qualifications for the job.  Most engineering companies go through cycles of program capture, program execution, and support.  During program capture, you need to be able to write clearly and make good arguments for why your company should be awarded a contract.  One of the best ways to prepare for proposal writing is to get an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and I was always welcome on proposal teams.  Once the contract was won and we had to execute the program, I could lead or be part of a team to successfully deliver the products.  And, of course, I was able to contribute creatively to the technical solutions we proposed.  We had several “force reductions” when the company was purchased or during some downsizing events, but because I could contribute in so many ways, I always survived the layoffs.

But probably the main reason engineering suited me so well was that many of my assignments allowed me to apply my philosophy background.  Much of the work I did was in data fusion, helping the warfighter understand their situation.  That work required a grounding in epistemology, which studies the boundaries between data, information, and knowledge.  Also, I became the resident expert on standards compliance, which required a good understanding of the common system architecture models that were just emerging in the 90’s.  This was “heady” stuff that I enjoyed.  It dealt with the application of patterns and abstractions to maximize system interoperability and to help manage complexity.  Engineers tend to revel in complexity, but complexity is what causes so many systems to fail or never get completed.  My wife has accused me of not explaining things well, but for many years that was one of my “specialties” in engineering:  helping others understand the underlying key principles or “hidden logic” of a technical challenge.

The aspect of engineering that I found most frustrating was the management side.  Our last owner, Raytheon, recognized both management and technical career tracks, but the real power and influence was on the management side.  I did not enjoy engineering management (especially when it came time to fire employees during layoffs) and felt that oftentimes the goal of management was to survive rather than excel.  I tried to maintain a good working relationship with the program managers, but toward the end of my career, the culture had become less collaborative, with the engineers being increasingly isolated from the customers.  That’s one of the reasons I retired at age 62 rather than staying on.  Also, I was starting to feel that the management team was too complacent and not willing to take the risks that we were more likely to take on in earlier times.  I missed the closer interaction that the engineers and managers had when the company was much smaller and less compartmentalized.

Another aspect of engineering that is challenging and frustrating for some engineers is that it requires more re-education to keep up with changes than other professions.  I spent a lot of personal time reading about emerging technologies and design and standardization initiatives in the military, and that extra effort was necessary to stay relevant.  When it was clear that more of the new work was systems engineering rather than electrical or software engineering, I went back to school at GMU to get an MSSE degree.  That additional education was an essential step in staying relevant and competitive with my peers.

Engineering turned out to be a great way to earn money and have a satisfying career that didn’t require compromising my values.  I don’t expect that most young engineers today would find the going as satisfying, as workplace cultures have changed to where engineers are sometimes treated more like replaceable parts, but I’m sure that there are still many opportunities like what I enjoyed.  My biggest regret in my career is not keeping up to date with software engineering the way I should have.  I tried to keep up to some extent, but this field has been changing rapidly, and I didn’t take some extra steps that I could have, and I suffered for that lack of effort.  That was another reason for retiring relatively early—I was starting to feel too old to climb yet another learning curve.