Examined Life

I wrote this little piece while walking home from school, drunk, at 2am, on my phone on Instagram. Nevertheless, I do find it charming, so here goes:

I’d had a drink and then eaten far too much with it, so I’m walking from Seoul National University Station to Yangjae to settle my stomach. I often think that, even if I lived in Seoul my whole life, I would die without having walked all its alleys. When I consider how small a patch of this planet Seoul occupies, a strange feeling comes over me. Well, I may as well walk one more while I’m here.

Even by the new international reckoning of age, I am already nearing the far slope of my thirties. A pileup of wrong turns has landed me in classes and seminar presentations beside classmates ten years younger, which strikes me as both absurd and a little pitiable. A migraine kept coming on while I studied today, and I couldn’t stop wondering what my life might have been had I gone straight from my undergraduate degree into graduate school. Of course, without this detour, philosophy, or study of any kind, might never have grown so dear to me.

A story a friend I deeply care about told me has stayed with me for a long time: the story of a certain artist and a willow. There was a willow he passed every day in his neighborhood, and he had come to hold it dear. One day he found that the district office had cut it down, and he sank to the ground on the spot and wept aloud. The willow was not an endangered species. Nothing sacred had ever dwelled in that particular tree. And yet. Whatever lay between that artist, with his life, his character and his history, and that one willow, could not be explained by abstract pity or by a general reverence for life. It had to be a bond both concrete and singular.

The word I am most attached to these days is 아낌 (akkim), our word for what Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love and his other essays, calls “caring.” The Korean edition renders it 신경 씀, which roughly translates to “paying mind.” But to my ear that expression brings out only the cognitive side of caring and fails to capture the sentiment it carries. An aging ethicist, walking the last stretch of his life, spoke not of morality, or ethics, or the categorical imperative, but of caring and of love. That fact stays with me.

Caring about something. Frankfurt says that this, more than morality or ethics, holds a more direct normative jurisdiction over our lives. To care about a thing for itself and not for what it does for me; to hold its well-being as I hold my own. And if you ask why that thing, why that willow out of all the willows in the world, there is no available answer. Countless accidents, personal and social and historical, have made me someone who cannot help but care for it, and that has become an identity that I can’t do anything about. It is simply who I am. To choose to stop willing that caring is, structurally, impossible.

Frankfurt calls this volitional necessity. For if I could choose my identity at will, if I could decide to care for this today and for that tomorrow, then my will, my identity, and my devotion would mean less than a passing breeze, and no choice I made could truly be called mine. The freedom of the will that Frankfurt speaks of is possible only under a condition that ends this infinite regress of choosing. Bound in order to be free—what a beautiful paradox.

Looking back, philosophy has always been for me both an intellectual game and a way of accounting for my own life. What kind of person am I? Why did I turn out like this? Where should my life be going? What kind of person do I want to become? At the same time, philosophy has been a normative force that leads me on in its own right, a feeling that if I did not spend my days thinking and speaking about these things, I would be estranged from my own life for good. Despite my affection for analytic philosophy, I always carried this literary sentiment, and I think it took me some time to admit it without shame.

Do I actually have what it takes to survive grad school? Honestly, I’m not confident. Caring about something and being good at it are different things. And the fact that what I feel toward analytic philosophy runs along a slightly different grain from the feeling of academic philosophy makes me even less confident.

Today, reading all day in the library, I was tormented by the thought: why hadn’t I signed up for six credits? Why couldn’t I do this full-time? It took me a long while to find the language for the life I want. It was not a glamorous life, or a seeker’s life, or an intellectual life, or a life in which taste becomes a trade. It was a life of caring about something wholeheartedly, a life that is not estranged from itself. And when I came out of the library late at night without the feeling of having thrown the whole day in the trash, I thought I had caught a glimpse of what such a life feels like from the inside.